TheGamesDB.net - Open Video Game Database (wiki-based, register and contribute)

malte - Some level of sleeping between requests would be most helpful. I haven't performed any load testing, so I can't say how much load the server can take. We can also look at offering a semi-static xml file with all the games for each platform for a one time mass download. I can schedule a job to refresh the files on a nightly basis.

I also wanted to let you know that there might be an xml structure change because of the multi-language request. The problem that I am facing is that each release is a separate game record. What that means is if someone adds a second or third language to a European release of game, it would not (automatically) be added to the US release of that game. The same goes for text updates. I'm kicking around the idea of consolidating multiple regional releases of the same game into one parent record and then breaking out regional differences in child records. This would only apply to the same game on a single platform released across different regions. The data would look something like this:

Top Level: Game Title (multi-language), Short Description (multi-language), Long Description (multi-language), Platform, Publisher, Genre, Players, Image, Fanart

Regional Level: Game Title, Region, Rating, Release Date, Original Price, Box Art

As for the XML, there would be an additional <Releases></Releases> node that would contain the regional level information listed above. Some of the elements from the current <Game></Game> node would move down into there.

This has been the only way I can figure out to share multi-lang data between games. I might have to go this route depending on how the CRC value question is answered. What do you all think?

Flomaster - Finally! I've been chasing the bug for a while. I think I know what the issue is but it might take me a bit to fix it. You should only get bug while sorting or moving through search result pages.

Quote:We can also look at offering a semi-static xml file with all the games for each platform for a one time mass download. I can schedule a job to refresh the files on a nightly basis.

Would be good to have both options. On small systems like xbox it may be too much to download a 10MB file and keep it in memory.

Quote:I also wanted to let you know that there might be an xml structure change because of the multi-language request.

No problem. I can configure the parser, so I hope that I can reflect your changes on the fly.

jas8340 Wrote:Here's another question about CRC values: do the crc values on your site only pertain to the regional release of that game? I know that some games have multiple values because of different versions.

The problem that I'm running into is that each regional release of a game is a separate entity. So right now all the crc values that I am importing are associated with a specific regional release. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't associating the crc value for the European release to the US release.

The crc values are collected from various Rom collection sets (TOSEC, NO-INTRO etc). For alot of the systems we have a REGION field that tells what region the game in our database comes from. So a game with 2 versions will entail two entries in our system, each with its own crc value.

So same as you've setup, we have each game region/version as a seperate entity.

Thanks for adding the Players field

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'll still working on all the changes.

I have done some tests against your API now and it works all well. Maybe we could try it without a sleep at the beginning? I need around 1 second for parsing your description and storing the content to database. I hope this will be enough time for your server. All in all it took 63 seconds to get 32 games (including download of one image per game). But we could do further load tests if you like.

Are you planning to add more images (or even videos) in the future?

malte, I think that's fine to start out with. We can adjust later if need be. And yes, I'm planning on adding more images first and then videos later.

Are you looking for only original box art for the games or alternative covers as well? (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=82214)

Hey guys, here are some game case templates someone might want to use. I did not make these, but I got permission to post them here for general use. Have fun!

http://download832.mediafire.com/k4hk8re...+Cases.rar

I think I found a bug in your API: Every time when I ask for a crc value that you don't have in your DB, I get the info of the game 3-D Tetris