Description
The Id Games tab is a great feature, it's really convenient to be able to download new WADs so easily. However, it shows the most recently uploaded by default, and it's a mixed bag; there's some gems in there, but plenty of unplayable dreck as well.
Finding the best WADs is currently hard work
Recently on a whim I tried downloading as many of the Cacoward winners as I could - I've got almost all the winners & runners-up from 2023 and 2022, and let me tell you it was an absolute pain. Hunting down the web pages that lists them, going back and searching for the correct Id Games link in DL, or finding the DoomWorlds forum announcement and tracking down some random Dropbox account. Lots of them have busted names & thumbnails, because we can't handle TITLEMAPs, and possibly other reasons. They are all designed for a particular IWAD and sometimes a particular source port, and you have to figure this out by trial and error or ferreting out the documentation.
I think that it should be way easier for users to find the best of the best WADs. Searching for the latest bleeding edge stuff is a perfectly fine use-case, but it shouldn't be the first thing they see.
Proposal:
- Introduce a "Discover" tab.
- Maybe "Id Games" becomes a "Latest releases" sub section under "Discover".
- "Discover" shows a thumbnail grid with all the images of Cacoward winning mods, with description, proper titles (statically known details & images shipped with DL). Looks similar to the regular "Local" or "Recent" tabs
- We can take screenshots so that even TITLEMAP ones can have thumbnail images
- The ones that have been downloaded show a "Play" button like normal
- Ones that are in idgames show a "Download" button, that puts it in the download queue, and replaces it with a "Play" button when it's ready
- Ones that are not in idgames show a "Find" button that sends the user to the Doomworlds announcement web page
- It has to know how to identify the same WAD downloaded from other sources, like Sigil from Steam vs Sigil from idgames. That way it can correctly show the right "Play" or "Find" or "Download" button.
- On first startup, the user is taken to the Discover tab instead of the IWAD tab
Notes:
- Lots of manual work required to assemble the hundreds of download links, thumbnails, authors, descriptions, etc. It's static information, so the list would be in code rather than another database table. Probably
class CacowardWinner : IGameFileso it can slot into the existing TabView machinery. - Would it bloat the DoomLauncher installer size to an unacceptable degree?
- Older Cacoward winners tend to be on idgames, simplifying download; newer ones are often not done yet, and stored in random pain-in-the-arse-walled hosting sites. I don't think we should attempt to automatically download these. At best it will be a pain to code it into a seamless experience and will result in dead links; at worst, it is a security nightmare. Maybe ModDB deserves to be automatic like idgames? But better to have a "Find" button, that way we can still lead the user to classics like My House before forcing them to go fishing.