Fursphere Posted January 23 Posted January 23 Trying to understand the data source used to build out launchbox. When you add games to Lauchbox, they get 'linked' to a Launchbox DB ID# right? But when you click on the ID link in LB - it takes you to the Launchbox Games Database page for that entry, and the ID # isn't the same? (and you can't search LB DB by Game ID which seems weird) Launchbox DB seems to be the authoritative source, it seems not all fields are exposed in the web interface? like "playmode" for example. And if you edit the information in your local copy of launchbox, does it feed back up into the database? Or is it only a 'pull' from DB to local? thanks Quote
C-Beats Posted January 23 Posted January 23 9 hours ago, Fursphere said: When you add games to Lauchbox, they get 'linked' to a Launchbox DB ID# right? If we find a match to a game in our database then yes, the DB ID of the game in question is attached to the game to allow for scraping. 9 hours ago, Fursphere said: it takes you to the Launchbox Games Database page for that entry, and the ID # isn't the same? Correct, the ID you see in the web URL is I believe the actual key used by the underlying database and not the "database id" field used inside of LaunchBox. The difference is because of how the database was first created. It was an import of another database and the two columns wouldn't have always agreed and so the "Database ID" column was created to keep them the same so that scraping in the app didn't break when it migrated from the that other DB to our own. 9 hours ago, Fursphere said: Launchbox DB seems to be the authoritative source, it seems not all fields are exposed in the web interface? like "playmode" for example. Playmode is derived from the Max Players and Cooperative? field. If Max Players is greater than 1, and cooperative is true, then playmode is Cooperative, if max players is greater than 1 and coop isn't true it's Multiplayer, if max players is 1 then it's single player. 9 hours ago, Fursphere said: And if you edit the information in your local copy of launchbox, does it feed back up into the database? No, local edits to your metadata in the LB client do not get pushed back towards the database. Only way to push changes to the database is via the database website. Quote
Fursphere Posted January 23 Author Posted January 23 Thank you for taking the time to reply to all that. - Can the DB ID be exposed on the Games Database website, so you know you're looking at the same entry? - 'Playmode' has more values than just "Multiplayer, Cooperative, and Single Player" - there is actually a pre-made list of options (see screenshot). Where do these comes from? MAME.XML or something? Long story short - since this is a multi-value field, it would be nice if this was exposed for edit in Games DB website, and then we could tag games for "4 player simultaneous" (or whatever) so the playlist auto-generation could work (a lot) better. I'm not sure about full on replacing the existing tags, as that might screw up existing playlists, but adding a tag doesn't seem like a bad idea. And there are some weird conflicts too. "Max Players = 2" but "Play Mode = 4 player simultaneous" lol If this field was captured and exposed, I'd love to start submitting adjustments to help clean this up and make it more usable. Lastly, it would be really cool to add a field to the DB that included "Control Type" (or something) where a standardized list of controls types could be entered. "Lightgun" "360 Wheel" "360 Wheel & Hi/Lo Shifter" "Twin Stick" "Dual Twin Stick" "Rotary Stick" - Something like that. So edits could be made to define and standard control types and then games could be filtered based on available controls. Lightgun games are often in the ""shooter / gun" genre for mame, but just "Shooter" or "Action Shooter" in TeknoParrot, or just "Shooter" in Sega Model 2. Again, inconsistency. I guess we could just agree upon a unique 'genre' entry too, but that doesn't cover other non-standard control types. Quote
C-Beats Posted January 23 Posted January 23 33 minutes ago, Fursphere said: Where do these comes from? MAME.XML or something? Yeah, those are values coming from your MAME games that have their own playmode already set that we use do to it being more descriptive/accurate. 35 minutes ago, Fursphere said: And there are some weird conflicts too. "Max Players = 2" but "Play Mode = 4 player simultaneous" lol Fairly certain this is caused by the innacuracy of our database. Max Players comes from the GamesDB while the playmode is coming from MAME. Max Players I believe is in the MAME metadata so not entirely sure why we wouldn't pull it for that field as well. Most of these decisions pre-date me and so I'm not entirely sure of all the reasoning behind them. 36 minutes ago, Fursphere said: I guess we could just agree upon a unique 'genre' entry too Yeah, I personally despise our genre system and have been working in my free time to more properly assign genre values to titles to help with this granularity (locally, the database doesn't support the values I've assigned). You can find that effort here Quote
Fursphere Posted January 23 Author Posted January 23 (edited) So it sounds like the only way to clean this stuff up is manual local edits (or your plugin, but it seems arcade stuff hasn't been touched yet). If you re-sync metadata with LB Games DB, does it overwrite manual updates? Answered my own question. I see it does not, as long as you don't tell it too. Edited January 23 by Fursphere Quote
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