2.1 Unstable [#2836]: Override for addon incompatibilities does not work
Yesterday I was playing Ultimate DOOM with an addon mega wad during the day, taking some breaks in between. Creation and loading of a savegame worked fine so far. However today when I wanted to continue, I was greeted with a "missing addon" notification in the Launcher, although no changes where made to the addon chain. This has happened to me a couple times in the past with different builds already.
First thing I notice is, that while now a notification text about "missing addons" is shown at the related game slot, at the same time the usually visible button to access the mods management dialog is unavailable. Instead the user has to find out that he is required, contrary to the regular use of the launcher, to right-click the game slot to open a context menu where the entry "Mods..." can be selected. It does not make much sense to me, that the mod management access button gets hidden, when the user gets requested by the launcher to actually go there to "fix" something.
Next thing I notice, after I had removed all invalid addon entries and re-added the same unchanged addons to the game, that I'm not able to load my savegame, due to "missing addons". So I'm looking at the modified in-game loading screen, where pressing the ALT key to ignore and continue no longer works, instead now a switch can be flipped to "ignore incompatibilities". But how to proceed from there? There is no load or continue button available, you can only cycle between the "ignore incompatibilities" and "Cancel" button.
Overall this addon incompatibility safety system has caused more headaches and trouble than it has done anything good.
First thing I notice is, that while now a notification text about "missing addons" is shown at the related game slot, at the same time the usually visible button to access the mods management dialog is unavailable. Instead the user has to find out that he is required, contrary to the regular use of the launcher, to right-click the game slot to open a context menu where the entry "Mods..." can be selected. It does not make much sense to me, that the mod management access button gets hidden, when the user gets requested by the launcher to actually go there to "fix" something.
Next thing I notice, after I had removed all invalid addon entries and re-added the same unchanged addons to the game, that I'm not able to load my savegame, due to "missing addons". So I'm looking at the modified in-game loading screen, where pressing the ALT key to ignore and continue no longer works, instead now a switch can be flipped to "ignore incompatibilities". But how to proceed from there? There is no load or continue button available, you can only cycle between the "ignore incompatibilities" and "Cancel" button.
Overall this addon incompatibility safety system has caused more headaches and trouble than it has done anything good.
Comments
Over the past several months, the way Doomsday identifies add-ons has been tweaked slightly, mostly to fix issues/bugs that were discovered. The objective for Doomsday is that each data file can be identified uniquely even when the data file itself contains no metadata specifying the version. This has been failing in certain cases, which meant that as a result of the fixes, some data files are now (correctly) assigned new IDs and/or versions. This makes Doomsday think your saves have become incompatible.
In the future, and particularly if you stick to stable releases, this shouldn't be a big problem. But the unstable builds will still be fine-tuning the identification process, so the situation will occur again.
However, there are still serious shortcomings in the UI, as you have noticed.
One of the bugs is that if the savegame requires a package that you don't appear to have at all, the dialog was only partially initialized, making you unable to override. I will fix this.
Another related bug is that the dialog was not smart enough to check if a different version of a needed mod is available (e.g., if it was identified differently as explained above, or perhaps upgraded). I'll make the dialog explain this situation and you will be able to override the check with more confidence in this case.
To summarize, this is still a work in progress. Thanks for being a beta tester.
This is a UX failure to be sure. I changed it so that there is a clearly visible button next to all games have mods missing, and now one can even access the Data Files config directly via the dialog where you pick mods for a game.
EDIT: Build 2849 still has some problems with the compatibility dialog. Monday's build should work better.
Then I tried loading the savegame which had me started this thread and I encountered a couple of bugs:
Only when activating to "ignore incompatible/missing mods" the savegame gets loaded, which counteracts the concept of choosing similar addons.
1/2 — The layout of UI text is malfunctioning in your videos, which may indicate a problem with fonts. Incorrectly measured fonts would certainly explain why the scrolling is broken in the list. How have you configured your UI scaling in Windows, and have you set any options in Doomsday that affect the UI scaling?
3 — Sorry about that one, this is a misleading UI. The info popup that you open in the compatibility list should not allow you to perform actions on the mod, just to provide information. I will remove those buttons in this context.
4 — That may be already fixed for 2850. I noticed I had overlooked the situation where it should attempt to load a different version of a mod. (Although there is no reason the first two errors about missing "doom1-ultimate" should be happening, unless you've deleted your Doom plugin.)
The current engine capabilities to handle more complex scenes is the limiting factor, not the resolution. Because of your post above I changed Doomsday's resolution back to my native monitor resolution of 3840x2160 which makes the scroll issues disappear. So that's something you should look into.
And yes, I know you are working on huge improvements here. I'm really looking forward for that.
No, I deleted nothing. Regardless of adding the addon TNT31Fix.wad (a key access fix for Map 31 in TNT Evilution) or leaving it disabled, the error messages still would complain about tnt31fix.wad not available, which I cannot understand as I never had that addon fix activated for anything else than TNT Evilution. I was also surprised about the "no game exists with ID doom1-ultimate" error, but as I wrote when activating the "ignore missing addon" switch no errors are triggered.
Let's see how the next build improves the situation. I understand due to the automated build process it will be available only after midnight, right? Or could you make a separate Win 64-bit build available earlier?