[Suggestion] Enable Quick Load directly from the Main Menu

[badtoper]

Currently, loading the quicksave when launching the game is a somewhat tedious process. You have to navigate to the "Load Game" menu and then move down if you want to select the quicksave.

Moreover, when using the keyboard, the slightest mouse movement (if you keep your hand on it) breaks the focus, and sometimes you can't even regain keyboard focus at all. This makes the whole process even more cumbersome.

So this would be a QOL improvement to allow players to simply press their quickload keybind at the opening of the game and immediately return to the point where they last left off (which is often the quicksave).

[tmyqlfpir]

Hi thanks for the issue.

I'll investigate this/next week.

[badtoper]

Hi! I’ve been experimenting with this locally and managed to implement the improvements. Since you mentioned you were planning to investigate this, I thought I’d share what I’ve found in case it saves you some time.

These are minor adjustments (~50 lines) with no structural changes, tested on a clean clone of the original codebase. Summary of changes:

Quickload: Now works in-menu (except during text entry or key binding).

Shortcuts (F2->F9): Enabled within and between menus for more intuitive navigation.

Menu Stack: Added EDuke32-style persistence (saves your last position/selection). I'll let you decide if this could be the default, or an option.

Note: I haven't changed the focus logic itself, but direct shortcut access makes it much less of an issue.

Everything is working smoothly so far and I find these changes make the UI much more enjoyable to use. I’ve modified two files and marked my additions with triple slashes ///. I haven't created a fork, but I've attached the files here for you to review and try if you are interested.

Edit: I noticed it was missing protections against saving in menus when it shouldn’t be allowed (no game started, autosave-only, or permadeath).

blood.cpp
gamemenu.cpp