Perhaps adding a new button to the launcher, Start New Game, which would launch immediately into a new game. And also a Continue Game button, which would launch and automatically load the save game with the latest timestamp (when such things are implemented, of course), and a Launch Game, which behaves as is default now (and later, launch to the game's main menu).
We do need to clean up game initialization, though. Currently, even when you start with --new-game, it loads you into Beshara first before actually moving you to the chargen boat. It also seems we get a couple frameRenderingQueued calls before the game is fully started up (I once tried to get --new-game to play the intro movie, but I couldn't get it to behave right even when waiting for the second frame).
Making changes to the launcher now is not such a good idea. We would have to remove them soon anyway, since they become useless.
I think we should switch to proper startup (with new game menu item) after we have load/save, since otherwise we will just complicated things for testing. Considering that we have gone along with the current setup for over a year (or was it two?) and we are maybe 3-4 months away from a proper implementation of the new game procedure, I do not see an urgent need to act now.
I agree that it isn't urgent, but it does leave users scratching their head and having to ask on IRC or website since they use OpenMW through the launcher and not the command line.
Even a stop-gap of adding 'new game' to the in-game menu work for now.
That is actually an interesting idea. We could keep the startup as it is and end a "New Game" item to the menu. We would need to implement cleanup functions first, that remove old state, but that can be done with relative ease. For 0.25.0 maybe?
Was this the case in Morrowind? I find it kind of logical to have a 'new game' in the menu with a fat warning/question to either "save current game" or "don't save". This could be a two part thing, the second part would only work when we have proper saving/loading support.
I think MW just gave you an "Are You Sure" type dialogue, warning about the loss of unsaved state. We can't do anything different at this point, because we can not cleanly introduce new localised strings. We can add that with the "New Game" item or later. Doesn't matter that much, since people won't have any game state worth saving for the time being.
Vanilla has a "new game" button in the pause menu.
Edit: I'm giving this a try.
Currently, even when you start with --new-game, it loads you into Beshara first before actually moving you to the chargen boat. It also seems we get a couple frameRenderingQueued calls before the game is fully started up
That's a very good idea Brother Brick and Zini, but why wait until 0.25.0 when 0.23.0 was just released two weeks ago? Here's the issue, if you change your mind, or if Scrawl finishes it and doesn't want to bother finding it: https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/405
Last edited by Greendogo on 14 May 2013, 12:55, edited 1 time in total.
If scrawl wants to give it a try, that's okay with me. But:
when 0.23.0 was just released two weeks ago?
Since we are more or less on a monthly release cycle and we need about a week for RC testing, that means we should stop adding new features soon and warm up for the next release.
