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Siorghlas
Starting Member
Spain
4 Posts |
 Posted - 15 Nov 2010 : 19:05:00
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Well, since I had long thought about the idea of a program to manage my personal info, also have the habit of cataloguing my games, and have programmed a bit in Access, I have quite a bit of improvements and suggestions to make. I hope not to overload you!
First, I do not well understand the purpose of all fields in the Game info. Is there a place where they are explained?
Small details:
I find it a bit confusing that the lists personalised thought the Game dialog tabs (like Genres) do not appear in the "Tools"-"Edit Lists" menu. It would be more logical to be able to access them from there too.
In the "Genres" table I see there are "duplicate" entries like "Role Playing" and "RPG" that should be just one, others like "Boxed Game" that I don't see the sense of it, and others missing like "Family" and "Casual" that I think could be added by default in a next release.
I wonder if it could be very complex and worth the effort to create a script to get game details from Wikipedia?
I would like to have a "mass change" option to update a field's content on selected games, or depending on matched content (a "search and replace" function).
I've taken a look at the inside format of the access database and found that game fields related to auxiliary tables are not defined as a code keyed to the aux table, but instead as text filled with the full text on the aux table. I wonder why. This is much more inefficient space-wise than a normalized database, and may lead to inadvertently using values non-existing in the aux table.
Eg in the example database there are some games that contain "Role-playing" in the Genre field, though that value does not exist in the reference table (it is "Role Playing" there). This would be avoided (even if opening the database directly with Access) if these kinds of fields were defined as codes linked to the aux tables.
Now, the important stuff:
I'd like to be able to use one Game entry as a template to add a new one (to reuse many of the already filled values). Maybe you could add a "Main"-"New Game"-"Use existing game as template" menu option, and on the right click menu on a game in the grid the option "Add new game using this as template".
As a complement of this I would add the option to define a master game template: that would allow to predefine much more values that those now specified in "Tools"-"Field Defaults".
Improvements in Game info:
In "Details" tab:
<Language> only allows to display one. Since I speak multiple languages (and like to play sometimes in one or another) I always keep track of exactly what languages a game supports. I guess I could define a different value for each subset like "Multi5: EN ES FR DE IT" but I would en up with a lot of values and that would not be very usable. So I'd prefer if lnguage could be defined with a Single/Multi checkbox or radio button. In the "multi" case, there should be a list where multiple values can be added and selected.
I would add also to Details tab the network used in internet gaming: eg "Games for Windows", "GameSpy", "Turbine", "Battle.Net", "Game--specific", etc. to be able to know which games depend on what in case there are game network outages or a network is closed: thus I will know what games are affected.
In "Details 2" tab:
I would add here the following information that I keep track of:
- Download link (for the freeware/PD/Open stuff) (eg http://www.fileplanet.com/210105/210000/fileinfo/Command-&-Conquer:-Tiberian-Sun---Full-Game-Client)
- Official game home site link (eg http://www.commandandconquer.com/)
- Official Support forum/contact page link (eg http://help.commandandconquer.com/app/home)
- and a couple (or maybe more?) of other personal links, for example My Clan Page and a Game Fans page.
I guess for security reasons I wouldn't add here the user/passwords required to access the support and clan websites, but maybe add a checkbox to indicate that login is required.
In "Personal" tab:
I'd like a way to indicate if a given game is a gift (in that case maybe purchase price would not have to appear?)
Also, to avoid displaying worthless/unapplicable info on Games and clean up on info overload, I would do this:
Disable LOAN info subset when fields Purchase location> or <Format> in Main tab are defined as eg "Steam", or maybe if an "unloanable" option is set there.
Disable PURCHASE info subset when field <Game Type> in Main tab is "Freeware", "Public Domain", "Public Domain".
For better control, it would be best to be able to define a list of <Game Type> values that imply that a game can't have purchase information. Maybe this could be done as well with the not-loanable games.
In "Description" tab:
I find the space devoted to <Tags> is too large at the expense of the <Description> that usuallly has quite long content.
I would add if possible the Game Score from Metacritic.com from a new script, adding a link to the game page there to view the detailed score explanation. Or maybe this could go in the Main tab along with the <Personal Rating>?
Whew! Hope this isn't too much! I won't bother you for a while now!
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Slán leat,
Síorghlas |
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A lot of suggestions
