Metadata Improvements in EmulationStation

Nismo

@fieldofcows I know but I do not want to pressure you more, it was just an opinion... XD.

mattrixk

This sounds great @fieldofcows.

I have some questions/suggestions:

Will this give us a search option based on filters?
Will we be able to use multiple filters (favourites | beat 'em up)?
Will it list out all games that fit those filters regardless of system, or only the games of the selected system?
Will we be able to create our own filters?
Will we be able to use genres as pre-set filters, or will we have to create them ourselves?

Also, I'd love to be able to add metadata and meta images to ROM folders.

I just saw your second post about how to view/search the filters. It's got me thinking a bit:

Would it be possible to add metadata to systems the same way we do with ROMs? If we could add info about the various systems (description, release date, number of games, performance stats, etc) it would be some cool info that themers could use. You could also add images (console, logo, controller, etc) that themers could use as backup images if they don't want to use their own.
Maybe pressing Up on the System View will take you to a search bar with an onscreen keyboard to type in the search terms, maybe with a list of commonly used filters down the side
Maybe pressing Down on the System View will display all of the created filters in boxes (or something, maybe as a list of checkboxes) and you can select as many of them as you want, then hit an "okay" button down the bottom and it lists out every game that fills those filters.

Question: If you were on SNES in the System View and went into one of the Search Views (up or down or whatever), does it display only the list of games from that system, or could you make it display any game that fit the selected filters?

We could potentially end up with lots of filters, so it could quickly become unwieldy. We could potentially sort the filters into categories, such as a Genre category, System category, Age/Year category. That could make filtering a bit easier. We could search all Systems for Beat 'Em Ups between 1990 and 2010 with relative ease.

Custom Filter Bundles
Could we potentially create our own filters by bundling a couple of filters together? I have a few favourite genres and systems, so could I bundle the SNES and MegaDrive System filters with the Racing, Fighter and Beat 'Em Up Genre filters, and call it the "Old School Favourites" filter?

Sorting and Display Output
I'd also like to see an overhaul of the Sorting options (mainly on the Detailed View, but could also be used for the Search Results View). I'm not sure if what you're doing will encompass this or not, but it can't hurt to mention it.

I want to be able to sort by Genre, or by System, or by Year.

What I really want is a two-tier sorting ability. eg: If I want to sort by Genre, then by Year, it will display all the Action games by the year of release, then all the Fighting games by year of release, then all the Racing games by year of release. This might be a pipe dream and a lot of work, but I think it would be amazing.

My brain is buzzing about how this could all work, but unfortunately I don't know the innards of the system so I can't actually help to make it real. All I can do is put ideas out there and hope others like them and that they aren't too hard to implement.

I think I'm going to write up a document, a design proposal even...

Zigurana

First of all, I would like to thank @fieldofcows, @mattrixk and @Nismo for their careful considerations, I am really digging the level of this conversation!

Sketching a horizon

I would like to paint a picture of what I imagine a future handling of metadata would look like. At this point, I'm not really concerning myself with the implementation aspects, just the features and how they should be presented towards end-users.
When they are on a Nintendo spree, users should be able to find 1) all Super Mario Brother installations over all systems, 2) all games related to the Mario character (i.e. Dr. Mario), 3) find spin-off or equivalent games on other consoles (i.e. Sonic on Sega).
When more concerned about the best games of certain era, the user should be able to view the best games across all systems, grouped by decade, or maybe even console generation era.
In essence, I would like the front-end to be suggesting ever more games to play, offering suggestions to find new gems in the rich treasure-trove that is RetroGaming.

When we break the system barrier, that is, allow ES to list games from any system, the amount of items to show quickly becomes too large to meaningfully display as a single list. This is especially true for the game-hoarders under us. This is why filtering this data is essential to this discussion, as @mattrixk already indicated.

Conceptually, I imagine there are two ways to reduce the total number of items, either by selecting relatively many items non-specifically (categorization), or by selecting relatively few items specifically (searching). These two approaches hint at two workflows:

Categorize

Now we have only one type of game category: the system or console it was created for. With the new system in place, I imagine we can easily add the other existing metadata items to the list of category types. That would give us the following list:

System
Year / decade / era
Number of players
Genre
Rating (community based, not personal)
Developer
Publisher
number of plays
time since last play

Apart from populating the main set of results in a gamelistview, a second 'quick'-filter could be allowed, enabling users to add an additional filter onto the current selection. Eg: while in a list of platform-only games, show only 2 player games.

I think of these categories as aspects of games that virtually no one will disagree on, and that is readily scraped from existing game databases.

Search

Another type of metadata is more personal, or rather, not so easily scraped. These are the tags that users set themselves, such as 'kid-friendly' , 'favorite', 'zelda-related', 'cool-to-play-when-drunk', 'party game'. In principle, these can be considered free-text, and selecting a tag will basically perform a search across all systems.
I believe this is largely complementary to the earlier described system of categories, and both should be allowed simultaneously.

Sorting

Sorting can be done either on

name (alphabetical)
times played (numerical)
time since last play (time-numerical)
rating (numerical)

I would not allow combinations of sorting methods (grouping within the sorting method)

Other considerations

What I would like to prevent, is to make the new solution too much focused on flexibility and customizability, and too little about usability. It is easy for us to keep on adding features, but we should consider ease-of-use as well.
Therefore, rather than allowing full flexibility in setting up filters from within ES, I would suggest to work with external resource files to allow users to define their own filters, and their order in the list etc. We should come up with a reasonable and small list of the most probable filter types, and allow the creation of new ones by tinkerers.

Another issue, all of the above should be doable without having to break out a keyboard. Maybe this is impossible, and we need some kind of smartphone-app to maintain things like user defined metadata-tags.

Zigurana

@mattrixk said in Metadata Improvements in EmulationStation:

I think I'm going to write up a document, a design proposal even...

Maybe a google document we can all add to?

herb_fargus

@Zigurana I know @jacobfk20 had done some Integrations with an on screen keyboard...

mattrixk

@Zigurana The only thing I can think to add to your list is the ability to Sort by System. If I have a list of Mario related games, I'd like to be able to view them grouped into their respective systems, or even just by release date, so you can see them evolve.

I suppose the question then becomes how do you sort the systems? By Name or by Age? I think sorting them by Age with older systems first would be the most useful/used, but would people want the option to choose Alphabetical?

Side note: I started working on a MarkDown document on stackedit.io that I have linked to my google drive. I'm not sure how that would go with sharing, but I'll look into it once I've done some more work on the doc.

fieldofcows

Thanks all for your comments so far. I wasn't expecting so much detail!

I'm just playing around with integrating the new metadata functionality into ES replacing the existing code just to see what problems I am going to be facing and I've run into the first difficulty - folders.

So, I'm just going to ask the question. Who is using folders to organise their roms? Would you miss this feature if it was removed but replaced with a more comprehensive set of filters?

I don't mind implementing folder support but it adds complication and may not be required if we have better filtering/sorting.

Nismo

@fieldofcows For me it's ok without folders, but just my opinion.

mattrixk

@fieldofcows I've been wanting to use folders to sort games into favourites, genres, 2-player games, etc, but it's a big task and I haven't had the time/motivation to do it (and I already use child-friendly ES for favourites).

I'm also sad that I can't add any metadata to folders to give them special images and descriptions and such.

So for me, I'm fine without folders, because the new filter/sort options should hopefully do everything I would want folders to do, and do them better.

Side note: I mentioned above about 'custom filter bundles' and it got me thinking; would it be possible to populate our own carousel? Instead of a carousel of just Systems, could we maybe choose what filters to show on the carousel? Like a quicklist of all the best filters? Then we could have select Systems, along with our most used other filters (like the "favourites" filter, the "3d racing - racing|psx|3do" bundle filter etc).

Just a thought anyway.

Zigurana

@fieldofcows Personally, I've never used it, but it was one of those things that came back to haunt me when I released Kid-modes for ES. This is just to say that others are using it currently, not sure what for other than creating more gategories besides systems.

ebtalk

I don't use folders but have contemplated using them for arcade. With this, I would be totally ok without folders.

One thing I would add is to be careful on how much ability of customization you enable for the end user. In my field of work with some software implementations, the more fields and abilities you give to the end user, the more problems it creates. Just my two cents though.

herb_fargus

@Zigurana I don't really use folders but there are some cases like scummvm or dos where they have multiple game files so I keep them in folders to keep them organised. That may be a use case that isn't addressed by the filters.

Zigurana

@herb_fargus said in Metadata Improvements in EmulationStation:

@Zigurana I don't really use folders but there are some cases like scummvm or dos where they have multiple game files so I keep them in folders to keep them organised. That may be a use case that isn't addressed by the filters.

True, but is there not a shell script placed in the parent directory that is used to launch the game? Maybe, the subdirectories can effectively be ignored?

mattrixk

@fieldofcows I've been thinking about filters and forgot about something I've been wanting. Is it possible to add more images to the ROM metadata? I've been hearing about marquees, and obviously video previews, so could we add other fields for fan-art, screenshots, box-art and the like? I know the Pi isn't too powerful so you don't want to go too overboard with the images, but I'd like to have the option there.

I've been using UXS to make some nice combo images involving screenshot, box-art and game logo, but I can't really do one of the things I really want to do, which is the big fan-art in the background. I can use UXS to make a small image (640x360) that will scale up to full screen on the Pi. I don't mind if the large fan-art gets blurry because it's behind a "screen" anyway, but when the box-art and screenshot scale up, the blurriness is unacceptable.

I can still make the theme I want within ES if I use UXS to put the screenshot, box-art and logo together into a single image, then use that as the scraped image, but it will be missing the large fan-art background.

Even if we could just add the option for a second image, I can do the rest myself.

mediamogul

@fieldofcows said in Metadata Improvements in EmulationStation:

Who is using folders to organise their roms?

I use folders for several different purposes and I'd genuinely hate to see them eliminated. However, if they are going to cause a lot of difficulty moving forward, I guess I could find alternative methods to adapt.

Would you miss this feature if it was removed but replaced with a more comprehensive set of filters?

My main concern is that I keep categorized folders of launch scripts in the RetroPie menu to accomplish different tasks, such as system backup, as well as dozens of controller key-mappings organized by system. Would the new set of filters you mention be able to replace this type of use case scenario?

fieldofcows

@mediamogul said in Metadata Improvements in EmulationStation:

Would the new set of filters you mention be able to replace this type of use case scenario?

Maybe not.

I spent some time last night looking at how to build folder support into my metadata model and I think I've cracked it so it looks like folders should be back on the feature list.

mediamogul

@fieldofcows

That's fantastic! I really appreciate all of the time you've put into all this. Emulation Station is really on the move and I look forward to seeing it all come together.

Zigurana

@fieldofcows said in Metadata Improvements in EmulationStation:

...
I had a look at the 'sqlite' changes made (I think) by Aloshi and decided I wanted to go a stage further so I'm currently busy implementing a new set of C++ classes that manage the game list and metadata using sqlite over multiple tables. I'm not a database software engineer so it may not be perfect but should hopefully be an improvement over what's there now.

I can see a number of benefits once this is working:

Very fast startup and shutdown of ES

Metadata can be managed separately to the installed game list meaning (for example) the metadata can be shared and distributed without a romset but when roms are available the metadata is already there

Metadata fields can be added or removed without recompiling ES

Tags will be supported meaning ES can filter based on tags (like favourites or 'kid friendly' for example)

...
I'm trying not to making it a 'breaking' change in that the new version should be able to read the current gamelist.xml files and populate the database automatically.

Ok, maybe I am just in a negative mood, but please help me reason through this here: With the step to a fully querieable SQLite database, are you/we moving away from XML files altogether?
That would mean we are also moving away from a lot of supporting scripts and tools, from the venerable Sselph scraper, to the new and flashy UXS tool. Also, the Big Benefit of XML is that the data is user readable and editable. It would be very nice if we can somehow retain that aspect of the community-effort.

#1 was a real issue but is it still? PR#78 was merged in recently, and should mostly solve the issue of long saving times (loading not so much propably). #4 is an important additional feature, I agree, but SQL is not needed for it. #2 and #3 are nice to have features, but their gain lie mostly in the future, when other aspects (i.e. a framework for sharing metadata packages, and some interface to change and populate the metadata) are put in place.

And really, do we need SQLite for that? Once the metadata is in memory, it doesn't really matter one way or the other, or does it?This is a real question of which i do not know the answer.
There have been many discussions on this before:

here at the RetroPie-repo,
here at Herdingers fork, and some more, see also their design document, for inspiration.

and of course here on the forum:

pro DB by @SimonBelmont and
anti-DB by @Arcuza

I guess the answer really comes down to what the metric is you are trying to improve. If it is performance, maybe we should start with some profiling to see if the loading can be just as easily sped up as the the saving apparently could (see the recent PR). Its clear that things can be improved, but I rather do it in a way that keeps the existing XML based tooling.

Again, I am really not trying to be a downer, it's just that we should be doing things for the right reasons, and I'm not seeing those at the moment.

sselph

These types of questions should be answered. Adding complexity to maintaining the project should have measurable benefits.

@Zigurana said in Metadata Improvements in EmulationStation:

With the step to a fully querieable SQLite database, are you/we moving away from XML files altogether?

In the original sqlite branch there was code to detect a new xml on boot and import it. It also would be fairly trivial to write an importer/exporter for the current XML format, which would be good when migrating to a new system.

That would mean we are also moving away from a lot of supporting scripts and tools, from the venerable Sselph scraper, to the new and flashy UXS tool. Also, the Big Benefit of XML is that the data is user readable and editable.

I could write to sqlite but it is a little more of a pain since using the C library makes it difficult to cross-compile. The ability for a human to edit xml is questionable. Simple things are okay but I've helped lots of people who have mangled their xml by opening it in windows. I also wrote a neat web based metadata editor a long time ago but it was pending the sql update.

#2 and #3 are nice to have features, but their gain lie mostly in the future

I actually don't know if #2 is very feasible. It might be for MAME but for console games unless you use my renamer or my hash algorithms, it would make it hard to have an entry in a DB waiting for the file to appear.

fieldofcows

@Zigurana - the question should absolutely be asked as to whether this is the right approach. Believe me I've asked myself the same thing many times over the last few days looking at how much time this is taking me.

At the end of the day, it's not my decision as to whether this should be implemented in any 'official' branch or not. I am, after all, doing this as a hobby and would not be offended if it is decided that this is the wrong approach. All I can do is provide the facts, code and test results and leave it up to others to decide. Some of the 'facts' that I've found so far though:

I have already implemented the parser from both gamelist.xml and scanning the ROMS directory exactly as non sqlite ES did. This means that we
could if we wanted to still use this as the only persistent game/metadata source, recreating the database of every start (it doesn't take long). The sqlite database is then only used as an internal query engine.
The whole system/game view architecture is based on the layout of the configuration folders and XML files. This needed large changes in order to support some of the filtering/queries I plan to implement. It is simpler for me to understand my new code than try to massage the old code when changing this. I think implementing #4 with the current architecture would be hard.
It would be very easy to write a standalone import/export tool to convert from gamelist.xml to sqlite. I can certainly put this together as part of this work
The tag/filtering changes were always going to be large regardless of whether we use sqlite or XML. I wanted to put some unit testing into the code in order to reduce the risk of introducing bugs but the existing code does not lend itself to unit testing without a major rewrite so I used the opportunity to switch to sqlite.

I'm sure there are more but it's getting late and my brain is getting fuzzy.