[Scummvm-devel] Improved reporting of unknown MD5s / new game variants

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Thu Oct 28 14:00:42 CEST 2010


Am 28.10.2010 um 13:00 schrieb LionsPhil:

> On 28/10/2010 11:11, Willem Jan Palenstijn wrote:
>> * User feedback for detection
>> 
>> If it's important enough to show to users, we should consider GUI dialog boxes.
>> I can imagine that failed detection in a directory would qualify.  If a user
>> says "add a game" and scummvm replies "sorry, can't find anything", more
>> immediately available info would be useful.
> 
> The console is helpful here because it is easy(ish) to copy the hashes 
> from, whereas currently GUI dialogues are not. Writing them to a logfile 
> may be a workable compromise.

Lion, you are right in so far as it should be easy for users to "copy and paste" MD5s (although I am not sure whether we really should overwhelm first time users / newbies with this). As Yotam already pointed out, the DOS console is not really a good "solution" for this.

But we definitely do plan to have a log file (or multiple) for that, with easy instructions for users on how to open it. It think this is doable with a simple three step guide, which even super newbie users should be able to follow.


But we can do more! Basically, we should integrate with the OS a bit more. 

First, we should display unknown game variants in a GUI dialog. As you pointed out, that does not allow easy copy and paste.

So as a first iteration, we could point to the log file, including instructions on how to open it.

A very simple first improvement would be to copy the relevant data to the clipboard and show a message indicating that: "An unknown game variant was detected. Relevant info was copied to the clipboard. Please report it to the ScummVM team by doing XYZ." (this text is obviously just meant to convey the idea, not to be used ;).


But even tighter integration is achievable with relatively little effort, I think: We could offer a "Report by email" button in the GUI dialog, which would open up the user's default email client with a precomposed email with right address, subject and pre-filled body. At least on Mac OS X, this is easy: One composes a suitable mailto URL (see <http://www.ianr.unl.edu/internet/mailto.html>) and passes that to a system API which handles it. Presto. I would imagine that this is similarly easy on Windows and Linux... Probably also on many smartphones (if not via the "mailto:" trick then by some other means). But I did not research that.

Anyway, a simple "OSystem::composeEmail(recipient, subject, body)" would suffice for that, and I could whip up a Mac OS X implementation in no time.

Of course, on systems that don't have a way to e.g. compose an email, we'd adjust the warning accordingly. E.g. Nintendo DS.



Cheers,
Max



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