MAT (240968) on 7/29/2018 3:40 AM · Permalink · Report

Ah yeah, when adding icons to those I also added their names to each major release ;))

Icons are OS specific or item-specific, while some are just a general icon that applies to the entire group (for example "Minimum RAM Required" icon).

Another thing, we have many duplicates because we separated same items per only some platforms, but not for all. We had three different CD-ROM media types. We have many mouses any keyboards, and those splits aren't as necessary since we only split them for some (i.e. PSX or PS2 mouse) but not for other platforms.

With CD-ROM and DVD-ROM the solution was easy since those are just merged (manually moving the games takes time, managed to move CD-ROM ones to a single group in two days, was about 700 of them, but for DVD-ROM it'll take me a while had over 3000 games, currently 2500 remaining to move).

In other cases maybe just merging it all wouldn't be good (despite the fact we can see listing based on platform so they are split and grouped at the same time). However, sometime we simply want to mention specific item that some game is compatible with but not all on the platform. This I tried to fix in the same way Sciere handled VR selection. In "Input Devices Supported" there's a VR, and then there's a whole new VR group where exact supported VR can be selected.

So my first try was to do that for "Light Guns". At first we had both "Light Gun" option and all specific light guns inside "Input Devices Supported". No we just have "Light Gun" and another group called "Light Guns Supported" which list them all (for each platform only those tied to that platform appear, not all, of course).

Another thing was that we had many "... Supported", '...Required" duplicates in same group which made many groups large. And also many didn't have required/supported text like Mouse on PC. Some games do require it, some games don't but support it. We obviously didn't care about that there.

Anyway, for that purpose I tried to eliminate duplicates in "Input Devices Supported" and create new group called "Input Devices Required" that only list those that were duplicates and required in the Supported group.

There are many other things that are grouped a bit strange in comparison to other stuff like we have many "Number of Players Supported" selections, but for some like "Kinect" or something else we have all that grouped like "Kinect Supported', "Kinect Required", "Number of Players: Kinect" and so on, all in the same group. Kinect is just another input device so moved supported/required version of it to groups that apply.

There are many inconsistencies how we handle something, and maybe some of them are too far gone to be altered or are better the way they are. Well, at least everyone has full overview how all is connected and can point to suspicious elements or tell us how to improve some things. Unlike Tracy I can only re-attach different specs between games manually so if some tech spec has 10,000+ games and is wrong, that sort of thing will have to wait, lol. Sort of how we have 3rd-person perspective deprecated genre with tens of thousands games that will probably remain uncleared by 2030, lol.

Ah, got a bit long-winded here for no reason... this will be looked into and I'm not doing any bigger decisions or changes on my own or in a way they can't be reverted back in the same fashion. But since MobyGames is user-driven site, it's always best to have more comments and suggestions for further improvement and changes where everyone can benefit from.