Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper

Deltax5

you know what my problem is. I notice the 1 file it found was .zip the others where .7zip. for some reason any auto scraper doesn't recognize .7zip. unziped them now it detects them fine. the data base is getting updated right now let you know if it worked.
I got a question. Lets say I made a custom folder for famicom for example. called fc. how do I scrap them proper?

muldjord

@deltax5 You can set the rom input folder manually with '-i' followed by the folder name. Just check the readme or type "Skyscraper --help". :)

Deltax5

ok ill look it up later today can you give me an exampe

incunabula

@deltax5 Maybe you should be a little more polite and patient when asking for anyone's help; doubly so when it's the dev of the application that you want to use. This is not your personal help desk.

Deltax5

I thank everyone who helped me. It was acting weird at first for some reason. Wasn't tring to be rude or anything. im still a noob and really don't know much about coding other then following the instructions.

Deltax5

Alright idk whats going on. The images are fine just the video's don't show up. nosing around in Winscp they actually downloaded. The thing is that it's not playing. It's in the /home/pi/skyscraper/dbs/gamegear/videos/screenscraper. The video's are labled a bunch of gibberish.
Do I have to edit the gamelist.xml or something.
Once again im sorry if I bothered anyone. This is getting annoying for me also.

muldjord

@deltax5 Run: "Skyscraper -p gamegear -s localdb --videos --unattend" and it will work.

Lastly, a couple lessons to take away from this:

When following a howto and a command fails, double check that you wrote the command correctly before asking for help.
If a command still fails, then don't expect the rest of the howto to work. Instead, ask for help from the community, but please remember point 1!
Read the README's thoroughly before asking questions. It's kind of the whole point of a readme, and I spend quite a lot of time writing them. Don't expect me to answer questions explained in the readme's, it's annoying and makes me think that you basically just want me to do the work for you, not putting in the required time to try and understand it yourself.

I don't mind people asking questions, but it is common courtesy to adhere to these simple points.

Ok, so with that said, I am glad you got it to work.

BladeHunter

@deltax5 said in Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper:

you know what my problem is. I notice the 1 file it found was .zip the others where .7zip. for some reason any auto scraper doesn't recognize .7zip.

Because most emulators don't use 7zip so why would anyone need to scrape them? The scraping is done by MD5, SHA1, CRC and name, if you rename a file, the MD5, SHA1 and CRC don't change, this is why we use these bits of information.

On the database side where these are scraped from, someone needs to physically link the bits of information to the game, no one links 7zip files because as I said before, how many emulators actually read a 7zipped file?

Deltax5

@bladehunter it played fine on retro pi. I got my roms in 7z for some reason. Atleast I noticed it and pass it on if someone else has trouble in the future.

kb1ujs

Is there a way to limit what types of resources are scraped? For example, I'm after text resources (descriptions, ratings, etc) but not images.

muldjord

@kb1ujs Videos are off by default (turn on with '--videos'), but images are always scraped and can't be disabled.

AnalogHero

@muldjord Just a small bugreport from what ive learned about videoscreensaver: Skyscrapers gamelist.xml files contain empty video tags looking like this <video />

This is a problem at the moment when using videoscreensavers. Could you make those tags optional somehow?

muldjord

@analoghero Yes, this has been fixed in 2.0.4 which as just been released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper

AnalogHero

@muldjord Thanks alot.

muldjord

Skyscraper 2.0.5 released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper

Added support for 'scummvm' platform in scraping module 'thegamesdb' or 'openretro'.
Now only removes 'the' from searchName if longer than 10 chars.
Now always converts underscores to spaces in search- and compare names.
Added edit distance optimization ('the sequel' will now match 'some game: the sequel' 100%).

Happy scraping! :)

muldjord

A little note on what is going on behind the scenes. I've been looking into creating some sort of GUI for Skyscraper to make it easier to first-time users to get good results. I've had a look at a bunch of sfml and sdl2 based gui frameworks, but not a single one of them are suitable. Believe me, I've been scouring the web for one that fits my requirements, and it's just not gonna happen. They are either too complex, or have too many dependencies to be feasible without making everything unnecessarily complex to install.

So, what I've basically decided to do, is to include a 'script-maker' mode when running Skyscraper. It will present the user with a bunch of questions, such as "What platform do you wish to scrape?" and other relevant stuff. And when all questions have been answered, it will create a script or possibly config file (or both) and ask if you want to run it.

Comments on this approach will be appreciated.

AnalogHero

@muldjord Maybe you can go with a shell script gui like the retropie-setup. Dont know if there is any framework there?

muldjord

@analoghero Yes, I am also considering that. Although I am partial to the "questionnaire" method since it can then be implemented directly in the software as I see fit. Thanks for suggesting it.

bleuge

@muldjord I compiled this in Windows using Cygwin some months ago, but got many problems running it. Do you think it is too much effort to make it run ok in Windows, scrapping is lot of faster and easier that connectin to Pi, etc. Thanks!

About commandline, I'm happy with it, but I know many users will be too complicated, an interactive shell as you suggest it will ok, while a graphical gui is thought and implemented. If we could run this in Windows i'll do a gui myself if it's needed. Regards!

muldjord

@bleuge You can easily cross-compile it for Windows. Just download and install Qt 5 from the official site (open source version). When installing, put a checkmark in the latest mingw32 version, I don't support MSVC++ although it might work, not sure. When it's installed you'll find a Qt specific command prompt in your start menu. From there navigate to the Skyscraper source folder and run:
$ qmake
$ mingw32-make release

That will give you a compiled version in a subfolder called "release". Then you need to copy the needed dll's from the qt5 install folder into the release folder and start an ordinary command prompt there. Then you should be able to run it.

I thiiiink it will create the .skyscraper data folder inside "C:\Users[username]... somewhere". Just keep in mind that there are some minor Linux specific stuff in Skyscraper's "make install" command that will copy relevant files to the .skyscraper folder. So you'd be missing those. But I believe I auto-create empty ones...

So yeah, shouldn't be too hard, but it's not really something I am going to look into myself at this time. Happy hacking! :)