Eternity Engine Minor Feature Wishlist

Eternity is one of my favorite ports.  However, much like any other, there are some features that I feel are missing or could be done better.  Most of these are small features that I don't think would be very difficult to implement, though I admittedly don't have a feel for that sort of thing.  I have wanted these features in Eternity for some time, but somehow they have not manifested themselves through the power of waiting and vaguely hoping.  I figured that I may as well throw my wishlist out into the open for consideration.

• Kill totals that take into account arch-vile revives and monsters spawned from scripts.  Cubic Worlds is an example of an Eternity WAD that does the latter.  I guess scripts mean that traditional kill counts are potentially impossible to calculate in advance, but increasing the monster total once a script spawns enemies could be enough.
• Make the -vanilla parameter persistent.  Currently, the option is reset when the player starts a new game or IDCLEVs.  I believe this is due to -vanilla being primarily designed for demo recording, but it would be nice to have for casual play as well.
• In a similar vein, quick toggles for various compatibility settings.  Obviously, I don't expect Eternity to have full complevel support.  However, an option to quickly switch the various compatibility settings to an equivalent of, say, GZDoom's Boom (strict) would be very nice.
• Search $DOOMWADDIR for WADs to load.  The Eternity wiki claims that Eternity searches $DOOMWADDIR for IWADs, but this does not seem to be the case for PWADs.
• -pistolstart, or an equivalent setting.  This is probably also possible through modding.

Automap rotation, like in prboom would be very welcome.

Just 2 things I think would be cool to see in EE if these are at all feasible for the current codebase:

1. A -levelstat or -statdump parameter (I just like to keep track of my game stats too much)
2. Blocky spectre drawing similar to Woof (My favorite way for spectres to looks has always been how they did in vanilla, and having them look as close as possible to vanilla is a real big deal for me when it comes to picking out source ports)

Adjustable FPS cap setting. Currently the options for uncapped framerate are to use VSync which feels super laggy to me (as it does in most ports), or fully uncapped FPS which results in extreme tearing and gets my laptop hot enough to boil a pot of soup.

I wish it would remember my FOV settings. I have to redo it everytime I launch it lol

Better low resolution scaling if it's feasible, like a proper aspect ratio corrected 320x200 or even 640x480 without it blurring.

I would love it if the automap could display kills / items / secrets. As it is now, you can see this information only if you use the alternative HUD while playing.

I also find it much harder to secret hunt with eternity than with other engines; using Automap nor IDDT doesn't seem to reveal secret locations very well.

I love the engine by the way, thanks to the developers for their hard work!

Edit:

Here is another one: the option "Novert Emulation" has to be turned "on" for me in order to disable mousespring, aka, disable moving forward by moving the mouse forward. The meaning behind this option isn't clear at all to me, and also, as a default should be set to on since I would guess that the majority of people don't play with mousespring.

The lack of MUSINFO support is the biggest thing against recommending using Eternity for Boom/MBF21 maps. That would be useful to have.

1 hour ago, deathz0r said:

The lack of MUSINFO support is the biggest thing against recommending using Eternity for Boom/MBF21 maps. That would be useful to have.

Eternity has MUSINFO, I've explicitly used it before. Even the MUSINFO page says it's in Eternity.

17 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

Eternity has MUSINFO, I've explicitly used it before. Even the MUSINFO page says it's in Eternity.

I'm guessing nobody has tested it recently, because it's definitely broken in the most recent git commit.

EDIT: quick and dirty test map

musinfo_test.zip

24 minutes ago, deathz0r said:

The lack of MUSINFO support is the biggest thing against recommending using Eternity for Boom/MBF21 maps. That would be useful to have.

It's working for me in Ancient Aliens MAP01 and GOODWAD MAP22, and I'm on a build from just a couple days ago.

On 11/8/2023 at 5:54 AM, volfenstein said:

I would love it if the automap could display kills / items / secrets. As it is now, you can see this information only if you use the alternative HUD while playing.

I also find it much harder to secret hunt with eternity than with other engines; using Automap nor IDDT doesn't seem to reveal secret locations very well.

I love the engine by the way, thanks to the developers for their hard work!

In the dev builds, there are stats displayed in the automap (when not using overlay mode). There doesn't seem to be an option for it, so I guess it's always on. I'd love there to be a way to show the stats outside the automap without having to switch to the fullscreen (no status bar) HUD, either above the status bar like with dsda-doom/Woof/PrBoom+'s extended HUD or in the corner like in Crispy Doom. In particular, the way Crispy Doom does it is basically how the stats are already displayed on the automap, just not limited to the automap.

Regarding secrets, there's a config key called "map_secret_after" that sounds like setting it to 0 should allow secrets to display before touching them, but it doesn't seem to do that. Not sure if that's a bug or if I'm misunderstanding what that config does... but yes, that does make it hard to find secrets on the automap. Even better would be what some ports (Crispy Doom, dsda-doom, and GZDoom to my knowledge) have, which is to use different colors for revealed secrets and unrevealed secrets, so you can distinguish between what you have and haven't already explored.

My main feature requests, besides the above, have to do with tracking stats for speedrunning purposes. I've thought about doing max demos for Heartland but a problem I've run into is that it's hard to verify whether I've actually killed all the enemies. The kill stats (either on the fullscreen HUD or the automap) mostly work, except that monsters resurrected by arch-viles are counted again when you kill them again so the kill count ends up going above the supposed total. I haven't tested spawned enemies like Valiant's arachnorbs but I imagine they work similarly.

In dsda-doom the stats are tracked according to DSDA's max rules, so resurrections subtract from the kill count and spawned enemies add to the total. That way the counts remain consistent, so when the kill count reaches the total you know you've taken care of all the enemies. Even before that was implemented in dsda-doom, you could verify in PrBoom+ by turning "smart totals" off, which separates the kill count (in the fullscreen HUD) into separate counters for number of kills and number of living monsters - when the living monster count reaches 0, you're done. Having either of these would make it a lot easier to verify max demos.

I've also tried verifying kills with IDDTx2, but the problem with that is that everything shows up the same color on the automap so I can't easily find if there's anything still alive that way. Many source ports nowadays show enemies in red, but Eternity shows them in green.

My proposal is probably not-so-minor, but anyway.

Actual OpenGL mode, albeit 8-bit, similar to that in DSDA-Doom. And maybe dynamic lights. Oh, and some decals.

If this happens, I will instantly hop from GZDoom to Eternity and never come back!

Duke Nukem 3D style security cameras would be nice. No need to create animated textures as fake cameras and live pictures.

GZDoom has a nice implementation of this for example.