ES Filter by Genre, Publisher/Developer, Players and Rating

Dochartaigh

How about the ability to Star or Favorite games? That was what a LOT of us have been asking for off and on for a while - it would make those LONG (like 1000+) complete game libraries so much easier to navigate through if our most favorite games could be brought to the top of the list (or something like that). I'm currently stuck using folders...

pjft

@Dochartaigh Yeah, I was just answering @Zigurana in that direction. He already did the whole work of adding that metadata.

If you use this, for the time being, you can just filter by 5 star ratings, for instance, but I agree - favorites and kid friendly should be a straight application of this, and as I said, it's fairly easy to implement should the metadata be there.

jdrassa

@pjft I am testing this out on my linux desktop. I pulled the latest source from your github repository and built it myself. I haven't had a chance to dig in to find the cause, but if I pick a set of filters that would result in no games available, I get a core dump.

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::out_of_range'
  what():  vector::_M_range_check: __n (which is 0) >= this->size() (which is 0)
Aborted (core dumped)

pjft

@jdrassa wonderful :)

Thanks for looking into this.

That's interesting, as that exact behavior should be... Explicitly... Coded... For. Hmm.

Unless it just got busted when I refactored the code to move the filtering to FileData!

That may be the case.

I'll try it out later and dig into it. I don't recall testing whether an empty selection still worked after I did the last change.

Thanks! I'll get back to you, no need to waste time tracking it down - unless you do have a proper way to do debugging other than via logs, which is how I'm doing it. If that's the case, if you can track down the exact line where it's crashing it's easier for me, but it still shouldn't be a big deal for me to track down otherwise.

Happy Saturday!

daeks

@pjft said in ES Filter by Genre, Publisher/Developer, Players and Rating:

@Dochartaigh Yeah, I was just answering @Zigurana in that direction. He already did the whole work of adding that metadata.

If you use this, for the time being, you can just filter by 5 star ratings, for instance, but I agree - favorites and kid friendly should be a straight application of this, and as I said, it's fairly easy to implement should the metadata be there.

it would be cool if there is also some visual indication in the gamelist already as well (recalbox has a star in front of the game name if it's a favorite + moved to the top of the list)

pjft

@jdrassa Of course, that was the case. Had left some logic in the view that should have moved to FileData.

Should be sorted now - apologies for the trouble, and thank you for catching it!

If you pull the code now it should work now.

@daeks Different feature request :) We don't have favorites yet, but that's a good idea if/when it ends up being implemented, should it be easy.

Sorting shouldn't be hard - the visual component I imagine will need to be done at a theme level. That does not exist at the moment.

Thanks both!

pjft

@jdrassa FYI, there's a leftover problem from the refactoring where in some occasions the gamelist will reset to the first on the list.

I'll look into it today.

EDIT: and it's fixed now. Should be all sorted! Thanks for testing.

mattrixk

Hey @pjft, I know this is an older thread, but I have a question that relates to how the filtering works:

If I select 2 options, eg Racing and Shooting, will that return all games with the Racing genre and all games with the Shooting genre? Or will it return just the games with both the Racing and Shooting genres?

Is it possible to choose how the filtering works? Inclusive or Exclusive? Broad or Explicit? I don't know the best way to phrase it.

pjft

@mattrixk Hi!

Not at all, glad someone is happy to use this :)

The filtering is:

UNION/JOIN in the same <category>
INTERSECT across different <categories>

So, what this means is:

If you select two different genres, it will show games that match either genre 1 or 2 (as a game can't have more than one genres, so doing it otherwise would always return none :) ).
If you select two categories (say, genre and players), it will intersect both. So, if you select:
- Developer: Capcom, SNK
- Genre: Fighting
- Players: 2
- Rating: 4, 5

It will filter for Capcom or SNK fighting games for 2 players which have ratings of 4 starts or above.

I hope this helps. I wouldn't think of making this more complex unless there is a clear need/use case for it. The use case here is "you're looking for something that matches a criteria", rather than "everything that matches at least one of the parameters".

But do let me know how it goes!

mattrixk

@pjft said

as a game can't have more than one genres

Uhh... so I can't have a gamelist that looks like this:

<game id="goldnaxe">
  <path>./goldnaxe.zip</path>
  <name>Golden Axe</name>
  <desc>Golden Axe is a sideways scrolling beat-em-up set in a traditional fantasy world.</desc>
  <image>./media-detailed/goldnaxe-detailed.png</image>
  <genre>Brawler, Hack-Slash, RPG, 2.5D, Golden-Axe</genre>
  <players>2</players>
</game>

So I can then filter by all Brawlers, or by all Hack-Slash games, or all 2.5D games?

I've spent most of my free time doing that to my Genre tags so I can easily filter exactly what I want. I hope I haven't been wasting my time.

pjft

@mattrixk Huh.

I'm not really sure that's how these tags are meant to work, but in this case what that'll result will be in an entry for "Brawler, Hack-Slash, RPG, 2.5D, Golden-Axe" :l

The genres usually come from the scraper and are a single entry. It is "genre", not "genres" :/

At least for now that will now work as you expect it to.

Sorry for that.

mattrixk

@pjft Darn. Oh well, at least I don't have to do my whole collection that way (it would have taken a while). Cheers for letting me know. I'll have to have a play with it when I get the chance.

HurricaneFan

@mattrixk If your gamelist has the data saved, I'd imagine you could probably have a script turn those genres into a custom collection. So all your 2.5D games would get its own collection, Brawler would be a collection, etc. This isn't a filter, but it would give you just the games you wanted per collection.

mattrixk

@hurricanefan: I wouldn't have a clue how to make a script to do that. So far I've only made the change to a couple of systems. The plan was to then use those new genres to add a only a couple of custom collections, I didn't want too many.

Because I used a couple of different scrapers, and they all have their own Genre names (eg: Platform and Platformer), I need to clean up the Genres anyway. I figured I'd come up with my own Genre names. Here's the list I've come up with if anyone is curious:

Genre:
  Racing
    Racing-Car
    Racing-Kart
    Racing-Bike
    Racing-Boat
    Racing-Plane
    Racing-OffRoad
    Racing-Toy
    Racing-Demolition
    Racing-Hover
    Racing-Snow
  Driving
  Vehicular-Combat
  Flight-Sim
  Space-Sim
  Tank
  Mech
  Shooter
    Shooter-Rail
    Shooter-LightGun
    Shooter-Flight
    Shooter-Tunnel
  Action
  Adventure
    Point-Click
  Action-Adventure
  Action-RPG
    Hack-Slash
    Run-Gun
  RPG
  Platformer
    Platformer-3D
  Brawler (Beat 'Em Up)
  Fighter
    Fighter-2D
    Fighter-3D
  Sports
    Sports-Snow
    Sports-Skate
    Sports-Bike
    Sports-Blade
    Sports-Wrestle
    Sports-Baseball
    Sports-Soccer
    Sports-Tennis
    Sports-Football
    Sports-Basketball
  Stunts
  Puzzle
  RTS
  Strategy
  Music
  Rhythm
  Management-Sim
  Stealth
  Turn-Based
  Maze
  Shmup
    Shmup-Vert
    Shmup-Horz

View:
  1st-Person
  3rd-Person
  Isometric
  Side-Scroller
  Top-Down
  Birds-Eye
  2.5D

Theme:
  Horror
  SciFi
  Fantasy
  Post-Apocalyptic
  Medieval

Age:
  Kids
  Adult

Collection:
  Alien
  Predator
  AvP
  Doom
  Street-Fighter
  Marvel
  X-Men
  Avengers
  Hulk
  FPS
  Rampage
  MegaMan
  SuperHero
  Batman
  Spiderman
  Superman
  DC
  Spawn
  Star-Wars
  Tetris
  Worms
  Mortal-Kombat
  LEGO
  Jurassic-Park
  Dinosaurs
  Punisher
  Pong
  DnD
  Donkey-Kong
  Cartoon
  Golden-Axe

Sure, if what I wanted to do worked, it would have made for a very large Genre Filter list, but that's a small price for being able to search for exactly what I wanted.

HurricaneFan

@mattrixk Wow, that is a long list. :)

mattrixk

@hurricanefan Heh, yeah... It just kind of grew. It's not a complete list, as I'm sure the "Collection" section will continue to grow as I go through more of my Gamelists.