launcher idea

I've been fiddling with GZDoom a little bit and there are several command line options for hosting and connecting to multiplayer games. There are even more for what mode of multiplayer and maps to play.

I did a little research and figured out how to run a program from C using a Windows function called ShellExecute(). It's pretty straightforward and I confirmed I could use it by making it run Notepad. The nice thing is that it's running it just like if I ran it from the console or double clicked an icon (as in, not dependent on the calling program staying open or anything).

There are several front end programs for GZDoom/ZDoom but none that I can find that are open source or written in GTK (and therefore could be cross platform easily if I can find similar program running functions in Linux/OSX).

I've been itching for some way to write a potentially useful program that would be complex enough and useful enough to a community to justify learning Git (so I can use Github) or hosting on SourceForge or something.

The only thing I don't immediately know how to do is the file selection dialog. I'd need the ability to point to the .exe and .wad files and it would be slick to figure out if the .wad files have any useful info inside of them like level names I could extract. My quick skim of the GTK documentation gives me the impression that it's not excessively tough to do a file selector. This makes sense considering how common that feature is!

Other than that it's just a matter of layout and how options should be toggled. The obvious first push should handle the most common ones. I'm getting better at string handling so storing all the options enabled and shuttling them to a string to be executed as a shell command shouldn't be too tough.

I really wish I was at the chapter in the GTK book that handles Glade so I wouldn't have to do the UI by hand, but maybe I need the practice!