[Scummvm-devel] Making it easier for users to add games

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Mon May 2 16:23:54 CEST 2011


Am 02.05.2011 um 15:48 schrieb Miguel Bernabeu:

> Hi there,
> 
> My opinion is that adding games should be as easy as it can, so I'm thinking the following (most of it already proposed in the thread):
> 
> - Directory layout:
>     -Games folder
>          -Game1 folder
>          -Game2 folder
> 
> - An Add Game(s) button which opens a directory selection dialog in which the user selects a directory. This directory is scanned recursively to all subdirectories looking for supported games. I suppose this is how the Mass Add works now.
> 
> - What if I just want to add one particular game? Then just select the directory containing a single game, the internal logic is the same, whether you have selected your Games folder or Game1 folder.
> 
> I think this is simple and obvious whether you are newbie or power user of ScummVM, you don't need any checkboxes or special keys.

Yes, that is essentially just the thing I proposed :).

> 
> This doesn't consider the possibility that there's more than one game in the same folder. Could this happen? Is there something else I'm missing and makes this a bad decision?

Yup, this is possible, and the main motivation why I repeated Torbjörn's concern regarding adding a single game. Of course for the avarage user, they can just use the "Mass Add" (renamed to "Add Game(s)...") for everything. But in some exceptional cases, (DOTT + MM is actually the only one I am aware of), two games can sit in a single directory. (OK, more cases are possible if a user deliberately mixes files of two games, but let's ignore that. If they want to shoot their own foot, let them ;).

More seriously, though: Sometimes the detector cannot unambiguously decide what game variant is present in a given dir. In fact, in some cases it is simply *impossible* to decide (namely, for multi lingual games: You can add the game as "FOO (English)" and as "FOO (French)", and you may indeed want to add both; or only one, depending on your language preferences).

The current "Add Game" (=single game mode) handles this case by showing a dialog listing all the possibilities, and then asking the user which they want.
In the mass add code, though, I think we just add them all. Which often is OK, but sometimes results in some unusable entries.  Of course, the goal here should be to make the detectors so good that the only ambiguous cases that occur are those for multi language games (or other similar variations). But I am not sure if we are quite there yet.

Anyway, I still think that as you said, for 99.9% of all users and use cases, the current "Mass Add" code is just fine for general use.


Bye,
Max



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