Mr Random is making a new Frontend

[K.F]

And what's the difference between this and the already available PCSX2 Bonus exactly?

for the legal issues we could probably get away with encrypting the picture in a local db and then claim we fetch the cover art from gamefaqs or something with no storage being done?

Let's not discuss scam especially on the official forums please, if it is not 100% legal, then forget about it. There are open and ready video game database sites like thegamesdb.net if the wiki is not available. Of course any external site comes with its own problems.

[scythefwd]

instead of hosting the database online, why not have the option of a local one with a minimalized MySQL, postgre, or .. for the windows side, gasp, mssql light locally with the ability to sync. This DB would hold the images, which can be selected by url (or better, screen shot!) and stored locally, would allow for full functionality offline, and would also serve as a repository for game settings. If the ability to export/import game settings existed, that would be awesome. That way, anyone that has game hacks that we know work with pretty much all hardware (not resolutions which would be stored, but speed hacks, game specific hacks like the auto hacks are done now, slui, etc...) then you could export the settings and import it into a "master" db the local ones can sync to on command. Crowd source the setups like we do patches (another table maybe?), settings, etc. Instead of keeping them in threads, have some sort of sql back end (yeah, I know, that's pretty much what this forum runs on), that can be directly accessed... if you have a pscx2 acct on the forums.

[CyberFox]

Rama you're marked as a pcsx2 coder. Maybe you can assist me if i have some questions?

Ok so. Game artwork. Yes PCSX2 bonus has a mechanism to scrape artwork from GameFags.com i have also been working on this project months back attempting to restore the source code.

OK so i have been thinking about this all day too. So:

But yes i would definitely demand the picture even if it's just a niceness it certainly makes games much easier to distinguish. BUT i would also argue that a list without pictures is still better than no list at all. For rev will just be this simple design without pictures. Simply because I'm incompetent. I could do this in 5 minutes in WPF. but wxWidgets... Well it's been 4 days now. Something is happening, but slowly.

Concerning methods to gather the pictures we can probably copy a ***** of the pictures from our very own Wiki. Other than that we can try to ask PCSX2 Bonus users to send a copy their archive, we can make a small website with a multifile upload.(And in JS we'll filter out the existing pictures before upload). And finally we can scrape the remaining off GameFags.com. I have the source code for that and with a little delay between the scrapes we'd avoid being banned and can probably scrape them all within a few days. Even a 1 minute interval would be 60*24 = 1440 games per day which is plenty considering the time the development of everything else will take months. In fact the latter approach alone might suffice.

Another thing you haven't considered is the thumbnail in the native save files that might be useful. They did this in Dolphin I think. But i frankly have no idea how to extract them and unless we already have a function for it it probably not worth the effort considering how small and irrelevant the pictures usually are.

For the legal issues we can probably get away with storing them in a compiled file that the end user normally wont be able to access open. This way they wont find the pictures in our emulator and we can make any claim as which method we're using in order to obtain the images and they wont be able to prove anything. What claim we can make is up for discussion. But to start with i'd go with not mentioning anything unless EXPLICITLY asked.

Just scraping the surface of Dolphin folders i can't seem to find any pictures. But looking in the forums i can see they have made a big effort to gather all the *Banner* images they use in their frontpage. One guy made an exe that the user had to dump into their program dir and it would upload the pictures to his server.

@FlatOut i know your train of thought. Perhaps in the future we can create something like the steam big picture mode. For now lets keep it simple
And about the console. It's very easy to hide and show it tho i'm not sure if i agree or not because Yes the dev builds will most probably not be a regular user. Another thing is we might forget to close it when we ship it. I don't know if we can do anything to automate that show/hide based on build type. My best gues would be that if it's compiled in the release mode we'll hide the console.

[CK1]

And about the console. It's very easy to hide and show it tho i'm not sure if i agree or not because Yes the dev builds will most probably not be a regular user. Another thing is we might forget to close it when we ship it. I don't know if we can do anything to automate that show/hide based on build type. My best gues would be that if it's compiled in the release mode we'll hide the console.

Why worry so much about people seeing the console in a release build? In our case, I think it lets users know that something is at least being processed; it's still an essential tool to debug issues when we do a stable release. You can untick the option and never see it again for all I care

Many retail games such as Source Engine don't hide their console even when you aren't running it with the -developer parameter. (unless ~ to show console is disabled)

[CyberFox]

@CK1 @FlatOut
I gave it some thought during the night.
The console has to go away, we are presenting the user with too much information, and considering that this is a very cheap improvement. I'd say leave the console off by default. You can click the button to show the console and it will be remembered in the INI. Even if you're compiling excessively.

@scythefwd I never intended the application to require being online to work properly. The database for all the hacks and the pictures would only need to be made once. When we have the complete database it's done. We just ship that with the application. But for now we should discuss how to actually make the db. How to gather all the data into one big collection. We scrape the settings off the wiki? That's what i do when i get a new that has some problems.


Another screenshot of Dolphin. When you right-click a game in the list and select properties you get this window.
   
It contains the similar nonsense as the pcsx2 settings pages.

The settings for the game is applied in 3 steps
1: Global settings
2: Game Specific overrides
3: User specific overrides

A little difference i suggest is that 1 & 2 is loaded from the localdb that shipped with the application and isn't changeable by the user.

Choosing DB provider is a completely subjective matter that has very little importance to the project. I normally use SQLite for clientside storage in most applications i make. But if take a look at Dolphin you can see they have chosen to just store them as raw text files

   
In the parent folder there is a file "totaldb.dsy - 707kb" which i don't know how to open.


On an unrelated note: For fun i tried my girlfriend to see if she could figure out how to start a game. She's an idiot. But idiots are great for testing.
In Dolphin i asked her how do you start a game? After a few seconds she pointed at the big fat play button i mentioned. (Not double click, suprize)
In pcsx2, she was just silent. No idea. I even showed how how to do it and she was unable to repeat it.

[dogen]

On an unrelated note: For fun i tried my girlfriend to see if she could figure out how to start a game. She's an idiot. But idiots are great for testing.
In Dolphin i asked her how do you start a game? After a few seconds she pointed at the big fat play button i mentioned. (Not double click, suprize)
In pcsx2, she was just silent. No idea. I even showed how how to do it and she was unable to repeat it.

Well, making it easier to start games won't help people with configuring it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with a slicker interface, but I don't think it'll lower the barrier of entry much. Pcsx2 has a lot of options, and a lot of games require messing with them. That's not going away any time soon.

[CyberFox]

@dogen You're right. A big fat play button servers no purpose if the game wont work when you click it.
The thing we really need it the config database.
Right now i just start the simplest task possible because of my inexperience with C++ and wxWidgets. When i finish this i will do some of the more juicy stuff.
And hopefully i have caught enough interest that some community members will assist.

[CyberFox]

Ok so i was working on some mock up and came up with a pretty bad UI.



This is a database editor with makeup. The right panel is a webbrowser. The idea is that it will open a "random" page on the wiki. Some of the fields will be automatically populated based on the HTML. The user can verify the information and check the hacks / render modes / plugin version selections. The hacks need to have a few fast checkboxes to quickly apply the settings. When you're finish you click next and it will open the next random game.

And by random i don't really mean random. I mean the next game that isn't already in the DB.

The whole process for a single game should never take more than 10 seconds.


BTW this will NOT be part of the PCSX2 application. It's a seperate program whose sole purpose is help make the configuration database. After the database is complete the programs purpose it done.

[CyberFox]

I'm not dead
Currently downloading the pages from the wiki. Max 10 concurrently. Gonna sleep for and let this finish. Tommorow i'll work on parsing the documents. Hopefully by the end of the weekend i have something that resembles a database.
   

Small question. Game id's the like: SLUS-12345 is it safe to assume [A-Z]{4}-[0-9]{5}?

[Silversonic]

Small question. Game id's the like: SLUS-12345 is it safe to assume [A-Z]{4}-[0-9]{5}?

It should be safe, i've never seen anything else. But on the game disks the id's contain dots, so you need to take care of that if you use them.