New Fields

[Jason Carr]

I'll be adding new fields soon to the database. I want to add all new fields in one fell swoop so I figured we should discuss it first. Open to ideas and suggestions about new fields to add. First off, one field I want to add is Series, to match the Series field that we have in LaunchBox. Beyond that, I want to better handle the description for multiplayer games. Right now we have "Max Players" and "Cooperative" but that doesn't quite cover all the details. At first I thought about replacing Max Players and adding a new "Play Mode" field to match the one in LaunchBox with options like "2-Player Alternating" and "2-Player Simultaneous", but with online games these days I'm thinking that would get unruly fast. So my current plan is to keep "Max Players" and add a new field called "Multiplayer Modes" with these options: Alternating Simultaneous Cooperative Online Split-Screen This would eliminate the Cooperative check box (we can move the data over to the new field easily). Also, of course you would be able to select several of these options at once. Looking for feedback on the above and also any new fields you think are important to add. Thanks guys! I'd like to nail these down before I implement the last major piece, which is adding new games.

[Cebion]

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Jason Carr said I'll be adding new fields soon to the database. I want to add all new fields in one fell swoop so I figured we should discuss it first. Open to ideas and suggestions about new fields to add. First off, one field I want to add is Series, to match the Series field that we have in LaunchBox. Beyond that, I want to better handle the description for multiplayer games. Right now we have "Max Players" and "Cooperative" but that doesn't quite cover all the details. At first I thought about replacing Max Players and adding a new "Play Mode" field to match the one in LaunchBox with options like "2-Player Alternating" and "2-Player Simultaneous", but with online games these days I'm thinking that would get unruly fast. So my current plan is to keep "Max Players" and add a new field called "Multiplayer Modes" with these options: Alternating Simultaneous Cooperative Online Split-Screen This would eliminate the Cooperative check box (we can move the data over to the new field easily). Also, of course you would be able to select several of these options at once. Looking for feedback on the above and also any new fields you think are important to add. Thanks guys! I'd like to nail these down before I implement the last major piece, which is adding new games.

Great ideas! Some fields I'd love to see: - Theme - Alternate Titles - Won Awards - Press Critics Score - Fansites - Link to buy on gog / ebay etc. - Keywords - DLCs - also on xxx System - Part of xxx game series

[Jason Carr]

Great ideas @Cebion. You reminded of a few things too. Are you good with my plan for Multiplayer Modes? We should definitely add most of the fields you've listed above eventually, but of that list I think alternate titles are probably the most important. So that is planned and should be implemented first before the rest. I probably won't try and tackle all of those all at once.

[SentaiBrad]

Alternate Titles with the distinction of Language. Alternate Title (Japanese), Alternate Title (Greek), Alternate Title (French). That sort of thing.

[Cebion]

The multiplayer modes are a great idea Jason.

[SyrianBallaS]

I think we need a "Box - Side" and "Box - Top" in the "Image Type" dropdown. Mainly because I think people are thinking they're the same as advertising flyers or banners. I think they look like banners.

[RiftCreeper]

The multiplayer mode options seem good. Additional field suggestions: - Alternate Title (as mentioned above) - Media (Floppy, Cassette, Cartridge, CD, DVD, etc.) - Manual

[Jason Carr]

Thank you guys. I ended up implementing adding new games first after all. I do plan to come back to this soon, though to add the fields I discussed above. @Samer, that makes sense. I can add those as well when I add the other fields. Alternate titles are interesting because it's not always associated with a language; sometimes it's associated with a region. For example, some games are named differently in Great Britain than in the US. I like your Media field idea, @M-6502, so I'll add that as well. Manuals we'll probably add eventually as well, but probably not at this point.

[robbforce]

Are there plans to handle multi-disc games, where the second disc offers a different experience? For example, I attempted to split the "Gran Turismo 2" entry for PS2 into two entries, one for the arcade disc, the other for the simulation, but this was rejected. The two offerings are very different experiences within the same overall framework, with slight differences in their disc images and could have different descriptions. Other examples: Final Fantasy Chronicles Disc 1 - Chrono Trigger Disc 2 - Final Fantasy IV Final Fantasy Anthology Disc 1 - Final Fantasy V Disc 2 - Final Fantasy VI Other things I'd like to see were mentioned by Cebion already, so I'll +1 for "Game sets" and "Also on xxx system", with a comment field to describe notable differences, like "Dreamcast: Enhanced graphics and audio. There's an easter egg when you enter this room and hit the left wall to make Sonic appear momentarily on screen."

[Soundtrackgeek]

M-6502 said The multiplayer mode options seem good. Additional field suggestions: - Alternate Title (as mentioned above) - Media (Floppy, Cassette, Cartridge, CD, DVD, etc.) - Manual

Back in the day I had a Commodore 64 and me and every one I knew had cassettes only. Those fancy (and huge) disc drives weren't common in Europe I believe. I am adding a bunch of C64 games to the database, but there is no image type for cassette currently. It gives me that extra nostalgia boost when I see one... Would love to have this option.

[Soundtrackgeek]

Genre: Pinball There's a few pinball games out there and I'm not sure what to use there :)

[SentaiBrad]

robbforce said Are there plans to handle multi-disc games, where the second disc offers a different experience? For example, I attempted to split the "Gran Turismo 2" entry for PS2 into two entries, one for the arcade disc, the other for the simulation, but this was rejected. The two offerings are very different experiences within the same overall framework, with slight differences in their disc images and could have different descriptions. Other examples: Final Fantasy Chronicles Disc 1 - Chrono Trigger Disc 2 - Final Fantasy IV Final Fantasy Anthology Disc 1 - Final Fantasy V Disc 2 - Final Fantasy VI Other things I'd like to see were mentioned by Cebion already, so I'll +1 for "Game sets" and "Also on xxx system", with a comment field to describe notable differences, like "Dreamcast: Enhanced graphics and audio. There's an easter egg when you enter this room and hit the left wall to make Sonic appear momentarily on screen."

This is clear in our Guidelines, multiple discs doesn't mean multiple entries, it's still the same game. I get they are two different modes, but they're apart of the same game limited by Disc Size not being different games. PS1 had 700mb-ish discs. We probably wont giveaway Easter Egg's, I'd like to see people explore and I don't want us to spoil all that. Also, we do have plans to deal with multiple discs, but honestly nothing is broken with it so it hasn't been priority. You can check out our BitBucket to find a list of all tickets, click "Feature Request" at the top of any forum page.

[robbforce]

SentaiBrad said This is clear in our Guidelines, multiple discs doesn't mean multiple entries, it's still the same game. I get they are two different modes, but they're apart of the same game limited by Disc Size not being different games. PS1 had 700mb-ish discs.

This confused me for a moment, I meant the actual picture of the disc, especially in the Final Fantasy examples. I think we can agree that Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV are not the same game, but they do share a single entry, currently. Since the topic was about the database, I just wondered what the plan was for handling these games.

We probably wont giveaway Easter Egg's, I'd like to see people explore and I don't want us to spoil all that.

That was my bad example of "additional content" that might be within a game ported to multiple systems. Where I'm leading with this, if I was going to play a game that had releases on PS2, Xbox, Gamecube and Dreamcast, I'd find it helpful to know the Dreamcast release was slightly superior graphically, but the PS2 release had exclusive content. And another idea just formed, other relationships, like "Remake of ...", "Precedes ...", "Follows ..." (or "Prequel to ...", "Sequel to ...") would be cool. Certainly nice-to-haves but as you capture more info, it should help your games database stand out from the others.

[Soundtrackgeek]

Genre: Educational

[DudeManL57]

Hi sorry if this was asked somewhere else I didn't see. Is there a way or will you be adding a field in launchbox itself to pull the max players field from the database. I would really like to see it do that instead of manually adding it to each game. Sorry if this has been discussed previously and thank you for all the work you do.

[wasili]

Cool thing! "Alternate Title" (and maybe also "Subtitle"?) would be useful... About the "Medium" field: I would like it. But it would mean to have more entries for different versions of a game, which wasn't the plan so far as I understood. It would make sense tough, since a lot of DOS games were reissued on CD and often with better music and stuff like that... It would also make sense then to merge platforms like Jaguar and Jaguar CD, Genesis and Sega CD and so on.... But I think other stuff, like the ability to add new games you are going to implement or having more genres to choose from would be more important. Also changing the platform of a game. For the genres we would need a whole new discussion thread though ^^

robbforce said "Also on xxx system", with a comment field to describe notable differences, like "Dreamcast: Enhanced graphics and audio. There's an easter egg when you enter this room and hit the left wall to make Sonic appear momentarily on screen."

I think stuff like that could just be written into the "Overview" field (which translates to "Notes" in Launchbox I guess?).

[Beatlemaniac19]

Great ideas guys. I made a Bitbucket ticket recently about a "Controller Type" field. Instead of explaining myself again, I'll just paste my ticket: "A new standard filter request I have is "Controller Type". When playing all of these different consoles, you're going to want to use different controllers for different consoles/games and it'd be cool if you knew which controller you need to use for each console/game. For example, the standard controller can be labeled as "gamepad" for consoles, and "mouse and keyboard" for PCs. Here's a list of potential controller types: -Gamepad -Mouse and Keyboard -Wii Mote (for Wii) -Balance Board (for Wii) -Guitar (Guitar Hero/Rock Band) -Drums (Guitar Hero/Rock Band) -Microphone (Guitar Hero/Rock Band) -Dance Pad (DDR and StepMania) -Light Gun -Track Ball -etc. (there are many more possibilities) Having this as a standard filter, beneath play mode, would be great. When playing Wii, it's annoying figuring out which games need Wii Motes or Wii Pro Controllers. This would alleviate that problem. A "View Controller Type" option in Big Box would be great too. It would make it easier to search for Light Gun games or Dance Pad games etc. for whenever you want to search for any and all games that use a specific controller type."

[SentaiBrad]

A ticket in the Database does exist for controller types if I recall. You can search for existing tickets so you can vote and comment on them.

[DivinityCycle]

So, I'm a long term Kodi user, and as a result my perspective on this stuff comes from spending way too much time messing around with media centers and organizing metadata for movies & TV shows. One thing that I think may prove useful in LaunchBox is giving the user to ability to add arbitrary keywords to games. I'm not sure if you'd want to make this a public-facing feature for the online Games DB, as that could become a moderation nightmare.

The basic idea is to let users tag keywords onto games and then search / filter by those keywords. This would allow things like, "Show me 80s games that have cyborgs in them", or "show me games Hideo Kojima worked on" do-able. I know themoviedb.org uses this system for helping to classify movies, and they do allow user-submitted keywords. I'm not sure what methods they employ to prevent users from submitting incorrect or offensive tags, but I imagine that would be the key logistical problem that would potentially be introduced by such a thing. The Genres field in the Games DB already has support for multiple entries, so I'd imagine the coding side of this would be pretty straightforward. 

[Top Titans]

The Wii, Wii U and Wiiware games uses a tag system that is very useful for several reasons. As an example, Wii's Mario Party 9 is Mario Party 9 [SSQE01] or Mario Party 9 [SSQP01] (the E and P distinguish PAL and NTSC).

My setup is game directory name ended with [code#] and the game names themselves are the code. This format is created by one of the software that creates the wbfs file format for Wii. Probably there are other setups, but highly likely that they all include the code number.

So, there is a chance that most of Dolphin users will benefit from this.

Because the code is part of the directory name, the game is not selected, even though the rest is the same