Suggestion Feature Favorite Game List

[mer-curious]

Hello Tux! Thank you so much for implementing these changes.

I was thinking about some cosmetic changes in the GUI and would like to know if you agree with them.

- Change the term "ROM" to "game" in "Change/Load ROM", since the term "game" is used in "Game selection", "Load NeoCD game", "Available games", "Play game", "game inputs", "Save per game screen settings" and will also be used in "Recent games", so the reference will be more consistent.

- Capitalize "ROM" in "Rom directories" and "Rom dir".

- Change "Load game" and "Save game" to "Load state" and "Save state" to not create confusion with the real "load game" function of the emulator and to also use the term which is more widely adopted by emulators out there. Perhaps this would also require renaming the folder to "savestates"?

- Fix the alignment of the "Year" and/or "Category" info in the game selection list, as you see in the screenshot below:

It seems that either "Year" is placed in the limit of the window or "Category" is a little too far from it. I don't know which one should be better aligned in comparison with the other information in the left.

- Rename "Always stop CD music while loading" to "Always stop NeoCD music while loading" to contextualize the usability of the option in Sound options.

- Do the same for "Mute SFX" (so, "Mute NeoCD SFX") and "Mute CD" (therefore, "Mute NeoCD music tracks").

- Capitalize "SFX" in "Sfx volume".

That's it! Maybe there are more, but for now this is what I found could be slightly changed in terms of the interface. Not a real difference, but perhaps it could help a little new Raine users using the emu, no?

Anyway, I'll wait your thoughts on those suggestions.

Thank you so much again for your work.

PS: I'm sorry Augusto to deviate a little the thread. It's just that Tux started to make some changes in the GUI here, so I thought I could also make these suggestions.

Edited October 11, 2022 by mer-curious

[Tux]

I'd say it's too bad you can't make a pull request on git, because all these changes are minor and wouldn't require any coding skill, they just require time and determination. For me all of this is minor, I might take a look, but it's quite boring, so motivation is very low. Plus changing a string here might break the translations, even if it's probably minor.

I was right to sleep on my changes for the "most recent" and most "played" games, I have some new idea on how to initialize the "recent games" the 1st time. I didn't do it first for the very rare cases where there might be a bad disk cache and initialization takes too much time. But it can be safety be done when raine is launched, and these settings updated only if there is not any info on "recent games" already saved, so even if there is a slow down it will happen only once, and here it's not even a slow down, I guess it will go unnoticed everywhere... So this option will disappear from the gui, and it will become automatic, much better !

edit : just did that, and fixed the category alignment issue you found. I had thought about that when creating the dialog first, and never looked at it twice actually, I just reserved the max width for it based on the longest game category we had, it doesn't show that much because it's a variable width font. Anyway now it just uses the actual width of the current category to display instead of that. Notice that for the info on the left there uses a margin, but I forgot the margin for the right aligned info ! I guess I'd better leave it like that for those with small screens anyway, eventually remove the margin on the left.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Tux

[mer-curious]

3 hours ago, Tux said:

I'd say it's too bad you can't make a pull request on git, because all these changes are minor and wouldn't require any coding skill, they just require time and determination. For me all of this is minor, I might take a look, but it's quite boring, so motivation is very low. Plus changing a string here might break the translations, even if it's probably minor.

Hello Tux! Thank you for the fast reply.

I would be glad to help you in reviewing these little suggestions for the GUI. I've looked at the Raine code in GitHub and it looks like most of this information is on raine/source/sdl, right? So I just need to edit the text, create a pull request and then wait for your approval? Or is there something else to do?

 

3 hours ago, Tux said:

I was right to sleep on my changes for the "most recent" and most "played" games, I have some new idea on how to initialize the "recent games" the 1st time. I didn't do it first for the very rare cases where there might be a bad disk cache and initialization takes too much time. But it can be safety be done when raine is launched, and these settings updated only if there is not any info on "recent games" already saved, so even if there is a slow down it will happen only once, and here it's not even a slow down, I guess it will go unnoticed everywhere... So this option will disappear from the gui, and it will become automatic, much better !

I can't tell much about the new "Recent games" changes you made because I haven't tested it yet, but I think it's great that you found a better way to implement it. I'll let you know my impressions on it when I test it.

 

3 hours ago, Tux said:

I guess I'd better leave it like that for those with small screens anyway, eventually remove the margin on the left.

Yes, I also noticed this little margin in the left side of the window and I agree that it would be indeed better to remove it to match the other side. Anyway, just little changes that I've recently noticed and decided to report when looking for text to update in the GUI.

Thank you very much again for you continuing work.

[Tux]

Wow, it's rather bold to want to try to make a pull request without compiling... you are sure you don't want to compile, even without understanding the c code it should be possible and would make things easier for you. Anyway if you want to try, from memory steps are :

1) take a github account, I think you said you already have one to post comments
2) go to the raine page, and click the "fork" button on the top right, it will propose a name for the copy of the repository on your account, you can accept it, you have a copy in your account now.
3) go to the freshly made copy, and clone it to your disk, I don't think you can edit files directly from the interface of github at least, that's the point where it's much easier if you have the tools for that, usually it means installing git, which is installed by default if you install mingw32. After that you open a terminal, type git clone address where address is the address you get when you click on the big green button "clone" from github on your fork page. Visual studio probably also installs its version of git, but I find there are too many options everywhere in visual studio and it tends to be messy.
4) do your changes. Here again, it's easier if you have some dev tools, I use vim usually in linux but there are other tools in windows for that, I think visual c++ has a good interface to git, but I don't like to use it so I can't tell. These tools make things easy to locate something specific in the sources to change it. Without them, well the main menu is in source/sdl/gui.cpp, and all the other dialogs are in source/sdl/dialogs (the file names tell what is inside !). Your changes are only about changing some strings so it's possible to do it without compiling, but it's bold for sure.
5) commit your changes, it's about using the git commit command, it will ask you a description, validate the description, and it's good. Then git push to push your changes to github, they increased security on github recently so they require ssh keys or other strong methods of authentication for that, they have a dedicated page to explain that.
6) if you reached this point, it's done, you can use "pull request", I don't remember if it's on your fork or raine page, it must be on your fork, it looks at the recent commits and proposes some defaults to you, add eventually some description and it's done.

It would be quite a feat if you succeed to do that, so I'll be forced to accept it of course ! There are ways to view files from the interface but I don't think you can edit them from the github interface, but maybe I missed something. Good luck, if you fail I might look into this later... but if you succeed, you should really follow the tutorial on how to compile to be able to compile your version... !

[mer-curious]

Hello Tux! Thank you so much to take the time to walk me through this process.

I went the bold way and just forked the code to my account and edited the files on-line using the GitHub page, then I created some pull requests. Please check them and add them to your code if you agree with the changes.

I made all the changes I suggested above and also changed "NeoCD" to "Neo-Geo CD" and "bios" to "BIOS".

I couldn't find the strings for "Raine controls" to edit the "Load game" and "Save game" options there. I looked for "Decrease" in many files, and that is a very unique word in this menu, but couldn't find any instances of that. It looks to be very hidden in the code or I simply couldn't find them using the browser find tool (Ctrl+F). I would be glad if you showed me where it is.

Finally, have you thought about renaming the "savegame" folder to "savestates" in order to match the new wording for this function? Or it isn't necessary at all? I was thinking if it would be better to add the new folder name for new installations but also look for save state files in the old "savegame" folder in case a user updates the emulator by just replacing the executable in the folder.

Anyway, I'll wait for your comments on that.

Thanks a lot again for your willingness to help me with the code.

[Tux]

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Hello Tux! Thank you so much to take the time to walk me through this process.

I went the bold way and just forked the code to my account and edited the files on-line using the GitHub page, then I created some pull requests. Please check them and add them to your code if you agree with the changes.

Well it would have been better to have 1 pull request only for all these changes, which would make only 1 commit to merge, but considering the conditions in which you did that, I guess I have no other choice than to accept that... !

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

I made all the changes I suggested above and also changed "NeoCD" to "Neo-Geo CD" and "bios" to "BIOS".

I couldn't find the strings for "Raine controls" to edit the "Load game" and "Save game" options there.

There is a magic command for that when the files are on your disk : grep, it goes like this :

cd source/sdl/dialogs
grep -i "load game" *
-> game_options.cpp:  TMenu *load = new TMenu(_("Load game"),menu);
-> game_options.cpp:  { _("Load game"), &my_load },

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

I looked for "Decrease" in many files, and that is a very unique word in this menu, but couldn't find any instances of that. It looks to be very hidden in the code or I simply couldn't find them using the browser find tool (Ctrl+F). I would be glad if you showed me where it is.

This is in the description of a control, so it's in source/sdl/control.c. What do you want it for ?

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Finally, have you thought about renaming the "savegame" folder to "savestates" in order to match the new wording for this function? Or it isn't necessary at all? I was thinking if it would be better to add the new folder name for new installations but also look for save state files in the old "savegame" folder in case a user updates the emulator by just replacing the executable in the folder.

Or just don't change it, I am not going to look into 2 places for the savegames !

2 hours ago, mer-curious said:

Anyway, I'll wait for your comments on that.

Thanks a lot again for your willingness to help me with the code.

Ok, I'll go looking at this ton of pull requests then... !

Merged all this manually to be able to merge all these commits in just one,  I made the mistake of merging the 1st one from the interface, so the repository had a commit that I was forced to overwrite shortly after, but anyway. Also updated the locale files so that all the translations continue to work. I should at least update the po files to merge the new strings, but I forgot everything about these commands, I guess I should investigate one day...!

Anyway it's merged. (and congratulations for your impressive determination to have this done !)

Edited October 12, 2022 by Tux

[mer-curious]

3 hours ago, Tux said:

Well it would have been better to have 1 pull request only for all these changes, which would make only 1 commit to merge, but considering the conditions in which you did that, I guess I have no other choice than to accept that... !

Hello Tux! I'm sorry for creating a lot of pull requests. I didn't know how to gather them all in one pull only, so I did what I could to do it quick. Anyway, I'm grateful for your understanding.

 

3 hours ago, Tux said:

This is in the description of a control, so it's in source/sdl/control.c. What do you want it for ?

I meant the "Decrease cpu skip" option in "Raine controls". I couldn't find any of those options in the source looking in the cpp files using the browser find tool. I wanted to be able to review the "Load game" and "Save game" there too and possibly other text. Thanks for pointing me the file. I have already pulled a request for the changes there.

 

3 hours ago, Tux said:

Or just don't change it, I am not going to look into 2 places for the savegames !

I'm OK with keeping the same folder name if it would cause problems both for you in the code and for the current users who update by replacing the executable. The change would be mostly for keeping the reference with the new wording adopted for the function. Either way, I think that "savestates" is clearer in terms of what files are there, because the saved game data is in "savedata", therefore in "savegame" we actually find the saved game states, hence the folder being called "savestates". But you can decide however is better in this case.

 

3 hours ago, Tux said:

Anyway it's merged. (and congratulations for your impressive determination to have this done !)

Thank you! It was a pleasure to help you on that. I would certainly do more if I understood a thing about coding. By the way, I guess you forgot to merge the changes in the sound options. At least I couldn't notice it in the master files. Curiously this was the only changed file which created a "dezraj-patch 1" branch instead of a standard "patch" branch. Anyway, I deleted it from my repository. Please let me know if you can merge that, otherwise I can recreate a new patch with the changes in this menu.

Thank you so much again for your work.

Edited October 12, 2022 by mer-curious

[Tux]

I don't think it's mandatory to create a branch for a pull request although it's often done... sound_options.cpp ? Well that's what happens with so many PR, I might have missed one. Well I checked your patch-1 branch, it was about gui.cpp, and your main branch doesn't contain any commit from you, so I don't know where this commit is.

It's good, I could retrieved your changes from github, you just won't see your name in the from for the commit, but I cited "mer-curious" in the comment, and updated the locale files too.

And the reason why I missed is because I merged all this manually because there were too many,  I saw they were named as patch-1, patch-2, etc... so I didn't try to check, I just got all these patches, and missed this one because it was named differently. Next time make all your edits in the same branch then make a pull request for this branch alone, it will make things easier, if there is a next time !

Edited October 12, 2022 by Tux