Playlist Auto-Populate 'And' 'Or' Support?

[Fursphere]

Are there any plans to overhaul the playlist Auto-Populate logic to include proper 'and' 'or' support? 

So i can do an "or" between two fields for example?  (instead of only being able to do 'or' logic between multiple criteria in the same field)

[faeran]

On 1/18/2025 at 12:44 PM, Fursphere said:

Are there any plans to overhaul the playlist Auto-Populate logic to include proper 'and' 'or' support? 

So i can do an "or" between two fields for example?  (instead of only being able to do 'or' logic between multiple criteria in the same field)

There's been a lot of discussion in the past about doing this. It would require a major overhaul of the entire system and could in the worst case cause issues with playlists that are already out there.

In saying that, I'd love to hear any real world rulesets that you are burning to use if we were to implement a system like this.

[Fursphere]

I've been overhauling my cabinets lately, and re-evaluating how I've got the front ends setup to 'present' things.  Let me see if I can convey my thought process on this one in a way that makes sense.  lol

I've got two 2-player stand up cabinets that can be physically linked (hardware) to create a big 4 player cabinet (with mirrored screens basically).  I made the decision quite some time back that the stand up arcades would only have arcade games on them.  Console systems are all on another PC hooked up in my living room. 

Looking at "Platforms" you get kind of a strange combination of things.   Some are single system (Sega Model 2) and some are multi-system (MAME / TeknoParrot).  But they're all Arcade games right?  So how do you unify everything so the 'platform' doesn't matter?  Playlists of course.  You know this already.

Building a custom 4-player game list that's auto-populated.   Sometimes "max players" is what you look at.  Sometimes its "Play mode". 

If I add "Field: Max Players" and "Field: Play Mode" in the same auto-populate list, its a hard AND.   You can only do "OR" with multiple values under the same "Field" right?.  So there is effectively no way to evaluate both fields?  (Unless there is some way to do this that I'm not aware of). 
 

That's the one use case I was toying with last weekend when I made this point.  I think I had another, but can't recall at the moment. 

What I really want is a T-SQL query based search....    heh   But I know that's not going to happen.

 

[Fursphere]

@faeran

Here is an example I just ran across.

Shooter auto-generated Playlist. 

Basic logic is "Genre Contains Shooter"  (Had 1766 titles in my playlist)

But this was picking up Lightgun games (Shooter / Gun).  So I wanted to filter them out. 

So I thought to add "Genre Doesn't Contain Shooter / Gun"  (also tried "Genre Doesn't Contain Gun").

This is a hard "OR" statement between the two rules.  Now the playlist has 6114 titles. 

The evaluation between  these two rules needs to be configurable to be an "AND" not an "OR" statement.

 

[C-Beats]

There a reason you couldn't just use Genre - Is Equal To - Shooter? Or instead of using Genre twice use the Controller support filter to remove the light gun games?

[Fursphere]

There are a ton of "Shooter / (something)" Genres.    The idea was to capture them all, excluding the single "Shooter / Gun"

I would have to find all the possibilities, then list them all out:

Is Equal to 'Shooter / Horizontal'

<or>

Is Equal to 'Shooter / Vertical'

<or>

Is Equal to 'Shooter / whatever'

etc.

And this is not forward thinking.   If something 'new' gets imported that happens to be a 'shooter / <something not specifically mentioned in the rule>' genre, it wouldn't be included unless the playlist was updated to specifically accommodate. 

...and least, that's my thought process. 

[C-Beats]

Yeah, wasn't sure if you were using sub-genre. I'd use the controller support credentials then to remove any game with light gun support

[Fursphere]

I was playing with that yesterday.   It seemed to only be supported on MAME, HBMAME, and Sega Model 2.    Didn't pickup 'light gun' games on any other platform.

And, in the scope of our other conversation about LB DB - that's another field that's not exposed in the LB DB online editor - so no way to clean it up.

Edited February 10 by Fursphere

[C-Beats]

32 minutes ago, Fursphere said:

I was playing with that yesterday.   It seemed to only be supported on MAME, HBMAME, and Sega Model 2.    Didn't pickup 'light gun' games on any other platform.

And, in the scope of our other conversation about LB DB - that's another field that's not exposed in the LB DB online editor - so no way to clean it up.

You can add any controller to any game in your local library, you're not limited to what the DB picks up/assigns. There are other platforms that have light gun games as well. I know because I manually and painstakingly assigned each of our controller support information per game per platform for all that the DB has in it atm.

[Fursphere]

Ok, did a little spot checking.   I see why my query didn't originally work. 

The console systems appears to be setup like "Controllers = Zapper (Light gun)" or "Controllers = GunCon2 (Light gun)"

The only outlier is Nintendo Wii - where everything is "wiimote".  Which makes sense. 

I think I had a "controller type equals light gun" rule, where it should be "controller type contains light gun" rule.   Lemme try that. 

[Fursphere]

Ok, here's the issue.   "Controller Support" doesn't support partial matches.   So I've have to go find every variation and put them all in.   

And then "Controller Support" field isn't exposed in the "display fields" list...     so there isn't a quick way to see them all.   You'd have to spot check every entry in the list.  

[C-Beats]

1 hour ago, Fursphere said:

Ok, here's the issue.   "Controller Support" doesn't support partial matches.

No but it does support the controller category. Just put the Light Gun category name in an it'll pick up all it's children.

1 hour ago, Fursphere said:

And then "Controller Support" field isn't exposed in the "display fields" list...     so there isn't a quick way to see them all. 

Check show badges, turn on the light gun badge, sort by badge column. Alternatively you can just use the Quick filter by the search bar and use it to filter to only games with light gun support

[Fursphere]

33 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

No but it does support the controller category. Just put the Light Gun category name in an it'll pick up all it's children.

I couldn't get anything to work in that field.

 

34 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

Check show badges, turn on the light gun badge, sort by badge column. Alternatively you can just use the Quick filter by the search bar and use it to filter to only games with light gun support

I added 'badges' - and not a single title in my list had anything in that column. 

[C-Beats]

19 hours ago, Fursphere said:

I added 'badges' - and not a single title in my list had anything in that column. 

That column only shows badges you have enabled. Sounds like you may not have had them on.