A wish from me

[subby]

G'Day all,
You know what would be great? All settings (set via the console) to be saved on exit of the game. I know some are but not all. For example

CUSTOM_CAMERA_RISE xx
CUSTOM_CAMERA_BACK xx
etc

It's just pain having to edit a config file every time a new version comes out, blah blah whine winge blah

What do you think ?

[wrtlprnft]

I think those options should get saved, yes. Actually I even think they should have menu settings somewhere since they're that useful. I mean, where's the point in allowing the user to select a custom camera from the menu if it isn't customizable using the same menu?

But you don't have to edit a config file for every new version. Just create an autoexec.cfg containing only the settings you want to change and they'll stay as long as the config item name is the same.

[Z-Man]

The rationale behind NOT saving those values is that they don't have menu items, and I don't see good way to give them some due to the large range of allowed values. If they would be saved, we'd get lots of "my arma is behaving strangely, look at this screenshot" bugs where players followed misguided hints from other players and entered stuff at the console and don't know how to revert. Generally, there should be only two kind of settings: those you can only set in config files, and those you can set in menus that get remembered for the next session. Yes, the camera settings should be in a menu, but to make that possible, we probably need a better menu system first where such a thing is possible intuitively.

[wrtlprnft]

What about making a new menu item that allows (pseudo)logarithmical values? So if the range was 1-1000 for CAMERA_CUSTOM_BACK and CAMERA_CUSTOM_RISE it would let the user select 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,20,30,...,100,200,300,...,1000.
We could drop CAMERA_CUSTOM_PITCH and make a new CAMERA_CUSTOM_ANGLE which would be in degrees. Add a "reset to defaults" button and you're done

Of course it would be nice if that menu automatically started a new single player game in custom cam mode and let some bot drive in circles (for _TURN_SPEED), but I think that's too complicated for now.

[subby]

How about a functiuon that can be called from the console that saves some of these config values to the autoexec file that wrtlprnft metioned:

con: save_settings

I agree with z-man in the game not needing these options within the menu system as only advanced players will use these features and they should be perfectly capable of using the console by the time they start playing with these sorts of settings.

[Phytotron]

Now that you mention it...

camera_custom_save
(moviepack_)floor_rgb_save
[local game physics]_save

...for examples, might be quite handy.

[Z-Man]

Good ideas for our next generation configuration system. We'll support settings groups there, anyway. Maybe also a peek at the way emacs handles customization may be good? They've got quite a complex settings hierarchy (I get lost there every time), and you can save each settings group separately.