The next update of My Game Collection will take a bit longer since I’m redoing the import code to more easily support multiple services.
I’m also adding support for Xbox Live and Desura, both with their problems 🙂
Xbox Live is not really an Xbox only list of games, all games get returned that are on your Live account. This also includes the games you have under Games For Windows Live. A second problem is that the game titles that are returned are sometimes not what you expects or what you want, so automatic linking to TheGamesDB will be harder for Xbox.
No API for desura, so I had to resort to ‘old school’ webpage scraping, which means I don’t have much more than the title of the game.
All of this meant that I needed to rethink the import of games and I think the conclusion is that the new way will be a lot better:
* Gone are issues: When games are not found in TheGamesDB it will get added without a link to the database. Games that have no link will get a button on the top of their detail page to easily allow you to manually link them to TheGamesDB
* Controlled automatic import: You will need to check a checkbox next to the games title to allow it to be imported. Uncheck it and it is out of your collection. This allows you to really be sure that all imported games are really wanted in your collection. You will of course be able to ‘Check all’, this results in the system we know today.
* Approve new games: new games will be shown in a list for you to check instead of an full automatic update. Annoying were the messages ‘A game has been imported’, but you had no idea what game got imported.
* Overview: you will be able to see all your linked games for that system in an overview for easily (un)checking.
I hope you guys will be as exited as I am now with this new system. The raw version is up & running and I can tell you that it ‘s a lot easier to use (and the code is a lot more robust)
Converting existing userdata will give me some headaches, but something has to 🙂