Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Don't read the front page? You suck. - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Jump to content

Hey there, Guest!  (Log In · Register) Help
Loading News Feed...
 

Don't read the front page? You suck.

#31 User is offline Andlabs 

Posted 29 March 2013 - 12:57 PM

  • 「いっきまーす」
  • Posts: 2081
  • Joined: 11-July 08
  • Gender:Male
  • Project:Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
  • Wiki edits:7,061
Thanks; that settles that, and I'll just remove the redirect following. The Sonic part can wait.

Now for the other side: the pages indexed in the database but not here. Mainly this consists of accessories and console pages. Should we start tracking these too? If so, should they be listed with the games or separate? Or will I need to add a flag that tells us not to track scans of those, or not have those use Scanbox at all? Thanks.

#32 User is offline Black Squirrel 

Posted 29 March 2013 - 04:34 PM

  • 2 warps to Neptune
  • Posts: 1941
  • Joined: 27-December 03
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Northumberland, England
  • Project:Blog Squirrel
  • Wiki edits:20,569
Accessories are worth doing, though it will be tricky to work out what constitutes a "complete" set of scans. Most boxes will have six sides that need scanning, but some may only need four or five, since there's not much consistency amongst third-party stuff. The other point to make is not all accessories will have scans - bundled controllers is the prime example

Consoles are more awkward. tbh I'm not keen on how we're documenting all the different models/bundles right now - the solution I came up with a few months ago kind-of works... but I'm not convinced shoving everything on one page is the best plan, particularly if we start getting detailed info on contents and release dates and prices. It will almost certainly confuse the tracker too in its current state, and we're also not very consistent right now.

#33 User is offline Andlabs 

Posted 30 March 2013 - 04:11 AM

  • 「いっきまーす」
  • Posts: 2081
  • Joined: 11-July 08
  • Gender:Male
  • Project:Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
  • Wiki edits:7,061
I'm not entirely sure either, but the scenario is this:
In order for a scanbox to be listed, the console= value in the template has to match the category name exactly, and right now the categories are hardcoded to be Cateogry:(console)_games. I could alter things to show everything on one page and use color coding to separate accessories from games, but I would have to make things more complicated to merge multiple lists (I have a potential idea that I could get to later).
Or we could put the accessories and games on separate pages, say "Mega Drive games" and "Mega Drive accessories", etc. The issue then is that the console= wouldn't necessarily match, and I would need extra information if I wanted to make the front page faster, because now I have no way of differentiating an accessory from a game. Of course, I could use string comparisons on the table...

I'll probably map out something tomorrow morning, but I know it will involve no longer automatically trying to discern the list of consoles through a filter and just specifying the list of consoles manually. Until now I enjoyed the luxury of the tracker automatically producing the list of consoles to track, but albums already give us special-casing and it's going to get worse as I add more things (see above). In that case, I would have my configuration file have a pair (category name, scanbox= field) and I could take the latter approach... I'll map it out tomorrow

#34 User is offline Andlabs 

Posted 30 March 2013 - 07:12 PM

  • 「いっきまーす」
  • Posts: 2081
  • Joined: 11-July 08
  • Gender:Male
  • Project:Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
  • Wiki edits:7,061
Okay, let's see: let's say I manually state which categories to watch using pairs of the form
     { "category name": "scanbox= text" }
For the front page, I would need to do the following
  • Read all scanboxes
  • Read all page names for all categories
  • For each scanbox, determine the values and add them to the stats for the category it belongs to
  • Produce the full report
For individual report pages, I would need to do the following
  • Read all scanboxes for the given console= value
  • Read all page names from the category
  • For each scanbox, determine the values and add them to the stats
  • Produce the full report
My issue is whether or not this would require me to duplicate code, and what data structures I would need to use to make this sortable (for the report page). However, this looks attractive, and if I use a map[category string]ScanSet I think I can avoid the need to use separate code outright (just pass in all the category names or just the one category name as a list...).

I'll just do that, if everybody thinks it'll do. The only cost is that this list needs to be edited if we add or drop categories, but since it will be in a configuration file, this won't be a hassle. In that case, here's what the category list will be:
Spoiler
Accessories without indiviudal scans can be dealt with individually; I have Template:NoScans for that... This is also a proposal for the system variations pages: put them all in a category like Category:Mega Drive systems, put the system variation name in the region= field (yes this is clumsier but avoids needing to have multiple entries or one category), and then it would be covered too. I can also edit this list to cover tings like our video scans...

This leaves a number of scanboxes (such as the ones for the Football Manager titles) that are marked PC/Mac; not sure how to handle those apart from splitting nad having duplicates :/ Any other ideas? Also should the two games for PC Engine Super CD-ROM² games (Gain Ground SX and Bonanza Bros.) have the scanbox say (and thus be listed as) PC Engine CD-ROM² games?
This post has been edited by Andlabs: 31 March 2013 - 01:30 AM

#35 User is offline Scarred Sun 

Posted 31 March 2013 - 09:54 AM

  • Crushed by a single sunbeam
  • Posts: 3380
  • Joined: 06-February 05
  • Gender:Female
  • Location:San Francisco, CA
  • Project:Conquering the games industry
  • Wiki edits:36,091
Reminder of my request for a manual column.

#36 User is offline Andlabs 

Posted 31 March 2013 - 10:25 AM

  • 「いっきまーす」
  • Posts: 2081
  • Joined: 11-July 08
  • Gender:Male
  • Project:Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
  • Wiki edits:7,061
Yes, this is all leading up to the manual column. I want to get this polished and fast before breaking it more =P
This post has been edited by Andlabs: 31 March 2013 - 10:28 AM

#37 User is offline Andlabs 

Posted 01 April 2013 - 03:49 AM

  • 「いっきまーす」
  • Posts: 2081
  • Joined: 11-July 08
  • Gender:Male
  • Project:Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
  • Wiki edits:7,061
Well I went ahead and made the switch on the scan server, and everything's MUCH faster now :) The front page takes between 1 and 3 seconds to load, whereas it used to take between 4 and 6. The only cost was that I had to split the Mega Anser and Miracle Piano pages into one for the accessory and one for the software because the system can't deal with a page being in both (and that would require a fair amount of change). I also changed it to use one database connection per page request rather than one globally, so there shouldn't be issues should the MySQL server drop and come back.

I'll be polishing the system off either all day tomorrow or over the next few days (depending on how long it takes) and at the end I'll add tracking manual scans to the mix.

Do you want to go with my proposal for dealing with consoles themselves? Is there anything I am missing from these categories? Did any games or categories disappear? Thanks.
This post has been edited by Andlabs: 01 April 2013 - 04:03 AM

#38 User is offline Black Squirrel 

Posted 01 April 2013 - 05:52 AM

  • 2 warps to Neptune
  • Posts: 1941
  • Joined: 27-December 03
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Northumberland, England
  • Project:Blog Squirrel
  • Wiki edits:20,569
answers

- there aren't any 32X/CD 32X accessories. Or any Mega CD 32X consoles in boxes because that would make too much sense
- copera should be merged with Pico
- Pico accessories do exist

also might I suggest different tables for accessories/consoles for the sake of readibility

#39 User is offline Andlabs 

Posted 01 April 2013 - 02:00 PM

  • 「いっきまーす」
  • Posts: 2081
  • Joined: 11-July 08
  • Gender:Male
  • Project:Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
  • Wiki edits:7,061
Thanks. It turns out all the Copera games are already listed under Pico, so that settles that. As for splitting by type, I'll see what I can do after settling everything else.
  • 3 Pages +
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
    Locked
    Locked Forum

1 User(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 1 guests, 0 anonymous users