Sorry Hyper_Eye, I hadn't seen your reply before.
QUOTE(Hyper_Eye @ Jul 2 2011, 06:40 PM)
I get a lot of conflicting opinions about the laucher. Some people love it and others hate it. The launcher is functional. It was made to be functional. It was also made to be cross-platform and that is important to us. Any large effort that targets a specific platform, especially a console that was end-of-life'd 6 years ago, is something we put serious consideration into and it is not something we are likely to go for. Odamex takes a lot of work overall and we all have limited time to work on it between our families, jobs, and other responsibilities. We have to pick tasks that benefit Odamex as a whole.
Fair enough, mate. You (and everyone else connected with XBox homebrew) put in a lot of hard work for no renumeration at all, and I do appreciate it, as I'm sure we all do. Please don't think I'm complaining, Odamex is great, and the Launcher works fine - I'd just like to see it perhaps a little more user friendly to those of us using only joypads, although of course improvements to the launcher aren't nearly as important as improvements to the Doom game/engine itself, or to added features or compatibility.
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I know the kind of launcher people in the scene want. That kind of launcher is a lot of work in itself. I was never interested in providing a show piece launcher or for Odamex to be a showpiece port. My intention was always to provide a functional port of a great client, with online play, that can be built right out of our source repository that all PC platforms build with without any modification to the code required. That is what I have done. When it came to the launcher I knew I would have to write a new one. I did not have time to create my own widgets and API. So I used a cross-platform GUI library that relied only on libraries the Xbox could run. The gui library turned out to be agar and the libraries turned out to be SDL, FreeType (both already ported), and pthreads (which I had to port myself.) This brought the timeframe on the task down to something reasonable where it was worth pursuing. I was able to write it even faster because the portability of the library meant I was able to write it in Linux with the tools I am comfortable with (vim, gcc, gdb, etc.) and test it running on a platform that had long been supported.
As someone with no coding ability or talent, I'll just nod whilst reading that, in the hope that I'll fool people into thinking I understood what you were saying (IMG:
style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)
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I have done what I can to accommodate people who don't like the launcher. First the sensitivity of the cursor scales pretty well. Pushing the stick to variable degrees while moving the cursor goes a long way. It doesn't take much time with it to get pretty comfortable with the analog movement. I also added the ability to do most things without the cursor. It is all documented in the README.Xbox. Another thing that I did was add support to the Odamex client to take arguments from the XBMC dash using the <game> tag. This can be used to create shortcuts that launch directly into the type of game someone wants including loading different iwads, pwads, connecting to online games, etc.
Oh yes, like I said it is OK now, it's just that it could be better, but then you can say that about anything. There's nothing major or urgent about the Frontend that needs fixing.
I've never tried to use command line arguments on the XBox - I might try it though, as it will be interesting to do. I do love how *everything* on the (modded) XBox can be run from the hard drive, I hope the hackers who made that possible know how grateful us end users are. My XBox is my media centre, I use it to play music and video files, although I don't use it to play DVDs, as although XBMC is a *superb* DVD player, I don't want to wear out the DVD drive (I'm no my second one already), so I use a cheap (£30, I think) supermarket bought standalone DVD drive to play physical DVDs, as it does everything I want. I FTP media from my PC to the XBox, so the DVD drive in the XBox sees almost no use, except to install games.
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See this xbmc4xbox wiki link:
http://xbmc4xbox.org/wiki/index.php?title=...s_to_.xbe_filesSee this Odawiki link:
http://odamex.net/wiki/Command_line_parametersUsing this feature allows people to create shortcuts that skip the launcher completely. There is a lot that someone could do with that.
Also, everything the Odamex team does is open-source including the launcher currently used on Xbox. Anyone can make a launcher and I have said in other parts of the community that I would be happy to see someone create a launcher with the things that people in this community like to see such as preview videos and graphics honed specifically to the Xbox. That is something I simply can't justify doing on the Odamex team but someone in this community could do it.
Anyway, the most important part of the whole thing to me is the client. The launcher, to me, is simply a tool to launch the client with the necessary options to play the game I am interested in. I put as much time into the client as I could to make it integrate with the Xbox in the best way possible. That included things like honing the controls, using good defaults, saving games in a way that allows them to be viewed in the save game manager and transferred with memory cards, high definition support, and even adding the macro joystick shortcuts for communication. The end result is, in my opinion, the best Doom port on Xbox and, overall, a port that is more polished than most. I am proud of what I delivered. The idea that someone doesn't use it at all only because the launcher isn't really what they want is pretty disappointing to me. I would rather someone curse the launcher on their way to playing the client which is the part that actually has a game in it and the part that I really want to continue investing time in.
There will be some changes to the launcher over time but you will never see me producing the madmab edition launcher. It is up to a madmab-like dev to come around and decide it is worth their time to tackle the task.
OK mate. Thanks for answering, and for all of your hardwork. Doom is a timeless classic, and it's brilliant having such a compatible version on the XBox (DoomX is brilliant but of course it can't use hacked .wad files). I do play on Odamex (offline, I've never been an online player, and I've not linked up the XBox, so it's single player Doom mods only), but when my nephew (nine years old, and a better gamer than me (IMG:
style_emoticons/default/mad.gif) ) is around I put on DoomX (he loves Doom and Duke Nukem on my XBox, but doesn't play them on his PC* even though I've put them on for him) as the frontend is quicker to use.
* Isn't it amazing how much the world has changed - I'm 41 now, and when I was a kid, being sent to your room was a punishment. My nephew (who's parents are far from rich) has an XBox 360, a PC, a Nintendo DS, mobile phone and probably (I'm not sure) satellite TV.
I had a portable TV, then a Spectrum. Technology has changed so much for so many people.
