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Jason Carr

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19 minutes ago, Evil_Orko said:

can we add prototypes and homebrew yet?  I really need that function and also the ability to add more genres like pinball, strategy, rts, etc.  thanks for the DB work, I have been adding to it on and off for months now.

I haven't added any fields for prototype or homebrew yet, so unfortunately we still need to wait on that. I can take a look at the genres here soon. Thanks for all your work, @Evil_Orko. :)

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2 hours ago, SentaiBrad said:

Homebrew, Prototype and Rom Hack identifiers would be great, but I would suggest not making them Genres at all. They can still have their own genre's and be 1 of those 3.

I definitely wasn't requesting that they be genres, just the ability to add them to the database somehow so I can scrape my entire collection and not just 95% of it. :)

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It's all good.  Thanks for all you do here.  I just try and help the database as much as I can.  I have lots of ideas for the database, like:  I wish there was a way to push a game from LaunchBox directly to the database, as I usually set my end up first when they aren't found then go and add them in manually to the db which is a duplication of work.  Also, next and previous buttons from the edit screen of LaunchBox would be helpful for editing and cleaning entire sets.  The audit tool is amazing, though, and I didn't think of doing it that way.  I love it!  Oops..I rambled a little.

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Going from LaunchBox to Database with game info was something we discussed day pre-5 of the Database! That is certainly one of our biggest goals related to it, we just can't seem to figure out content moderation with it. I think next and previous buttons has a ticket on the BitBucket too if you want to vote for that. Also, rambling happens, I do it too... a lot.

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I had a thought on the database. Would it be possible to have some sort of quality voting system put in place? A lot of stuff keeps getting changed and then changed back again, as people can't decide on certain things ('correct' game titles, genres, release dates etc) and a lot of these changes just seem to get voted through. If we had a system where every release on the site could be voted on for it's accuracy, might that help? For example, the NES game 3-D WorldRunner is also known as The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner, and it has been changed between both names here. Or some people might think a game in an 'Action' game, as opposed to a traditional 'Platformer'.  They use this system over at MusicBrainz, and they've been doing this sort of thing for music metadata for nearly 20 years.

Taken from their wiki:

Quote

Data quality indicates how good the data for a release is. It is not a mark of how good or bad the music itself is - for that, use ratings.

        High quality

                All available data has been added, if possible including cover art with liner info that proves it.

        Default quality

                This is the default setting - technically "unknown" if the quality has never been modified, "normal" if it has.

        Low quality

                The release needs serious fixes, or its existence is hard to prove (but it's not clearly fake).

Once something gets enough High quality votes, it could be 'locked' against more edits from newer users. There could also be a page listing all the items with quite a few Low quality votes.

 

We could also take a few ideas for how they handle releases. Take this example. There's an overall 'release group', with each release of that game listed underneath, with all associated data (2009-01-03 - UK - Publisher: Nintendo - Developer - Namco) on a per version basis. You can then click through to see the full info and artwork on each region or special edition release.

 

Probably overthinking this whole thing, but I see the database has masses of potential and seemingly a lot of people like myself wanting to dedicate some time to sorting out the masses of data, and making it the most complete and accurate games database around.

 

Oh, and also, definitely need more genres (or sub-genres). GameFAQs of all places seems to have handled this really well. 10 or so main genres, and clicking through on each one you can narrow that down (Sports>Team>Football, or Action>Fighting, or Racing>Simulation).

Edited by cafcmike
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8 hours ago, cafcmike said:

I had a thought on the database. Would it be possible to have some sort of quality voting system put in place? A lot of stuff keeps getting changed and then changed back again, as people can't decide on certain things ('correct' game titles, genres, release dates etc) and a lot of these changes just seem to get voted through. If we had a system where every release on the site could be voted on for it's accuracy, might that help? For example, the NES game 3-D WorldRunner is also known as The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner, and it has been changed between both names here. Or some people might think a game in an 'Action' game, as opposed to a traditional 'Platformer'.  They use this system over at MusicBrainz, and they've been doing this sort of thing for music metadata for nearly 20 years.

Taken from their wiki:

Once something gets enough High quality votes, it could be 'locked' against more edits from newer users. There could also be a page listing all the items with quite a few Low quality votes.

 

We could also take a few ideas for how they handle releases. Take this example. There's an overall 'release group', with each release of that game listed underneath, with all associated data (2009-01-03 - UK - Publisher: Nintendo - Developer - Namco) on a per version basis. You can then click through to see the full info and artwork on each region or special edition release.

 

Probably overthinking this whole thing, but I see the database has masses of potential and seemingly a lot of people like myself wanting to dedicate some time to sorting out the masses of data, and making it the most complete and accurate games database around.

 

Oh, and also, definitely need more genres (or sub-genres). GameFAQs of all places seems to have handled this really well. 10 or so main genres, and clicking through on each one you can narrow that down (Sports>Team>Football, or Action>Fighting, or Racing>Simulation).

i think we could just 'lock' the title after community verification that it has been taken from the US box art.   That would help with a lot of the back & forth name changes.  Also - with the alternate titles now able to add into a field, it should also help with that example.  I just think that we need to eventually have all known names for each game in the alternate titles field.  The problem I see with that is the Japanese names where names are translated loosely from Kanji and can have slightly differing names depending on who is translating.  Not really sure of a solution on that one, either.   All in all - it's good to discuss these kinds of things to help improve the overall usefulness of the DB in general. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have another romhack question. I just rejected a Sonic Classic Heroes entry as the research said it was a rom hack. But then I vaguely recall that Sega's relationship with the hacking community is better than average. Have any of these fan games gotten official sanction that I'm not aware of?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi guys. I have recently submitted a number of changes and new entries for pinball games. For older games, there are usually no high-res images available and sometimes no decent artwork can be found at all. This makes it nearly impossible to come up with decent background images (I admit that I don't have the artistic skills required for creating nice high-quality artwork from scratch myself; just doing some "Gimp-ing" here and there to clean up stuff or create clear logos from existing art). So basically as background images I uploaded images of pinball machines, generic ones, not visibly relating to any game in particular (like close-ups of ramps or bumpers - see example attached) so as to remain in line with the genre of the game. I see that some moderators accept them and others not (seems to be 50/50 right now). In the moderator guidelines, point 11 states that "fanart must be directly related to the game".

As I am also moderating myself, I would like to have your point of view on this. Are such images uploaded as "fanart" acceptable - in the absence of art directly relating to the game itself - or not?

By the way, I would also suggest to add the genre "Pinball". Pinball games cannot be easily categorised with the values currently available.

pinball_fantasies_background.jpg

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Pinball stuff needs to be overhauled, but there hasn't been too much demand for it, so it just hasn't happened. Jason does want to get back in to the Database though, so things like some Pinball stuff can make it's way to better help that category.

As for the images, I think in this instance it would make sense to relax that rule for Pinball, especially because Pinball tables are most often than not based on real machines, or recreations of machines. So in this instance, I do believe that to be a good change. I'll go ahead and amend the rules for Pinball, and make it more clear for Arcade as well.

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  • 3 weeks later...
1 hour ago, SentaiBrad said:

I made some changes to the guidelines, primarily rules 4 and now 5. I split up rule 4 primarily, and clarified it a ton. It was pointed out that it made little sense to someone new.

Great, the 4 and 5 rule changes circumstances for the platform i'm working on now. Bally Astrocade. I'll start changing Bally data. I already discovered the problem with special character in Title names. Working on some clear Logos for this Bally and Launchbox would not discover this new Clear Logos

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Bally Astrocade has weird titles. In Gamedb it's named Blackjack : Poker : Acey-Deucy. The original release name is Blackjack/Poker/Acey-Deucey and sometimes released as Blackjack+Poker+Acey-Deucey.
This is bit confusing . Could we use this for an Title Name in GameDB: Blackjack and Poker and Acey-Deucey or are + signs allowed in Title Name? We better get this right so we dont mess it up

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hey refresh, I was moderating on a lot of your changes, I rejected all the ones with forward slashes in them, we had a talk about it on the discord this afternoon.

I guess it best to use what is actually used in the file name for the romset you have?

I don't have this system but I did a quick search and found this rom named like this -  Blackjack & Poker & Acey-Duecy (19xx)(Bally)[release Number 5002].zip

the "&" symbol was not included in sentibrads list of characters, is this what your rom file has?

In the guidelines he added that names using special characters can be added to alt names for accuracy, but face names cant break scrapeing

 

Edited by massatomic
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To be honest, I find the updated point 5 very vague and confusing. Especially your example with the “+” symbol. Just take the opposite symbol “-“ which can be used as minus but also as hyphen that appears in nearly every entry with a subtitle in its name. Of course I completely understand what your point is but I don’t see any problems when symbols like +, &, -, etc. are getting used for the facing title.

Generally what breaks the LB scraper is when characters are used that are not part of the rom set naming convention. For example No-Intro, Redump, and probably almost every other group are only using Low ASCII characters minus the operating system specific ones like /, :, etc.

Personally I think we should orientate on that set of allowed characters as well for maximum compatibility with it. Here’s the documentation of the No-Intro naming convention and it’s a very good read of you want to understand a little bit more about the structure of this set.

The Official No-Intro Convention (20071030).pdf

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6 hours ago, massatomic said:

hey refresh, I was moderating on a lot of your changes, I rejected all the ones with forward slashes in them, we had a talk about it on the discord this afternoon.

I guess it best to use what is actually used in the file name for the romset you have?

I don't have this system but I did a quick search and found this rom named like this -  Blackjack & Poker & Acey-Duecy (19xx)(Bally)[release Number 5002].zip

the "&" symbol was not included in sentibrads list of characters, is this what your rom file has?

In the guidelines he added that names using special characters can be added to alt names for accuracy, but face names cant break scrapeing

 

The romfilename is not important, i can name the romfilename what ever i want to, it seems LaunchBox will scrape them. Just wanna now what should be standard in cases like 
Bally Astrocade with weird Release title, but "&" instead of / or + or and.

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