What I am working on

[nico]

Hi guys! First off I want to thank everybody for the enormous amount of positive feedback I have recieved on Tiggit!

Now I think it's time to plan the way forward. Below is a small plan of the next things I think I should work on, based on the most frequent requests I've gotten. I am open for more ideas and suggestions, of course, feel free to post below.

The plan:

Update #1: Redoing The Installer / Directories

• Installer will ask users where to install the main program and the games. Done, although users don't pick game directory directly yet.
• Existing users will get the option to move installed files.
• The installer will come in both .exe and portable .zip format. Done
• The installer will have fewer steps (one less exe), reducing the chance of failure Done, and seems to have solved several bugs.
• It will be possible to uninstall the launcher (with the option of leaving games installed.) Semi-done, should ask user if they want to remove games.
• The main program will work in offline mode. You can't install new games, but you can play the ones you have.
  

Update #2: Sorting And More List Columns Done
We will add columns for:

• number of downloads Done
• number of votes Done
• date added Done
  

You will be able to sort by any of the columns (including game title) by clicking the column header. All done!

Update #3: Auto-updating games
I've already been working on a system for this for a while, which is about 70% done. Here are the currently planned features:

• Auto-updates games to latest version, as soon as we know about it.
• Detects broken/changed links and report them to the server, so we can fix it.
• Supports multiple sources / mirrors, if one URL fails.
• New: Will unpack zip, rar, 7z, tar.gz/bz2 and some exe installers directly, meaning games can be added faster and will be kept more up-to-date.
• Will (later) support automatic patching, which means you won't have to re-download the entire game when it updates, only the changed parts.
  

#4: Open Game Registration

• Anyone can register games, on a web site.
• Moderators pick what games will appear in the launcher.
• (Possibly: ) Anyone edit/update game entries, like a wiki
• (Can grow into later: ) Community features: reviews, comments, mods, developer profiles, and so on
  

The last one is still on the idea stage, but with some work I believe we can make this happen easily. Also I hope others with more web coding experience can join in and help out with this. As things progress along, I will keep this thread updated. I will also link to here from the blog and a couple of other places so more people can see what is going on.

[ap3xultima]

Some great features mentions there dude, looking forward to it.

The open registration I see to be a big feature, clearly this will lower your workload when, you get some mods, and concentrate on programming etc.
There could be an issue with people spamming. Perhaps add a time-out, say around an hour, after a suggestion is made.

I'm personally looking forward to the new installer because I'm picky with where my files are

[xaos3k]

Altough i'm running a Linux i totally like this program and i'm a bit sad that there's no linuxsupport mentioned in your small plan.

For that game-registration-thingy i'd recommend a system similar to pacman/aur. Already approved games should be in a mainchannel and games which are suggested by the community should go in some 'betachannel'.
Then a votingsystem should be developed for the 'betachannel' and if a game gets enough votes it gets into the mainchannel.
The voting should be done either by going to the according 'betachannel'-website or by adding the 'betachannel' into Tiggit (should be available in options) and do a vote there.

I guess that way you could be sure that a game is running on more than one platform (and currently i mean Windows XP/7 and even Vista here, maybe even older Windowsplatforms) and that it doesn't contain any viruses/malware/... .

So that's it from me (at least for now )

[Aquillion]

One worry about auto-updating: This could be abused to force spyware or trojans into games. Steam avoids this by having strict quality control, but obviously you can't afford to do that on a free service.

I'm not sure what can be done about this. Possibly, once you've set up your moderation service and appointed moderators, they can vet proposed patches before pushing them out.

[nico]

(04-28-2012 10:37 PM)xaos3k Wrote:  Altough i'm running a Linux i totally like this program and i'm a bit sad that there's no linuxsupport mentioned in your small plan.

That's only cause it's a small plan Tiggit already mostly runs on Linux (and from what I hear, compiles on Mac), it's the games and game data (finding native ports etc) that needs more work.

Quote:For that game-registration-thingy i'd recommend a system similar to pacman/aur. Already approved games should be in a mainchannel and games which are suggested by the community should go in some 'betachannel'.
Then a votingsystem should be developed for the 'betachannel' and if a game gets enough votes it gets into the mainchannel.

I really like the idea of voting on submitted games. I've looked a bit into aur, and will look over the site in more detail later for more ideas.

BTW, if anyone fancies prototyping some code for this, maybe even start a github project, that would be very awesome. I imagine a super-minimalistic version should be pretty easy to make, just some mysql with a simple php overbuild. I can help out with integrating into tiggit and similar stuff later. Or maybe there's already some free software package we could use that I'm not aware of?

[xaos3k]

I created some stuff using PHP and MySQL about three or four years ago. So i should be able to create the minimalistic approach (maybe even more, that depends on the time i have available as i'm trying to apply to Gamedesign at the HTW Berlin).

But that'll have to wait until tomorrow

[nico]

(05-03-2012 08:37 AM)xaos3k Wrote:  I created some stuff using PHP and MySQL about three or four years ago. So i should be able to create the minimalistic approach (maybe even more, that depends on the time i have available as i'm trying to apply to Gamedesign at the HTW Berlin).

But that'll have to wait until tomorrow

That would be awesome. We really woudn't need much to get started, it's much easier to build on something once we have something to build on, however small.

[nico]

STATUS UPDATE:

Finished new installer + portable zip version. Updated task list at the top of this thread. By the lack of feedback I've recieved on this, I assume most people got it working and are now busy playing games

Also added minor item to milestone #3 (about archive/exe unpackers.)

[videotape]

(05-05-2012 05:34 AM)nico Wrote:  STATUS UPDATE:

Finished new installer + portable zip version. Updated task list at the top of this thread. By the lack of feedback I've recieved on this, I assume most people got it working and are now busy playing games

Also added minor item to milestone #3 (about archive/exe unpackers.)

that's what i've been doing, also i wanted to ask about assigning our own categories to the games in our library i thought you mentioned it earlier and id love to have less than the 15 categories i have now

[nico]

MORE STATUS UPDATE:

Finished entire point #2. You can click headers to sort now + a few other changes.