gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums

Okay, right now i'm working on a Wiki as a platform for a compatibility list.

This is where you can find it:
http://www.gc-forever.com/pmwiki/index.php

...and i need help
Here's the plan:

I want to divide it into three lists (PAL, NTSC-U and NTSC-J) so i need to delete the column "Region" OR pre-fill it with a region.
Any suggestions on how to do that? Some kind of editor?

Example:
||!Game||!Region||!Version of Swiss||!Status ||!Notes ||
||1080° Avalanche || || || || ||

so either i want to have this:
||!Game||!Region||!Version of Swiss||!Status ||!Notes ||
||1080° Avalanche || PAL || || || ||

OR

this:

||!Game||!Version of Swiss||!Status ||!Notes ||
||1080° Avalanche || || || ||

but i don't want to manually edit this for ~600 games and 3 lists

When I copied the list this morning into a table, i used regex feature
At this state it is easy, because all cells are pre-filled with dashes...
I think the region column is useless, if you divide it into seperate lists.

Should I remove the region column?

regards,
ct_the_1

If you want, sure.
Otherwise you could just tell me how

I did it, using find+replace in notepad++
btw swiss is great! Hope to get ide-exi soon (when germany based store opens ) and test it with swiss.

regards,
ct_the_1

but how did you differentiate between the first || and e.g. the third || ?

this just came to my mind: don't we have to differentiate between the 3 booting options? (DVD/SD/IDE)......

I hope that SD and IDE will have the same compatiblity because they are loaded in a very similar way. Maybe you should consider a column for the prepatcher.

The seperate lists for regions is stupid to me, 99% of games that work in the one region, work in the other too. Biggest problem here is that people won't understand that a PAL game that only works in black and white on a NTSC tv, is actually working. Good luck trying to find a solution for this.

Okay, i got a totally different idea.
What about a website where you can enter the title of the game, region, where it is booted from and what settings you chose and what worked/didn't work and then click OK and it's going to some kind of a database/list.

Is anybody willing to help me code this?

I could do it with php and mysql. I just hope there won't be spammers flooding the database with crap. I'll start working on it tonight.

Burbruee wrote:I could do it with php and mysql. I just hope there won't be spammers flooding the database with crap. I'll start working on it tonight.

i can help with that, you just need to do the PHP -> MySQL part - i can't do that
we can stillt set up 5 or 10 users that fill the database so we're safe (from spam)

In effort to fight spammers, perhaps each entry has to be approved before it goes through? (Or does that defeat the purpose of a wiki?) Maybe have registration for editing the wiki and have that registration fend off wiki-editing-bots?

either that, or we could use captchas!

In the meantime until all is sorted - please add all compatibility reports to: http://www.gc-forever.com/pmwiki/index.php

emu_kidid wrote:In the meantime until all is sorted - please add all compatibility reports to: http://www.gc-forever.com/pmwiki/index.php

yeah sorry forgot to mention that until we figure out the database solution

I don't think I have any plans for tomorrow so I think I'll be able to start work on the database driven compatibility site for Swiss.
Which fields should be available? Title? Swiss revision? Game region? Boot Method? Personal Notes/Comments? Status?
Did I get it all or did I miss anything?

Or should I do as in the first post and keep PAL/NTSC-U/NTSC-J separate? I could make it default to show all and then you just click something and it shows only the selected region.

Suggestions are more than welcome!

my idea was:

you come to that site and see a list of the entries other people made. the columns you suggested seem fine.
if their game is not on the list or they used another method to boot or whatever they can scroll down where you can see the empty fields where you can enter your stuff and say submit. it adds the entry to the db and shows it in that list....i think alphabetically is best, right?

and maybe add a captcha to that submit field

I also suggest separating the lists for testing on Wii and Gamecube that way it is REALLY less confusing. Also adding a color code legend that would be like: green is working perfectly, blue is working with some problems, grey is untested and red is not working at all

DJShotz wrote:I also suggest separating the lists for testing on Wii and Gamecube that way it is REALLY less confusing. Also adding a color code legend that would be like: green is working perfectly, blue is working with some problems, grey is untested and red is not working at all

i second that. swiss on the wii seems to have very different problems, so we should seperate them, yep.
also colors are always helpful

Hey,

I adopted your ideas and coded a little list.

What I have is that list of all ~640 gamecube games in a database and php connecting to it.
You can choose a letter, to see games beginning with this letter, 20 per page.
There is an overview, which shows you the current compability based on the user reports.
If you click on a game title, the detailed user reports are listed.

I took a screenshot and placed it in this post. I added some info, too.


I don't want to take this work away from Burbruee, it is only "how my idea would look like"
The thing is yesterday's evening was boring enough for me to start doing this list.


What do you think about this interface?

i like it!
Burbruee, get over here and say something

Yeah it looks great! I like the visual bars in a different color depending on the rating of the game.

ct_the_1, if you want to you can continue working on it if you get bored again as I've been rather busy lately. Plus today I received my GTX 460 OC graphics card I ordered so I'll probably want to play around with it this weekend instead of coding.

i really like it! you mention a checklist in each user's report. can you post it?

if you need any help or whatever, i'm glad to help whereever i can

Okay, so I have set up a copy of my current state at http://swicoli.111mb.de

Remember: the numbers are random!

As you may notice, adding reports is disabled and also there are no reports in the database at this time...

It is because I may have the idea of the "add report"-form with the dynamically generated rating,
but i don't know exactly the way this may look like.

What i thought of would be to start at 10 and then minus 1 for every checkbox checked.
But there are many checkboxes i can think of:
video mode selecting -> green/black screen
video stutter in videos
video stutter ingame
sound stutter in videos
sound stutter ingame
freeze ingame / in menu
freeze while applying patches
DRE in menu / ingame
...
The list is not finished.

There must be a better solution for this! Help appreciated.

ct_the_1 wrote: What i thought of would be to start at 10 and then minus 1 for every checkbox checked.

Use any amount of checkboxes you want (each one means a problem with the game). Then get the rating this way:
rating = #UNCHECKED_boxes / total_boxes * rating_upper_boundary
eg: Rating is a number up to 10, there are 20 checkboxes and 3 were checked. The result is, (20-3) / 20 * 10 = 8.5

If sometime in the future you decide to add more checkboxes... You can do something like this:
- Instead of marking, in the database, which fields are checked, mark the ones that are not, and do the inverse logic. If a field is marked in the database it means that item is ok, and there's no problem in the game (the user did NOT check the checkbox and you marked the field as true)
- When you add new fields update the database and set them to true (only the new fields) for all the records that were already in the DB.
- The rating may increase slightly, depending on how many fields you add, but it will be coherent for all records since it will mean those problems were not reported by any user (which was obviously impossible since there was no checkbox to report them )

PS: I think you shoud use a weighted mean instead. Clearly not all problems have the same impact... You may also want to consider some exceptions, like "The game doesn't load at all", in which case the rating should automatically be 0. If it's hard to come up with good weights for each item then at least consider the exceptions. If the game has some problem that makes it unplaybale then the rating is automatically 0, otherwise get the arithmetic mean of the remaining problems.

Nice post, Kemosabe-TBC!

The way you calculate the rating, is very similar to what i thought of.
And it would be easy to add fields.

Kemosabe-TBC wrote: PS: I think you shoud use a weighted mean instead. Clearly not all problems have the same impact... You may also want to consider some exceptions, like "The game doesn't load at all", in which case the rating should automatically be 0. If it's hard to come up with good weights for each item then at least consider the exceptions. If the game has some problem that makes it unplaybale then the rating is automatically 0, otherwise get the arithmetic mean of the remaining problems.

Yeah, i thought of dividing the formular in 2 parts:

1. Game is working / partially working (thumb up)
+ checkboxes for small things like sound stutter (weight 1)
+ checkboxes for bigger things like DRE ingame (weight 2)
-> calculate rating

2. game is not working (thumb down)
+ checkboxes for all not-working stuff (like green / black screen)
-> rating = 0

sounds good - let me know when you want/what you need if we are to host it here on gc-forever