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Caesar III said:
To break the silence in here... keep up the good work, it really does look good. Too bad the collaboration here on gaf is not as expected.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm a bit surprised by that. I think it's partly the time of year, with a lot of social activities and big game releases vying for attention.

Also, it may be better for this topic to go to the OT section, where it would perhaps disappear a little less fast?
 
I've now added a new option for features where you can specify that it is a user value. These features work very similar to the normal ones, but instead of having one value per game version, they have one value per user per game version.

These can be used to track anything user specific, like whether you own the game, what you paid for it, if you started or finished it, etc.
 
Fixed some small issues with user values and added Google Authentication, while retaining the option to choose your own (NeoGAF matching ;) ) username.
 
Did a bit more work tonight. Now the UserValues are working properly, albeit still very basic. I solved one or two issues with them (among others an issue with versions tab not loading when a user view was added), and now all the features that accept user values will now show on their details page all the games that you've entered values for this.

So using this, you can list what games you own, what you are playing, which you've completed, etc., all by going to the details page for that feature.

I think the most sense to do next is make report groups, and how your values stack up against the average, etc.
 
I've cleaned up the game overview page that I messed up a bit when I added the user values - looks better now. I've also added a shortcut so that you are able to quickly add a value to a game's first version from the game overview page, if you see that something is missing (if you're logged in). I've also added on the Feature details page, the first game version that is recorded for that feature. I've also started experimenting with providing the data from the site through an OData interface, should anyone want to consume some of the data for their own sites. I've fixed some issues with the note count / pop-up window as well, but it's still not completely working correctly. Layout at least is somewhat improved though. :)

Next up I really want to do some reports/lists, but I'm still struggling a little with how I would most efficiently do that.
 
You can now go to a publication or reviewer and add a score modifier. Say add 5 to all Eurogamer reviews because they score lower, but detract 5 from Dan Whitehead because he generally scores higher than his colleagues. Filtered average scores are shown with the originals. Only the game level scores are shown filtered for now, not yet the ones on the version level.
 
- you can now add user reviews to individual game versions, so you can write an updated review for a later version. The current average ranking takes all reviews, so if you started with a bad version on release, but the game got better with newer versions, your aggregate game score will still be lower than when you released the game in that later state. I think I'll eventually change that to only take the score for the highest version number.

- you can now add user reviews to publications, so you can review a site

- you can now add user reviews to reviewers, so you can now review a reviewer

- you can now review individual feature values

I'm still thinking the last one through, on how to organize that information though. But I thought it would be a cool idea, that that would be how you indicate your positives and negatives in the game. That could lead to some very fine-grained information, where you could indicate what features matter to you and how much, and have a score auto-adjust in that way.
 
Bookmarked. This site would be PERFECT if it had retro consoles. (If it does, I didn't see it.) Thanks, pretty amazing work.
 
Looking good. I only have two suggestions: add a listing for companion apps for tablets/smartphones as well as one for various HUD options. I can't tell you how many games I really wish I could fade, rearrange or eliminate the HUD all together.
 
Slackerchan said:
Looking good. I only have two suggestions: add a listing for companion apps for tablets/smartphones as well as one for various HUD options. I can't tell you how many games I really wish I could fade, rearrange or eliminate the HUD all together.
Click to expand...

Already in there! Under Controls you have App, and then below App you can also check in more detail what you can do with the App. Same for HUD, which is under Graphics. Of each feature you can also find a table of values entered for that feature, so for instance:
http://www.techingames.net/Features/Details/153?selectedTab=Table should give you an overview of all game versions currently in the database that allow you to disable the HUD. Once that value is set for a game, you should find it in the Overview tab easily enough. For instance for AC:Unity, here under Graphics the almost last two features are Can Customise and Can Disable HUD:

http://www.techingames.net/Games/Details/69?selectedTab=Overview

_Ryo_ said:
Bookmarked. This site would be PERFECT if it had retro consoles. (If it does, I didn't see it.) Thanks, pretty amazing work.
Click to expand...

Any console/platform can be added, if you have enough rights. Then all I need to do manually is make a visual style for it (otherwise it'll just be white).

A new platform requires 1000 rep though, so just tell me what you want to have added, and I'll add them, if you promise to enter some games and features for them. ;) Anyone here who is willing to add some data will get a rep boost from me of course.

I think it would be great if games that trail-blazed a feature would make it in there at the very least, but if enough people get enthusiastic, there's no real limit ...
GifGafIsTheBestGaf said:
wow, amazing work op. bookmarked it
Click to expand...

Thanks!
 
I just did a lot of work on incorporating the User Reviews of features as best I could. This means that you can now not only easily review a single feature implementation of a game, but it will show user scores right there in the Game Overview, and the main Category (Controls, Graphics, etc.) will show an aggregate score of ratings of individual features in that category for the game (currently based on the latest feature/version of the game that has user reviews only).

Feature values for a specific feature are now also paged, and you can search them. I've also added a few more style classes for older platforms, so when I (or someone) adds them, they'll look distinctive.
 
Ended up doing a lot of work on this the past weekend, but really satisfied with the results. There are a few small things not entirely working perfectly and I need to pretty up a bunch of stuff, but in particular I am happy with:

- the way cartridge based game versions are styled to actually look like a cartridge ;) (see Super Mario Bros. which I added as a test, need to add more features later)

- the way you can user review individual features and the scores aggregate to the category as well as that feature for the game.

- the way you can go to a user review of a game version, and then see: the review, the user values (e.g. did the user complete the campaign, what did he or she pay, etc.), and the individually reviewed features for that game.

As said, there are probably one or two glitches here and there, but I think this is a good basis for seeing what particular features are popular in a specific game, which gives you a much better idea of whether you'll like it, or if someone reviewed a feature you are particularly interested in (like support for a specific driving wheel or something like that).

Biggest thing I need to solve now (which I got working on another site but for some reason not yet here) is get auto-complete working for stuff like reviewers and game series (to be added) and such. Also, I need to complete the user-votes so you can up or downvote certain reviews and such, but that shouldn't be too much work now.
 
I actually didn't know that site. It's clearly not a relational database though, which will eventually hold it back some, but still an amazing site with clearly a very strong community.
 
Although it's just a regular workweek night I managed to do a surprising amount of solid work, fixing some long-standing issues I've had with adding and editing features making everything a lot faster and solving a nasty duplication bug (was due to jquery being bundled twice).

I've started building out the gameplay section as a result and have focussed a bit on Super Mario Bros. to start filling that out. Plan is to take some key games through the years to build that out and see if I can keep it orderly. Will probably need to rearrange some features occasionally but that's not a big issue with this setup.
Once I've done a few games the layout will probably get another look over.
 
Did some small cosmetic fixes yesterday, including showing the actual score color coded, hiding some superfluous data, and messing with the layout of the version overview a bit, made the feature overview a little better to navigate now also for users who are not logged in. ;)
 
I added auto-complete to creating games (for publishers and developers) and reviews (for publications and reviewers) which hugely speeds up the data entry process.
 
And did the same for platforms, so those can be added faster as well. Added the Atari ST and Amiga for instance, because those were the first platforms for Another World, etc.

I've also made the review scores look prettier here and there.
 
I came across my old favorite ACE Magazine, and decided that to honer them, I'd show aggregate scores in a scale of 0-1000. Users that don't like it will get an option to divide by 10 or 100 later, but it's always easier to show less than what's there, than to show more than what's there.

Decided to update the OP with a list of the current features. Starting to grow at a nice pace, and with the data entry now being much easier adding data can and will eventually become more of a priority ;).
 
Lots more work done on the aggregate scores. I couldn't find a too crazy way of keeping all the aggregate scores 'live' and being able to sort results efficiently (which is kinda obvious really) so I now update the database game and gameversion entries each time a user or critic review is added, updated or deleted. Too bad this means that if I'd want to add sorting for the modify-filtered scores, I'd probably have to build a table that holds the modified values per user if I'd want to make that something worthwhile. Certainly possible, but that could definitely increase the amount of data being tracked by a lot. Have to think about that a bit more before I dive into that.

Anyway, I've updated the layout of the scores and now show them in as many places I thought made sense. I think that's all working correctly now, except that the per-platform game lists show the score aggregates for all platforms instead of just the scores for that platform, so that could still be improved.

Optimised editing versions and such as well. Everything is becoming nice and fast now (insofar as the cheap SQL hosting I'm currently using isn't being overburdened ;) but performance so far seems good enough).
 
This has turned out to be one of the most productive weekends in some time. The content management is now to a large extent complete, unless I decide to add more features (I'm considering adding tracking who worked on a game in what capacity, was employed by what publisher,developer or publication from when to when, etc.).

A few optimizations may need to be made here and there to the data model, but it is mostly ready and adding games, versions, reviews, feature values, and new features to track is all pretty smooth and fast, and workable on basically any HTML5 capable platform. I've been pumping in a dozen or so more Eurogamer reviews to test how smooth that works, and reviewed bits and pieces of games that I own and played (and beaten) myself, and all that makes for a pretty smooth experience so far.

Hope some of you get round to testing it some time. There's very few things that are being tracked on Neogaf that you can't put into a database here now!
 
Alright, I managed to bring in some more big features that I am excited about.

First, I built out the whole review a feature for a game (version) aspect. In the backend, the scores are updated after each user review is added or updated so they can be queried properly. I also added an option for adding published review reviews of individual features. You can do this by reading the text that mentions a specific feature and take a rating from there, for instance, or take it from the plusses and minusses list if the review has them.

Then, I added a query that picks up individual feature values that have a critical or a user review and list the ones that score above 600 or below 500 as plusses or minusses against the game, and ditto for the 'casual' scores (which I've divided up into the typical five stars thing of aweful, bad, neutral, good, great) of above 2.8 or below 2.2.

Seems to work quite well! Will need a bit more tuning (some links, some additional checks), but it turns up results already very well.

In addition you can add reviews that have no scores (could already), give them a more precise score (translated to 0-1000) and now I've added the option to give them a 'causal' score (basically 1-5, you can map almost all of the 'casual' stuff onto that well enough).

I also updated some of the styles for different platforms (Vita, 3DS, Linux)
 
Did a lot of cleanup, removing some bugs in the new features, and doing some massive styles cleanup, so that now the vast majority of styles is properly CSS driven. Best way to test it for me was by switching back to a white background style and seeing how easy it would be to switch back and forth, so I can implement custom themes fairly easily later.

The site looks a lot better already I think.

Check out something like LittleBigPlanet 3 if you want to see some of the feature reviews in action.

Come on Gaf, love this already, don't play so hard to get. ;)
 
A lot more work done on the website layout and some bugfixing. I also added some auto-loading, so that you get search results when you type.

techingames_search_game.png


Quite happy with the basic layout of the site now. Though I'm sure there's a lot more that could be improved, the layout is really clean.

Example of a game page as it is now:

techingames_evolve_overview.png


A game details page that has individual features reviewed, which are then automatically highlighted as pro or con on the details panel:

techingames_driveclub_details.png


And a close-up of how a reviewed feature gets an 'inline' score shown in the overview page.

techingames_feature_review.png


(Building the overview is done dynamically each time now, so it's a bit slow, takes a few seconds typically. I'll cache that to a file eventually so it will be instantaneous)

Also, although I have examples of scores here, it's up to the user / reviewer to choose between a 'casual' review of anything or wanting to be more precise. The hardcore among us may want to be able to say that an implementation of a certain feature is better in game x than y (like me), but other people or at other times you may be happy with just assigning good or bad ...
 
I've now done a considerable amount of work on the reporting feature, something I've long looked forward to. ;) I've decided to go for a two stage process - first get a good report result from any combination of features that you can filter further, and then add some way to create custom reports where you choose what featureids you want to query, and allow you to save and run that query with filter settings for each feature.

The first part is done, and I've used it for features that have child features in the feature tree. These features will show a new 'Report' tab, that instead of showing the current feature's values as the Table tab does, shows the results from its children grouped by game. You can see and filter a lot of information from here already, and you can link through to children that have children of their own.

For instance go here to see the various multiplayer modes supported per game per platform:

http://www.techingames.net/Features/Details/45?selectedTab=Report

And then if you click on 'Same Device' you'll go to that one where you can see what games support local Cooperative, Competitive, Same Screen, Split Screen, Hot Seat and Second Screen multiplayer.

http://www.techingames.net/Features/Details/46?selectedTab=Report

techingames_feature_report.png


And again, all this is dynamic. So add a feature in the feature tree, add some values for one or two game versions, and it will be there.

I think it's nice to see that even though this is a generic setup, it's already catching up with some dedicated gaming sites in terms of this kind of functionality ...

But we're not done yet by a long shot. :) I've been at this for four months now ... pretty crazy, and I still never thought I'd get this far. But also not finished by a long shot. ;)
 
I made sure that critical and user reviews can now also link a video directly, which I thought would be useful in this day where everyone is going straight to youtube anyway.

Then I was thinking about adding some more old games from the ACE (Amiga, Atari, PC, MegaDrive, GameBoy) era of gaming, and then I came across another one of my favorite games of all time, Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker, by Archer McLean. As it always strikes me how all-round talented that guy is, I thought I'd really want to be able to see on my site as well who worked on what. So I setup a 'credits' section where you can add who did what for a game, and also if other development studios pitched in and in what way, or what companies did, say, the CGI (one for you Laa-Yosh? ;)).

So now there's a little imdb in the site too. ;)
 
For Vita games I can't see if a game is compatible with the PS TV or not. I'd suggest that be added, otherwise this is a really cool project.
 
Thanks! I was thinking about that just yesterday. I've added it as a new platform. Will update the stylesheet for it later today.
 
I have made a test query where you can add a few featureIds and get results like below. So all I need now is a UI for creating a selection. I may just add something first where if you are logged in, you can just select your favorite features, and start expanding that to shared or custom reports from there. We'll see.

Today though I've first fixed an issue with the reviews I had already uploaded, and I've added the support for reporting on the UserValue type features (these are features that hold values only applicable to the logged on user, and are not properties of the game itself, like how much you paid, did you start it, complete it, how long did that take you, etc.)

So if you now choose details for the User feature category and go to Report, you'll see something like:

techingames_feature_report_user.png


Well, that is, if you actually entered data. ;)

This will later expand to show how your values compare to the values of the averages of other users, etc.

If you go to a feature detail page, you can see the feature tree for that feature if applicable, so you can easily browse it from there too.

I also made several improvements so you can add, update and delete feature values and user values from both the Overview and the Versions panels.
 
You can now set user filters on Features, and these will be used to generate your custom report in your control panel under Report (click your login name right top to get there). Currently it just selects the filtered feature value, but does not yet apply the filter on it - that will come tomorrow (no real time today, but I snuck in a moment or two ;) )

I also looked at Giant Bomb api integration which seems interesting. May use it for something yet - at least I would like to auto-link a review. I already worked out the necessary api calls and fields for that.
 
Ok, filter is applied now too, and will show only matches for all the filtered settings. Currently only inclusions are supported, so that will expand, but I can now quickly make my favorite report show all games that are 1080p, 60fps and support local multiplayer..,

Now it's becoming more an issue of throwing insane amounts of data at it. ;)
 
Some more tweaks and fixes, an option to create notes that appear as news articles on the front page, and I've started to enter all data from iWaggle3D into the site as a bit more of a serious test. I already talked to the owner of iWaggle to see if we can get this site to be his database in the future.
 
I've updated the site so I (or anyone, really - will be interesting to see if I need to limit that at some point ;) ) can post articles on the site.

I posted up an article of my own called Deconstructing the videogame.
 
An odata api is in place giving you options to query data from iPhone or Android apps or other websites, as well as a json export of the data used in the game overview panel. If you are working on or want to try to create an iPhone or Android app to consume this data or want to integrate it into your site, let me know and I may be able to help.
 
Brawl96 said:
How often do you plan on updating this personally? And where do you get your information?
Click to expand...

Right now I mostly update what I come across. All the games I own myself, when they get an update, I take that information from the PS4's update history and type it into the system (fortunately I type fast). Ideally, more people start doing this with more platforms (don't have an Xbox One yet) and more games (I'm currently not in a position to buy all games out of pocket ;) ).

The idea is that the information is crowd-sourced - the more people use it, the more data it will have. Then I can focus on getting the data correct (data verification is in place) and cleanup or merge where necessary.

My sources are Digital Foundry, beyond3d (I'm a long time member there) for technical data, Wikipedia and the various online stores for publication data and multiplayer options, etc. Where possible/necessary I try to link to the source. Links to reviews I often take from Neogaf review threads. I'll be focussing on getting more ways of getting data into the system as efficiently (and legal) as possible.

There are a lot of threads here at Neogaf that would greatly benefit from using this database. For instance there have been several threads already about Chromatic Aberration in games. This is a simple flag that can be ticked under Graphics/Effects, after which you can report on them from there and refer to that report in future discussions.

For instance: http://techingames.net/Features/Details/281 or one level higher: http://techingames.net/Features/Details/279

Same for review threads, OTs, etc. And should any new effect come up in the discussions, anyone can add a field for it into the Features tree with just a few clicks in the site. I don't think many people realize how powerful this part is.

Unlike projects like Giant Bomb that don't want the data to be used to create anything of commercial value (still a great project though!), my prime goal is to have a good database, so I am not worried with not getting credits for the traffic for now. Ideally I want this so it can be used by anyone, commercially or no, more like Wikipedia than anything else, really.

When the time comes that the load becomes so large that additional money needs to be spent, there should be enough parties interested to voluntarily donate some money. I have seen several examples where sites and projects can be kept completely add-free, and this is something I'd love to strive for.

Being a good database is the prime goal, not a side project. So with the data model in place and the basic user interface for content management pretty functional, the real work starts now with getting people interested in getting data into the system. Any input about the best way of doing so is appreciated. If needs be, I'll see if I can get some students from a local university to pitch in, perhaps with a small financial incentive (I have a day job).

At the very least I want to have the information on the current generation as complete as possible, though being 40 I am obviously also interested in getting highlights from my past in there. ;) (which is why you can already find some Atari/Amiga stuff in there right now)
 
Brawl96 said:
How often do you plan on updating this personally? And where do you get your information?
Click to expand...

Today I noticed updates for Apotheon and Trials Fusion so I added the versions and patch notes. Apotheon now supports the light bar so I ticked that feature for that version.

I tested the Ajax jsonp cross site call for the game overview data and that now works. I also tested hooking up a wpf desktop app using an odata service reference and that works fine too.
 
Various small improvements (detailed on the site), and I've been working a bit on making an html embed easier to handle as well, which could be less work in some cases. For instance, http://www.techingames.net/Games/Ga...l=false&categoryName=Graphics&platformTag=PS4

Should basically use only stylesheet http://www.techingames.net/Content/techingames.css

Which uses only prefixed style names (tig_) so risks at conflict is minimal and you can choose between taking the default techingames.css and tweaking it for your own needs or making your own, much easier.

(leave out partial=False when you really embed)

(I'll be making more embeddable info, showing the latest gameversion, etc.)
 
I've had to enable cross-site stuff to allow iframes, so I've done that, and I've also learnt that style sheets don't travel across iframes so I've created a special light layout page for the embedded pages, and these have hard links to the site opening in a new page/tab.

I've also created an as yet much less pretty but compact table view:
http://www.techingames.net/Games/Ga...anLegends&partial=false&categoryName=Graphics

platformTag=PS4 also works for both.
 
I've implemented platform filters all around, so if you're only interested in one or two platforms, you can add those to your user filters (go to platforms, click details on one of them, go to user filters, click add and save - all defaults are set correctly). Now if you search, view overviews, etc., it will only show games for that/those platform(s).

I've now also implemented the feature filters for value entry, and cleaned up the feedback on entered values. You no longer get a popup, but color coded feedback on the value that was updated, and if there was a (validation) error, you get to see that message too.

For instance, here I've added same device multiplayer to my user filters, and because I have a feature filter, it will default to showing the filtered list here.

As the Same Device also has child items, the tree appears as usual for me to expand.

ajax_update_with_feedback.png


Together with this I've also made some efficiency improvements when entering a new game, it will forward you to the new version page, showing only your favorite platforms if you have any, and filling in all the default information so you basically only have to check the region and the releasedate. After that, it will go straight to that version's features so you can enter those. Once that's done you can do sync or copy to create the other versions and tweak those values from there.
 
After having done some data entry, that last change is very, very nice. I've also cleaned up the embedding by now having a single point of entry for it and cleaning up the parameters. So www.techingames.net/embed?id=RaymanLegends&platforms=WiiU,Vita etc. More examples under News on the front page.

Also changed the cross platform sync to show in the version overview, changed its default behavior to no longer create versions but just sync the feature values, added a cross-gen sync (currently defaults to gen 7,8). Creating the versions is then done by just using the Copy option.
 
I've added support for iframe-resizer, which is the best too I could find for the job!

So you can now have various embed options that look like this and will auto-scale thanks to David Bradhsaw's excellent library:

http://www.techingames.net/embed?id=RaymanLegends&category=Multiplayer

http://www.techingames.net/embed?id=RaymanLegends&display=Game (automatically shows the latest version)

etc.

More examples on the front page of www.techingames.net, as I've also added support for it in the Articles on the site.
 
Added shortcut icons for adding/removing platforms and features to the user filters and fixed an issue with adding game versions not always returning the correct view.
 
Some small updates, among others embedding for Credits and cleaning up the layout of credits, and a new front-page layout (still clearly not definitive) that I think looks better.

I've also been experimenting with creating some videos about the site. This is just a first test, but I do think it already gives you a pretty decent overview of the basics. Will go into more depth and create better videos, with voice overs, later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oanyQr3h4Ic

Although I primarily work on PC, I have an old Mac Mini that I bought to try out iOS development originally, and a little while ago I updated it to Yosemity. Today I learnt that this together with its version of QuickTime allows you to report your iPad output over Lightning to USB very easily, works great.
 
I will no longer be updating about this site here at Neogaf. I thought this would be the right place for it, but I was clearly mistaken. All that it has netted me is a two week ban for mentioning this site as a possible solution for a discussed problem in a few other threads, and that means this is not the place. I will from now on only discuss it on beyond3d, and we'll see how things go from there.
 
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