Project:General Discussions: Difference between revisions

Project:General Discussions (view source)

Revision as of 05:21, 7 December 2014

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new section: "Game .ini Documentation?"

Xerxes

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 == Open Discussions ==
+=== Game .ini Documentation? ===
+This is kind of building off of the discussion had on [[Talk:Metroid_Prime_(GC)]] a year ago about gameini and its relevance to the wiki, but since I'm not talking about Prime in particular and that discussion is so old I'm going to post this here.
+Gameini definitely needs documentation. I think everyone agrees with that. To your average user, it probably seems like magic that he starts his game and Dolphin starts changing settings all on its own before the game even starts, and there's really no mention of it anywhere that I've seen. It just sort of exists, and even as an outsider I've seen tension surrounding it, just from my own limited glimpses into Dolphin's development. There's confusion for developers and end-users, and it all stems (primarily) from a lack of proper understanding of what the gameini settings even do and why they're there in the first place for each particular game.
+I'm thinking we could kill two birds with one stone here. What we have with the wiki is a really accessible, easily understandable format that's perfect for documenting something like this. Any undertaking to try and make sense of gameini is going to take TONS of effort and I understand that completely, but if it's going to be done, I think the best option is to do it in a setting like what we have here with the wiki. Here's my idea:
+Under configuration right now, we list non-default settings. This is good, and it does its job well enough, but why not expand configuration to include current defaults from the gameini right next to the non-default settings? In a separate section of course, so it wouldn't be confusing trying to figure out what settings you need to change for the game. I'm thinking we could have an expandable window that defaults as closed so that if you're doing a quick scan through the page you wont be bombarded with twenty settings that would be useless to the standard end-user. With this comes some major pros, and also some major cons, and I'll list the ones I've thought of.
+Pros:
+*Very easy to update, moreso than anything else on the wiki pages right now. Any user could use three clicks in the latest revision to get the gameini contents from the game's properties.
+*Helpful for developers. This would keep track of current default settings in a way that's visually appealing, right next to the game's title and picture AND right next to the non-default settings to show what needs to be changed in the ini, making it much simpler to find specific games and their current settings rather than going through a giant list of game IDs and trying to find the specific ID which is for his game, probably having to use an external website like gameTDB to look up the ID, AND making it easier to understand what settings need to be changed.
+*Helpful for users. With gameini settings being listed prominently, being on the game's wiki page, it'd start to familiarize users with what the gameini actually does, and why it has different settings, removing the voodoo magic stigma that plagues gameini settings right now.
+Cons:
+*This would take TONS of manhours to set up initially, creating a new template with all the potential gameini settings and applying it to each and every game's page. There's not much you can do about that, but this is a problem not so much with the implementation in the wiki so much as it is a problem with how complex and expansive gameini is, and a problem anyone trying to document this would run into, which will only get worse as time goes on.
+*Games have multiple IDs, and different IDs can have (or even need) different settings, or be missing gameini entirely. I'm thinking for this, in the expandable window we could list the different IDs for the game horizontally on the top, and then the settings vertically on the side, making it into a grid of sorts. I don't know how difficult this would be to implement though in the template, but I'm thinking it could be done with some planning. However a user might accidentally edit the wrong column if he doesn't check his ID first, and nobody would know that the settings are wrong until they looked themselves for that specific ID. We'd need to specifically mention that before editing the user should double check the ID and make sure he's making his edits to the correct version.
+*Without enough people actually updating this, it could lead to more confusion than it already does. However I don't think this is as big of a problem as it seems since once again, anyone can check their accuracy with three clicks.
+Other than that, I don't know. Like I've said twice this would be a huuuge undertaking, and I'm not suggesting we do it, like, today, but I'm thinking that with the right planning and some forethought we could definitely make this work. This will need a lot of feedback though, and I get that this idea is crazy, bordering on insanity, which is why I spent a full day thinking about it before posting this. - [[User:Xerxes|Xerxes]] ([[User talk:Xerxes|talk]]) 04:21, 7 December 2014 (CET)
 === Regions Consistency ===
 I think we should shorten the region code for Australia and Russia to AU and RU. There is currently no consistency with the others(JP,NA,EU,KO) being two letter codes. [[User:Zephyrsurfer|Zephyrsurfer]] ([[User talk:Zephyrsurfer|talk]]) 09:48, 8 November 2014 (CET)

Project:General Discussions: Difference between revisions

Project:General Discussions (view source)

Revision as of 05:21, 7 December 2014

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