[Scummvm-devel] Detection hints in the Add Game browser

[Travis Howell]

From: "Max Horn" <max at quendi.de>
>> Requring many SCUMM games to have their MD5 details updated would
>> be a bad
>> idea and best avoided, as it can take a long time to build up MD5
>> details
>> again (As shown by changes to Simon game detection). In the case of HE
>> games, reducing to 64K would require many games to be updated
>
> Ah OK. Well, I didn't know that since none of the HE demos I have are
> bigger than 60kb (well, their detection files at least). But anyway,
> even a reduction to 128kb would already be a nice improvement.
>
> Could you give a rough overview which/how many games would be affected?

12 games for 64K, complete list:
Backyard Baseball 2001
Backyard Baseball 2003
Backyard Basketball
Backyard Football
Backyard Soccer
Backyard Soccer 2004
Backyard Soccer MLS
Lets Explore the Airport with Buzzy
Lets Explore the Farm with Buzzy
Lets Explore the Jungle with Buzzy
Pajama Sam 1
Pajama Sam 3

31 games for 32K,  complete list (in addition to above list):
Backyard Baseball
Big Thinkers 1st Grade
Freddi Fish 1
Freddi Fish 2
Freddi Fish 3
Freddi Fish 4
Freddi Fish 5
Freddi Fish's One-Stop Fun Shop
Pajama Sam 2
Pajama Sam's One-Stop Fun Shop
Putt-Putt Enters the Race
Putt-Putt Joins the Cirsus
Putt-Putt's One-Stop Fun Shop
Putt-Putt Saves the ZXoo
Putt-Putt Travels Through Time
Spy FOX 1
Spy FOX 2
Spy FOX 3
Spy FOX in Cheese Chase

With most HE games having multiple versions and multiple languages, several
MD5 details would need to be updated for each game.

>> I think a much better idea, is just to improve the documentation
>> and help
>> options for ScummVM:
>> Adding a guide like
>> http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0200586/videogames/scummvm_tutorial/
>> to the
>> future HTML documentation, so the process of adding games is even more
>> clear.
>
> I disagree that this would be a better alternative. Of course better
> docs are needed (it's me who always asks for them, too :-).
>
> But if your UI is bad or confusing, or counter-intuitive, then it is
> so... Adding any amount of documentation or help buttons (=band-aid)
> won't solve that.
> And in the end, people often enough don't read docs, so they'll still
> end up asking for help on the problem if they don't understand our GUI.

To be clear, exactly which game detection issue are we attempting to solve?
as I was unable to locate the video mentioned in the original message. The
only ScummVM related video was OpenAlpha episode 3, which included brief
guide to using ScummVM on a PSP.

The most common game detection related issues I see reported are:
1. User doesn't know file system well enough, to actually locate the game
data on their hard disk.
2. User uses the original game installer (Which doesn't copy over all files)
and selects the installation directory under ScummVM.
3. User copies data files from floppy disk but doesn't realise they are the
compressed installer files.

We can't do anything about case 1, and only provide further details in order
to help prevent cases 2 and 3 from occuring.

Also worth noting, that we don't actually mention that only directories are 
displayed, and the files are excluded, when browsing through the file system 
in the launcher.

>> Maybe adding a help button to each section of the GUI, with brief
>> descriptions to explain that section. Keeping the text for help
>> descriptions
>> in a separate file would be best, for easy translation to other
>> languages in
>> the future.
>
> We could do that, and it might even be a nice idea, though orthogonal
> to the rest of this discussion, IMO (see above: solving problems vs.
> fighting symptoms). My main concern is that it'll be a lot of work to
> get started and then maintain (and outdated / missing help texts are
> almost worse than none at all). Looking at our "success" at
> updating / maintaining the SCUMM help dialog, or writing
> documentation (or finding somebody to do it), I am somewhat skeptical
> in this, I am afraid :-/.

Our main GUI options seem quite complete at this stage, so the text for the
Help sections shouldn't require frequent updating, once the original text
for each section was added.

I thought the current SCUMM help dialog was mostly update to date, other
than the details of rare game versions.