Improved UI for packages

For the past week I’ve been finishing up with the Home UI for the 2.0 release. The Packages tab has gained a lot of useful functionality.

Package popup

The Packages tab helps you browse and manage your PWADs, add-ons, resource packs and other data files (all of which are called “packages” in Doomsday 2). Build 2208 introduces a new UI for viewing information about packages and performing quick actions on them. Like the game tabs, I consider the Packages tab now feature-complete for 2.0.

The new package info popup has the following features:

  • The popup can be quickly opened by right-clicking a package in any Packages list.
  • There is a convenient “Play in…” button for quickly loading the package in an existing game profile, without making any permanent changes to profiles. This works great for quickly trying out PWADs, for example.
  • The “Add to…” button lets you add the package to any existing game profile.
  • The “Show File” button opens the folder containing the package in Windows Explorer / macOS Finder / etc. (This may not be very helpful if all your data files are lumped in a single folder.)
  • The “Options” button allows selecting from the optional .box contents. It was relocated here from the old context menu that no longer exists.

A little bit of content analysis is done on the package:

  • Doomsday tries to guess which game the package is for, looking through any auxiliary readme files, the used WAD map format, Snowberry metadata, names of parent folder(s), etc.
  • In the case of WAD files, the game title picture is shown in the popup as the package icon.
  • If the package contains an “icon.jpg” (or “icon.png”) file, it is used as the package icon image. Currently these images are only displayed in the popup.

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