Suggestion Feature Favorite Game List

[Augusto]

Hello Tux and Raine users.
I see good improvements being done in Raine.

Raine has an good game list allowing correct scroll.
An Favorites Game List is an good feature.
I not understand if is simple to coding adding it.

Have an nice week.

[mer-curious]

Hello Augusto! I like this idea, especially because we generally have much more roms than time to play them, unfortunately. So we generally end up playing just a few games and, in my case, mostly the same ones.

But instead of a "favorites" game list, what do you think about a "Recent ROMs" or "Recent files" list being placed right below the "Options" in the Rom selection menu? Then as soon as we opened a new rom it would show in this "folder" and the folder would automatically place at the top the most recently played game.

Here are some examples of how some emulators have introduced this feature:
https://imgur.com/a/Y13qvNf

Let's see what Tux thinks about this! 👍

Edited August 12, 2022 by mer-curious

[Augusto]

"Recent" is an better menu naming.

[Tux]

I am not super convinced for now, you should at least know the names of the games you prefer, and then accessing them in the list is very fast by typing the 1st letters of their names.

Adding some code to count either the number of times a game was used or even worse for the gui a separate list for favorited stuff would be quite some work, and not sure it's worth it. It could be interesting to keep some info on how many times/how much time a game was played though, I just have to think of something to display it without overloading what is already displayed, plus then test how / where to save this info (every time a game is changed / the emulator window is closed, then in which config file).
So well, not so easy, maybe later, I'll think about that.

Edited September 6, 2022 by Tux

[Tux]

On 2nd thought I can have these stats and merge them in the game selection dialog without too much trouble, I'll try that soon (the rain is back in the area, it helps a lot !).

[Tux]

Ok done. The game selection dialog now displays the 5 most played games at the top (in the header, which is now separated more clearly from the main dialog), sorted by play time. The number of times a game is loaded and how much time it's played are tracked (watching the game intro behind the menu is not considered playing time !), and it's tracked even if you close the window without using the quit command.

All this is saved in a new file "stats" in the savedata directory, the contents is ascii but it's not supposed to be edited by the user. Games stats are stored by the short name of the game, which means that if a game is renamed for its short name the stats are lost (it happens almost never in raine anyway).

Neocd games are not supported, only arcade games (well neocd games are not even loaded from this dialog so it would be quite a problem, and they don't have a real short name), the picture behind the game selection dialog is not updated when selecting one of this favorite games in the header because it's not worth the effort and it would make some duplicate code, and I don't like that. 5 only for now, because the header doesn't handle any scrolling bar and can't scroll its content, it should be enough for a start anyway.

I'll test this a little more, but it seems good now (fixed some bugs related to the header display at the same time).

Edited September 7, 2022 by Tux

[Augusto]

Thanks for adding it, but an favorite list is good too.

How you say is much time to coding .... perhaps in future.

[mer-curious]

Hello Augusto and Tux!

I have finally used this feature for some time now and I guess I can share some feedback on that:

- It looks to me that the recently opened games list inside the game selection list works better when we use Raine in full-screen mode, as in here:

- If we use it in windowed mode, especially in the default window size, the menu gets a little visually confusing:

- I don't pay much attention to the amount and number of times that I've played a game. What is important to me is keeping track of the games that I've opened, from the most recent to the oldest one. Also, sometimes I am just testing some stuff in a game or checking it to see if I'm in the mood of playing it and it looks like this time is also marked as "playing time", no? So this information becomes a little misleading in the end. For me, it could be discarded or marked as optional to be shown in the menu.

- I know that we haven't been able to play as many games as we wanted, but we can eventually end up playing more than five games occasionally, so this feature would not allow to keep track of all those games as of now.

For all the issues I have reported above I think it would be better to have a "Recent games" list inside the game selection list if possible. This would probably resolve the menu visual organization in any resolutions and also allow for more games (perhaps an infinite number?) to be recorded as opened.

These are my impressions for now.

Thank you so much in advance for your attention.

PS: While capturing the above screenshots I have noticed that the GUI background effect is not maximized with the window when we click on "Maximize" already in the game selection dialog. You can check the result above. Is this a glitch?

[Tux]

 - the confusing look at reduced size : well it's mainly because there are games which are way too long, the solution would be to cut some part of ti, but anyway since the most important part is at the beginning it's still usable.

 - the times you don't like : no luck, I quite like them. Yeah what is counted is more the game usage than the actual play time because it's impossible to know when the player is actually playing, but I find the info quite fun to have sometimes. For me my current record is 1 hour 29 on battle bakraid, it's because of the time when I searched for its hiscore, it took more time than what I thought !!! Also if you reach 24 hours, it starts to count the days, let's see if someone reaches such an insane time... ! (well when you see the insane records some people have for the official hiscore records, yes they spent some insane amount of time on these games for sure !).

But yes I agree, an option to choose between recent games and most played could be handy, I'll try to add that for next time (but of course since currently the time a game was last played is not tracked this will start from scratch next time).

The effect misaligned because you changed the size of the window while the dialog was already opened : yeah super minor glitch, might take a look or not, it's super minor at this level, most people will never see that.

[mer-curious]

7 hours ago, Tux said:

But yes I agree, an option to choose between recent games and most played could be handy, I'll try to add that for next time (but of course since currently the time a game was last played is not tracked this will start from scratch next time).

The effect misaligned because you changed the size of the window while the dialog was already opened : yeah super minor glitch, might take a look or not, it's super minor at this level, most people will never see that.

Hello Tux! Thanks for considering those changes.

Just to be clear, when I mentioned it would be better to have a "Recent games" list, my idea was to put a list inside the game selection list. So we would click on "Change/Load ROM" and below "Options" there would be this new option called "Recent games" and there the recently opened games in the order they were lastly opened (from the most recent on the top to the oldest on the bottom). I think this way we could be unlimited in terms of how many games to show because it would be a separate list from the "Available games" list. The way it currently is (two different lists piled up) do not allow that due to visual organization.

I'm OK in keeping the playing stats if you like it. I'm more concerned about the ease of navigation and the possibility of showing over five played games, which are currently the issues of this feature, I guess.

Thanks again for your continuing work. 👍

[Tux]

Ok, it's done, the list directly in the header of the game selection dialog is gone, instead you have now "Recent games" and "Most played games".

It displays the list in 2 columns with the times / number of times played on column 2, which means you won't see any of this 2nd column if using a vga window because these game names are way too long !!! But since the list is sorted, and you'll probably want the 1st entries anyway, it's ok even without seeing the times. Switch to fullscreen if you want to see them.

Also added an option to initialize the "recent games" from the access time of the files in savedata. It's the access time which is tested (last time the file was read), in a file selector it's usually the modification time you see, which is older.

And if the time becomes > 1 year, it counts in years and does not display days or times in this case because they don't have much meaning anymore.

This should finish this option for good this time, but it's right it needed some improvements !

It's pushed to git.

edit : on 2nd thought, limited the names of the games in these 2 dialogs to 40 characters max, much better readability.
Also the desktop is also resized now on windows resize events (the reason why the drawing was not updated behind the dialog after your window resize).

Edited October 10, 2022 by Tux