what about adding a cheevos flag in gamelist.xml ?

meleu

@pjft Hello friend. Finally took some time to compile it on my pi2, and it runs just fine. Exactly as expected. I also tried to edit metadata of a game enabling/disabling achievements. Really cool.

I did a very well-behaved test. I didn't try to break anything. If you think it needs a more "hardcore" test, I think I will have some free time later in this week. Any particular test you want me to do?

So far I'm really happy with what you made. You hit my feature request in the bull's-eye! Huge thanks for that! :D

pjft

@meleu thank you good sir. No need to try to break it, I didn't do anything really out of the ordinary, just followed the lead from other such attributes. Just wanted to get your hands on testing to confirm that it worked as intended and that I didn't miss anything.

Did you have a chance to release the scraper, or did you per chance had any further discussions about getting this into @sselph 's scraper in one way or the other?

I'll try to submit the PR later this week. If anyone wants to test it further that'd be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

meleu

@pjft said in what about adding a cheevos flag in gamelist.xml ?:

Did you have a chance to release the scraper, or did you per chance had any further discussions about getting this into @sselph 's scraper in one way or the other?

Yeah. You can find it here: https://github.com/meleu/hascheevos

The README has some instructions and examples.

Currently I'm just trimming some edges but the tool is perfectly usable. I'll open a new topic talking about the tool soon.

Later I'll try to discuss with @sselph if integrating the hascheevos in his scraper is a possible thing.

I'll try to submit the PR later this week. If anyone wants to test it further that'd be very much appreciated.

Maybe @hansolo77 , @Sano , @grenade44 , @PokeEngineer ...

hansolo77

I've actually been waiting for further advancement of the scraper tool before I attempt anything further. My wish was to have an Achievements game system rather than a "flag". That is now a possibility and I already have it working. Further "advancements" I'm mostly looking for is a system to scrape my games by just adding the new games that have cheevos without having to rescrape everything. I've not tested yet, but if I rescrape my systems and generate a list of games that have cheevos, would it overwrite the achievements gamelist, add all of the detected games again (multiple entries of the same game), or just add the newly detected ones? I'm also looking for a more fluid, easier method of doing all the work without having to do it all manually in the terminal.

meleu

@hansolo77 well, I was asking for testing the @pjft 's version of emulationstation, not the hascheevos tool.

Regarding scraper userfriendliness, I'll improve that as time permits.

pjft

PR submitted.

Best.

pjft

@meleu As mentioned in the PR, if it doesn't make it to ES in the current envisioned way, I'm more than happy to suggest an alternative approach to you that came to mind recently.

meleu

@pjft man, what you did is nothing more than perfect for RetroPie/RetroAchievements users. If it won't be merged I'll find a way to patch your changes into ES code everytime I update it from source.

hansolo77

It's a bummer it looks like project leader is opposed to adding this simple addition. It doesn't do anything to the system for non users. But it adds functionality for those that do, and sets up future-proof for new users.

pjft

@meleu We can always turn your scraper into, rather than adding <achievements> tags, just auto-generate collection files that users can load into their systems. That's probably a saner option rather than patching the code.

@everyone here: let's not get personal. These decisions need to be done, and they're never easy. Nobody likes to be the person saying "no" to people, but in truth, the job of a good product manager is saying "no" most of the time.

If this makes it in, happy days. If it doesn't, happy days as well. We still all have a great platform to enjoy and play with, and a great community to boot.

hansolo77

I'm not taking it personal. I didn't even mention names. :) I was just saying it's a bummer. But I totally agree with what you said. Maybe adding a filter is the wrong way to go. I wasn't fully on board with the flag approach to being with. I think the custom collections approach is a better way to do it. There's really no extra steps involved to get the list. It's on it's own system. With filters, you have to go into a system that has cheevo games in them in the first place, and then customize the sort. But unless a user is willing to do little more work (which would be required anyway with filters too) there is nothing even hinted at in ES that a cheevo "system" is in place.

Sano

Hi guys.
Sorry I wasn't here for a while. I'm really sorry to read all this.

Just an idea I didn't read on the PR : as the main issue with project leaders seems to be the impact on the interface (as well as specificity with retroarch), would it be acceptable to not have any change in the interface without editing for example the '/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/es_settings.cfg' file ?
So there would be no noticeable change for regular users, but advanced/interested users could enable the feature by simply adding a line in a config file, enabling the filter/metadata/whatever ?

hansolo77

Yeah that's where I was getting at with the dedicated Collections gamelist. There is NOTHING in ES that even suggests there is functionality built in for it. Yet, if somebody were inclined, there actually IS functionality. A simple writeup in the RetroPie Docs explaining what you need to do to activate it and use it would be all that's required. Almost like a 'PORT'. It's not necessarily installed by default (although there's no reason not to), and it's there for somebody who wants to use it. A user would still have to scrape their roms, either to have the FLAG or to build a custom Collection. But if the "holding back" is related to having a visible indication inside ES to non-users, then a custom collections method is a good solution because there wouldn't be anything there.

meleu

Guys, there's no reason to feel so down. Jools said: "I haven't made a decision on this, I am just not convinced it is required yet."

So if you guys have good arguments, maybe you can say something. But I've already put some reasons why it would be a good addition here, try to not be repetitive.

robertybob

With all the exciting developments going on in Emulationstation this year, I think it'll be a crying shame if something RetroAchievements-related isn't added. It's such a good idea and one that, if more widely known, would make RetroPie even more attractive to users.

Yes only (some) RetroArch emulators are compatible, however I'm willing to bet that most users spend most of their time on said emulators anyway!

Worst case scenario, would it be possible for your flag to be installable via the RetroPie experimental menu (i.e. rebuilds the stable ES but with the flag added)? If we can have a 3do emulator (which doesn't even really work on a Pi) within the Experimental section, then why not this? It would be used by many more people.

meleu

@robertybob said in what about adding a cheevos flag in gamelist.xml ?:

Worst case scenario, would it be possible for your flag to be installable via the RetroPie experimental menu

If you're talking about a EmulationStation fork only with this feature, EmulationStation development fragmentation is strongly unwanted.

But I'm sure we will find a satisfactory solution for this. Let's just wait a little... ;-)

robertybob

@meleu Not as a separate branch, but a patch that, if Emulationstation was updated, would still be there. ...I suppose when you update ES it deletes the existing installation, rather than installing over the top of it? (I have no idea how it all works)

pjft

@meleu What would you think about the output of your script being custom-collection files? They're just plain text files with the absolute path to the ROMs, one per line, named custom-<name>.cfg, and stored in ~/.emulationstation/collections.

If you were to generate, say, custom-nes achievements.cfg and add it to that folder, the user only needs to go to the collections menu and enable it. You'd have a dedicated system with all NES games with achievement support, in this case.

Just a thought. Might be easier to generate, easier to use, and not depend on any changes to ES, which would alleviate the current concerns in that thread.

@robertybob the concept makes sense, but the patch itself would need to be updated as with any ES developments the code may change in ways that it would render the patch changes incompatible.

meleu

@pjft said in what about adding a cheevos flag in gamelist.xml ?:

@meleu What would you think about the output of your script being custom-collection files? They're just plain text files with the absolute path to the ROMs, one per line, named custom-<name>.cfg, and stored in ~/.emulationstation/collections.

The hascheevos is already able to do such thing, as in this example. But I'll make it easier.

Thanks for the suggestion. ;-)

pjft

@meleu If you output in that format and filename, to that folder, then they'll automatically show up in the "Custom Collections" menu to be enabled. That'll make it easy for the user to immediately have access to a collection in ES filtered with only achievements titles.

EDIT: if you want to go the extra step, though I wouldn't especially encourage it myself, you may then also edit the es_settings.cfg file automatically and add those files to the enabled custom collections list. It's riskier, though, as if something goes wrong ES may stop working :)