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mattrixk

@madmodder123 There are some very smart and talented developers around here that will soon be working towards a fix for this problem and many others. Thread here.

Basically, they want to redesign how the metadata is structured, possibly even moving to a database system. Then they can add all sorts of fancy filtering and sorting options, including displaying only 2-player games across all systems, or only Racing games, or only your favourites, etc. I'm very excited.

madmodder123

@mattrixk That was a quick reply Thanks lol.
Cool, I hope they will have a good system for converting the xml files into the new database system.
I have put a lot of work into these XML files, even going as far as writing scripts to edit entries haha, I am not too worried :)

mattrixk

@madmodder123 I think they were planning on making it backwards compatible (or something) so you could still use XML files, or make it so changing the XML would update the database. I may have that completely wrong as I don't really understand that side of things. I just kept throwing ideas at them in the hopes that they would find something useful.

MWGemini

@mattrixk The idea would be to have a program to pull the data out of the current XML format and insert it into the new database format. It's actually not a very difficult task, but it requires the rest of the infrastructure to be in place and well tested first (which will take some time to do).

mattrixk

@MWGemini Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. I don't know much about what you're doing, or how to do it, and I can only really test on PC, but I'd like to help if I can.

MWGemini

@mattrixk Invent a time machine so I have more hours in the day :). Or just clone @fieldofcows, since he's the one doing all the hard work of implementing new features :).

fieldofcows

@MWGemini Haha! We could all do with more time. I have started looking at this again recently but video preview is taking what few spares I have at the moment.

mattrixk

@fieldofcows on a slightly related note, "Spares" was a great book by Michael Marshall Smith that was turned into the mediocre movie "The Island".

MWGemini

@fieldofcows Yeah, work has been keeping me pretty busy lately as well. I still need to do more testing on your video stuff, hopefully will get a few hours later this week to do that (and will update your other thread when I do). If there's anything specific you want me to go through, just let me know and I'll add it to the list.

mediamogul

@mattrixk said in Sort by players:

on a slightly related note, "Spares" was a great book by Michael Marshall Smith that was turned into the mediocre movie "The Island".

Actually, Steven Spielberg's option to produce 'Spares' expired, so DreamWorks decided to base 'The Island' on a previous film from 1979 called 'Parts: The Clonus Horror'. The stories are very similar and Michael Marshall Smith, who wrote 'Spares' in 1996 did consider perusing legal action against DreamWorks, but ultimately decided against it. At the time he claimed the fight wasn't worthwhile, but it's likely he also felt that publicly comparing his own story to that of an existing work that was nearly identical was not in his best interest. No matter who's telling it though, it really is one of the best sci-fi cloning stories ever conceived, right alongside 'The Boys from Brazil'.

mattrixk

@mediamogul Huh, I didn't know that. It's really interesting how these things work. I need to read Spares again. Have you read "Only Forward", also by Smith? It's the book that introduced me to the concept that weird can be good... very good.

mediamogul

@mattrixk said in Sort by players:

Have you read "Only Forward", also by Smith?

It's been on my list for a while now.

It's the book that introduced me to the concept that weird can be good... very good.

That's the kind of personal description that really piques my interest. I look forward to checking it out. Maybe I'll give it a read sometime this summer.