Games Library (Game & Emulator database + launcher) development project, help wanted!

Awen Wrote:Speaking python integration, beyond info scraping, is there anything else scripting could be used to ? (without coding another freevo )

My first thought is downloading roms

Naughty boy

There are of course some (public domain) legal ROMS and some semi (gray-zone) legal ROMS available
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROM_image#Legal_status
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_com...s_freeware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fa...nd_sequels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freeware_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Expiration

Quote:All copyrights and patents have always had a finite term, though the terms for copyrights and patents differ. When terms expire, the work or invention is released into public domain. In most countries, the term for patents is 20 years. A trademark registration may be renewed and remain in force indefinitely provided the trademark is used, but could otherwise become generic.

Hi folks,

Do you know Scrum (Scrum : the graph picture is quite interesting) ?

The idea is to build a very detailed feature list concerning Games DB: our 'product backlog'. And after that, performing monthly 'sprints' (with volunteers as 'pigs', gamester and you, smart forum users, as scrum 'chickens' ): every months, we decide of what we want (we're able) to develop, aka 'sprint backlog' for 30 days of coding, ended with a product release.

Right now i'm writing the almighty 'Games Library Product Backlog' using wiki: i'd like it the most detailed, please consider throwing all of your ideas at it. Use this forum to synthesize and/or give references

Thank you for your time.

Awen

I would once again like to strongly suggest that non-developers still only post (list) their ideas to the threads in the existing feature suggestion forum instead:
http://forum.xbmc.org/tags.php?tag=games+library

That way the developers who will be doing the actual coding can read those forum threads to then 'cherry' pick the best ideas that they like and think that they would like to implement and add those themselves to the wiki article, (instead of the end-users themselves adding their ideas directly to the wiki).

Good idea?

As a non-coder/random guy on the street who thinks this whole idea is amazing and wishes the best to everyone involved, I'd like to ask a few questions, if I may. Naturally, it's pretty early in development, so if there are no answers, feel free to ignore the questions.

First, is the goal of this code to start only emu games (such as MAME, old NES, etc.) in which a separate program runs a rom, or when development evolves in .2 and .3 will there be the eventual goal of executing modern computer games such as Half-Life 2, Crysis, etc.?

Second, how integrated into xbmc is this process ever likely to become? For example, XBMC has its dedicated video player. Clearly, that's an example of complete integration. A middle ground would be an integration in which XBMC shipped with a cadre of emulators and automatically picked the proper emulator for the specific game. A relatively unintegrated solution would involve each user downloading and installing his own emulators of choice and telling XBMC where those emulators were.

A further middle-ground option would be to have XBMC recommend system emulators or give the option of downloading from within the XBMC interface, possibly during the scraping phase.

I would assume an evolutionary process would entail a gradual tightening of integration. The initial code might only allow a user to pick his emulator or .exe file (in windows). I don't anticipate XBMC ever shipping with built-in emulators, so I imagine the final stage would involve the downloading of the appropriate emulator from within the interface during the scraping phase.

Thoughts?

natethomas,

At this point (and within my own plans), we're going to be supporting emulators. I don't think we'll have anything that will offer emulators for your ROMs for download. Rather, the structure I think we're heading for is:

1) You have your own files (roms, exe's, etc) that can be scraped by extension.
2) You associate that extension with a specific action (i.e. launch exe's from the native system/shell; .nes files launch with a Nintendo emulator -- but you'll have to specify the emulator)
3) You open up your game library and look at the various games, etc; you get a nice interface that shows some information about the game. You confirm to play/select this game, and it loads.

I've got an Xbox with XBMC running -- ideally, I want to be able to select "Applications" and it pulls up information on the ROMs I legally own (ROMs/EMUs can be tricky business because some are illegal, etc; that's why we can't build anything in about offering to download you an emulator). I can select the system, etc, and I can choose to play them without having to load the emulator.

Of course, there'll probably need to be some work on my side to get emulators that work on the Xbox with a kind of parameter-passing formula.

But essentially, I think it's going to be heavily dependent on scrapers, and have a lot of input on the user's end to get it configured from the get-go.

Hope that helps. I think that's more or less what Awen is going for as well -- I'm checking out the code fairly soon and going to try to compile.

natethomas Wrote:Second, how integrated into xbmc is this process ever likely to become? For example, XBMC has its dedicated video player. Clearly, that's an example of complete integration. A middle ground would be an integration in which XBMC shipped with a cadre of emulators and automatically picked the proper emulator for the specific game. A relatively unintegrated solution would involve each user downloading and installing his own emulators of choice and telling XBMC where those emulators were.

Even simply offering to download emulators during scraping doesn't make much sense to me because either

1.) You already have an emulator and roms and don't need to download anything

OR

2.) You don't have an emulator yet, but also don't have any roms which defeats the point of a built-in solution since you're already going to have to go out and find and download stuff anyway before you can use it.

Not many people have folders full of roms sitting around with no emulators to run them.

At best I'd say XBMC could provide links or names of popular/compatible emulators available for different systems if and when you try to access the games section if nothing is already scanned in, which is something that could be easily skinned anyway without addition to XBMC itself.

While you are almost certainly correct, Timdog, in that people who have roms also have emulators, you are forgetting the driving goal of XBMC, which is to make for a near painless application to the end user.

Consider video playback. While it's a given that most people who have mkv's also have a player to use them, XBMC doesn't simply make this assumption and provide a call function where the user sets the external video player. Instead, XBMC provides all the tools necessary. The end user need only bring the media itself.

I acknowledge that this level of integration would probably be too much for the ever changing world of game playing, but the goal behind the model is worth keeping in mind.

Terin answered the question well. Even if XBMC doesn't provide the emulator, for good integration, it'll at least be necessary to identify emulators that can take the parameters submitted by XBMC. At least, for the Xbox. I don't know enough about parameter passing in windows and linux to know if the same functions would be necessary in those systems.

Anyway, I think that's about the extent of my two cents on the topic, and I'm grateful for the info. With that said, don't let me keep you. Making this work is WAY more important than answering my silly questions.

Oh hell yeah! I thought I was the only one wanting/thinking about how to improve the game section of xbmc.

Here are my demands! No just kidding, but seeing as I didn't know people were already working at improving it, I already starting some work myself. On the other end of things though.

I have looked through a lot of already out there gamedb's, but in my opinion most of them are of inferior quality, this in comparison to thetvdb (for tv shows) and for instance the various sources for movie scraping. So here's my suggestion.
A dedicated online db specifically tailored for the needs of the many. Think thetvdb, but for games. Much like thetvdb doesn't offer you the option of downloading a tv show, merely information about it, so would thegamedb (working name) offer a one source solution to everything you might need to know about the games you have. I'm thinking...

- Ratings (PEGI, ESRB, BBFC, OFLC, CERO, USK if it has a rating, it should be possible to scrape it, with transparent .png's to match I thought)
- Posterstyle coverart (already making/have made those anyway)
- Listings of developers, publishers, genre, release dates for different platforms and/or regions
- plot outline, of course.
- for emulated games one could have a flagging system for prefered emulators, which xbmc could use as a reference to locate emulators on HDD (don't know if it's possible)
- etc...

Also much like thetvdb, users could contribute to expand the assets available from thegamedb.

Is this a good idea? I've already started working out a prototype database.. this includes a standardized xml layout, which in turn can easily be translated into an .nfo file. Maybe making that an option for users as well.

The biggest problem I'm seeing so far is that games don't seem to have a unified id tagging system (none that I've found at least.) And I feel that this is something that should be adressed. Sure most of us probably go for naming the game as it should be anyway, and it that case searching based on title would work. But it would be possible to make it a hell of a lot smoother if there was a unified tagging system, maybe even with added parameters for different platforms. (ex. 1234-1 for halo combat evolved on xbox and 1234-2 for halo combat evolved on PC)

Is anyone already making a db?, of so I will gladly contribute anyway I can. In not, well I'll just continue with the work I've done so far.