Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper

jakejm79

@muldjord
I do have one other question (I searched the artwork examples, artwork.md, readme.md and wiki and didn't see it addressed). Can I have separate artwork.xmls for different game folders, i.e. can I have one for ../arcade and one for ../arcade/vertical ?

muldjord

@jakejm79 You can have one per platform, but not for subfolders inside platforms. Set them in config.ini under any "[platform]" section you need. For instance:

[amiga]
artworkXml="artwork_amiga.xml"

jakejm79

Thanks, I had seen that. I think what I will do is run skyscraper with just vertical files inside the arcade, then move those out and put the horizontal ones back in after modifying the artwork.xml. I assume skyscraper just appends to the gamelist.xml and wont delete existing entries even if the rom files aren't currently present in the roms folder.

muldjord

@jakejm79 I can't remember, you'd need to just try it. On another note, I have just finished the <scanlines> effect. It will be in 2.9.0 to be released soon. By default it will use a scanline overlay I made myself. But you can also create your own and set it with 'resource="filename.png"'. It's also possible to set the composition method such as overlay, screen, lighten and so on. Just like you can on layers. Lastly, you can set the opacity of the overlay from 0-100 with "opacity=50".

jakejm79

Sounds good I look forward to trying it out. The only issues I see with using an overlay:

If the over lay isn't black/transparent or a mix, then you get scanlines on black portions (I originally used a overlay that had a slight hint of purple/green in it vertically to try and help recreate that full crt effect, but it messed with the black areas).
Does the overlay get cropped or resized to match the screenshot size, if it gets resized then you will run into the problems with them getting distorted. Ideally you'd want to maybe start with a 1920x1080 scanline overlay and just crop a section of it to match the size of the screenshot.

muldjord

@jakejm79 said in Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper:

If the over lay isn't black/transparent or a mix, then you get scanlines on black portions (I originally used a overlay that had a slight hint of purple/green in it vertically to try and help recreate that full crt effect, but it messed with the black areas).

You can use one of several different composition modes that will give you pretty good control over this. I am creating the scanline myself. I will provide 2-3 by default, and you can use your own aswell if you wish.

Does the overlay get cropped or resized to match the screenshot size, if it gets resized then you will run into the problems with them getting distorted. Ideally you'd want to maybe start with a 1920x1080 scanline overlay and just crop a section of it to match the size of the screenshot.

It is not getting resized. But I am considering adding a "scale" attribute to it, so the user can scale it up or down using nearest neighbor scaling. That should avoid the issue with the scanlines disappearing. But it will look best unscaled of course.

Basically the effect gives you almost complete control.

jakejm79

OK sounds like you have it covered. I look forward to trying it out.

movisman

@muldjord

Hey there,

Sorry for the late reply, the last couple of days have been quite busy and have not had much time in front of the PC to continue my build!

I am sure it works fine now, but I will give it a test as soon as I can (should be able to do it later) and clarify it for you.

Cheers!

muldjord

Skyscraper 2.9.0 released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper

Update either from the RetroPie-Setup script or using the update procedure from the Github readme, depending on what version you are using.

Release notes:

MAJOR: Now looks up Amiga lha files in the Amiberry "whdload_db.xml" and retrieves data from "openretro.org" based on the uuid from the xml
Added search based fallback pass for Amiga when game isn't found via uuid
Added "<scanlines>" effect to compositor. Check artwork documentation for more info (Thank you to "jakejm79" for suggesting this)
"mobygames" module now uses https
Fixed bug in "openretro" module where "developer" would potentially scrape wrong under certain circumstances
Improved "description" scraping for "openretro" module
Improved bracket tag handling for Amiga lha files A LOT
Fixed minor pass 2 bug when using search based sources
Added a pass for integer to roman conversion for search based sources (eg. "4" converts to "IV")
"the" matching now uses regular expression for better precision
Added "mame-*" platforms to "mameMap" name load list

This is a big update for the Amiga whdload crowd. The best amiga database around is surely the OpenRetro database. Unfortunately the lha filenames used with whdload gave us a bit of a hard time. This is all a thing of the past now. With the help of HoraceAndTheSpider and Olly, we now have a database which maps pretty much all of the lha files directly to their data inside OpenRetro. And it all works seemlessly. Just pop those lha's in your roms/amiga folder and run "Skyscraper -p amiga -s openretro --refresh" and watch that glorious data stream in.

Lots of other stuff in this release aswell. Some rather big improvements to the filename search based scraping. If a game is called "Game Name 6" and no results are returned, an extra pass will now be tried with "Game Name VI" automatically.

Lastly, a new <scanlines> effect has been added to the compositor. It comes with two default overlays you can use. But it's also very customizable, so feel free to use your own overlay and fiddle with the compositing method to get the desired result. It's all documented here: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper/blob/master/ARTWORK.md#scanlines-effect-node-from-v290-optional

Happy scraping!

Silent

Regarding your last changes to Roman numerals handling and other permutations of title:

Do you think it makes sense to remove ™, ® and © (also maybe others) from titles prior to scraping? "Hitman™" currently fails to scrape miserably even though it has entries in databases:
https://thegamesdb.net/game.php?id=44303

However, that's also something which will be solved by "title hints" feature you mentioned is on the roadmap at some point.

EDIT:
FYI numerals handling change fixed the way R.C. Pro-Am II is scraped (previously it'd scrape as R.C. Pro-Am, so first and second game showed the same), so good job :D

muldjord

@Silent Do you have ™, ® and © in your filenames? Or is it in the returned titles?

Title hints? I don't remember what that is. :S

Silent

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

Do you have ™, ® and © in your filenames? Or is it in the returned titles?

Filenames - as Hitman presents itself as Hitman™ and so that's how Moonlight saves it. However, I should just rename the file and be done with it - no point bothering you with something this minor.

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

Title hints? I don't remember what that is. :S

https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper/issues/77#issuecomment-446739139

This and your reply. At least the way I understood it is that you may consider defining title aliases for those games which are poorly matched (another use case I have for this: nothing in skyscraper detects "DiRT 3 Complete Edition", but "DiRT 3" works fine so I could define it as an alias).

EDIT:
"esgamelist" scraper sounds excellent! Will be super useful for cases where Skyscraper can't scrape the title fine but ES inbuilt scraper does! DiRT 3 issue I just mentioned is one such case, for example.

Thank you and mgerhardy!

muldjord

@Silent I don't mention any custom aliases in that. All I mention is the already implemented automatic extra pass for "Game Name II" to "Game Name 2". But you can use the --query option to create custom search queries for special cases. https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper/releases/tag/2.7.5

But it's not a bad idea to have some kind of aliases.csv file that you could put in "DiRT 3 Complete Edition";"Dirt 3". Just one per line for instance (it's exactly what I already do for mame games). And it would then check that if you apply a "--aliases" command line option or something like that. I'll make that, should be useful.

Silent

Also call me stupid, but I don't see a way how to scrape a single rom? Just point to a specific file instead of a directory, like

Skyscraper -p nes -s screenscraper /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/nes/MyGreatGame.nes

?

mitu

@Silent You need to use the --query parameter and provide the filename or checksum - look up the usage in the --help output.

muldjord

@Silent Updated doc with info on how to scrape single or a subset of roms. It was already in the localdb doc, but I've added it to the main doc aswell.

muldjord

@Silent Just added the alias feature. In 2.9.2 you will be able to add lines to the file ~/.skyscraper/aliasMap.csv with the following format:
filename without suffix;use this name instead
It will then override the name gotten from the filename and other sources and instead use use this name instead whenever a rom with that base name is scraped. This will of course not work for the screenscraper module (it's checksum based) but will work for all search query based modules such as thegamesdb

Silent

@muldjord Awesome! Two things to nitpick if I may:

--aliases doesn't seem to have made it to the final cut, but docs still refer to it.
Shouldn't aliasMap be a multimap, in case multiple aliases are defined for a base ROM? Unless it's contractual that you can only have a single alias per ROM (which should be perfectly sufficient).

muldjord

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

@muldjord Awesome! Two things to nitpick if I may:

--aliases doesn't seem to have made it to the final cut, but docs still refer to it.

Removed. I've designed it so the "--aliases" option isn't necessary. It will always look up the name in the aliases file. So if you want to disable a name, just remove it from the file again.

Shouldn't aliasMap be a multimap, in case multiple aliases are defined for a base ROM? Unless it's contractual that you can only have a single alias per ROM (which should be perfectly sufficient).

No. This gives you the option to hand 1 alias, not several. Why would you need multiple aliases? This doesn't add a pass to the scraping, it just allows you to overwrite whatever name is fetched from the filename. So this will gives you the option to fix your Dirt 3 problem for good.

Silent

Good news - that worked perfectly!

Bad news - "Hitman™" is still problematic, with an error message like this:

Couldn't calculate sha1 hash sum of rom file 'Hitman��.ml', please check permissions and try again, now exiting...

I think I'm just going to rename that one. Perhaps Moonlight script should trip such odd characters from filenames.