MW4.exe accepts 76 command line switches. Only 27 of them appeared in the old
-help output, that output went to the debug log rather than to the user, and it
did not stop the game from launching afterwards -- so in practice the switches
were undocumented.
-help now writes a full, categorised reference to mw4-help.txt next to the
executable, opens it in Notepad, and returns from WinMain without starting the
game. If Notepad cannot be launched, a message box reports where the file was
written. The check runs immediately after the command line is lower-cased at the
top of WinMain, before any subsystem is initialised.
A file plus a viewer was chosen over a message box because MW4 is a GUI-subsystem
application with no console, and 76 switches with real descriptions do not fit
legibly in a dialog.
The reference documents every switch actually parsed, grouped as: display and
video, audio and plasma display, pod hardware and arcade (CTCL), zoom and field
of view, multiplayer and network, logging and diagnostics, development and test
builds, and other. Each entry records the accepted value range where the parser
enforces one -- for example -tbaud 9600-921600, -armorlevel 0-4, -tmfds 0-4,
-zmfovb 0.01-0.5, and the -zmtime special case where 0 means instant.
Two switches are listed under "recognised but inactive" so their behaviour is not
misrepresented: -join, whose consuming line is commented out, and -noabzug, which
is only parsed inside a disabled code path. The LAB-only switches are marked as
accepted and ignored in Release builds.
The old partial SPEWALWAYS list in GetGameOSEnvironment was removed so there is a
single maintained reference rather than two that can drift apart. A comment there
points at the new one.
Also adds an explicit #include <stdio.h>; this translation unit previously had no
direct stdio use and relied on transitive inclusion.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: GitHub Copilot <copilot@github.com>
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