What I would love to see in Lakka

Libretro Lakka
#1

Hey everybody,

first up: I am a developer myself and often thought about contributing to the project. Unfortunately I have no experience with C++ or other technologies of this project (like LibreELEC etc.) Currently I do not have enough time to get into the whole project to develop for it.

There are some features that I would love to seen in Lakka. I am not sure if the features contradict the philosophy of Lakka but I want to write them down anyway…

Game Meta Data

Pretty sure that something like this was requested before. It would be very nice to have game meta data (e.g. developer, relase date, description etc.) shown for every game. Maybe it would not even be such a big effort. We could implement a scraper that collects the information from various sources. Afterwards it renders the information to an image that could be shown as a new thumbnail type (like boxart etc.). A more difficult solution would be to render HTML out of the game information and display it using a webview. With this feature you could customize to look of every game.

Game Favorites and History

It would be so nice to be able to tag games as favorites. This could be displayed using a little icon next to the game title. I would also love to have the ‘total minutes played’ information next to the title. Another advantage could be to display a playing history as an entry in the game menu. It would be perfect to order the playlist by favorites and ‘time played’. Playlist options like this could be accessed by selecting the playlist without scrolling down to a game (instead of selecting the first game of the playlist automatically).

Game Database

To store the information for the features above I thought about a SQL-lite database. I don’t know if something like this already exists or if there are good arguments against it. Such a database could be used for other useful things:

Create a default dataset with known games. Join each game entry with a list of known checksums. Join each game entry with a list of known rom names. Use this dataset to find the right thumbnail for the playlists entries.

Conclusion

I know that some of the features would lead to a lot of work. As I said… I am not even sure if they maybe contradict the philosophy of Lakka. I like to know if the Game Favorites and History feature does have a chance if there is a bounty for it. I would definitely spend some money for it! If I have much spare time in the future I maybe think about writing it on my own and create a merge request. Would it be declined? :slight_smile:

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#2

It actually is a tremendous effort. Not because of a scraper or an sqlite db of metadata, but the application of the correct metadata to the game at hand. I myself am in the middle of that task for my own game launcher.

#3

It seems the guys over at RetroPie may already have a decent head start on metadata, and freely offers this tool https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Scraper Or at a minimum the information is being centralized here http://thegamesdb.net/ to develop a lakka scrapper against.

Personally for adding something new like this to Lakka, I would suggest it simply adopts the RetroPie format for storage, no point in reinventing the wheel.

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#4

We already have and display a lot of metadata. If you go to a game on a playlist and go to launch it, you’ll see:

Run
Remove
Information

If you go to ‘information’, it’ll show you the genre, publisher, developer, franchise (e.g., Mario, Zelda, Street Fighter), max players, TGDB rating, release date and then 3x checksum flavors.

We’ve talked about having a “favorites” playlist, which would add another option there, probably between Run and Remove, to add to that playlist. However, we all felt it was a bit redundant with the History playlist. That is, my History playlist is basically just full of my favorite games that I play a lot.

As for SQL-Lite, we strive to minimize our dependencies, and that’s a pretty big one. It’s also super-slow, so we made our own database format that houses all of our existing scanning stuff. It runs extremely fast compared with alternative scanning methods, but the fact that we use CRCs and existing ROM databases from specific sets means that not everyone’s games (and very few ROMhacks/translations) get picked up. OTOH, if we tried to do heuristics, with name-matching, etc., we would pick up more games, but we would also have false positives, so we’d need some way to correct those, which means more menus and more complexity.

Personally, I don’t think we should do any of this scanning stuff at all. It’s an ongoing headache/maintenance burden with an audience that is never satisfied (not attacking anyone here, it’s just a factual statement). Twinaphex goes out of his way to provide the features that people want, but I see this one as a never-win.

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#5

I’d say it would be nice to have a favorite menu instead of recent used content, specially because you can’t have many games appearing in that screen. What I’m doing is taking screenshots of games I like and use those as a favorite menu.

About the scraper, it is a nice solution, but the playlist scanning is already working fine. It only needs to scan games by filename, so playstation, dreamcast and other systems can be easier to categorize.

#6

@tonyhoro : Some people are working on favorite feature. It should be available on RA 1.6.6.

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