pharum wrote:Hi everyone, I'm new around here and I'm trying to understand the scope of this project and how you're plannig to do it. First of all, let me tell you that I love what you're trying to accomplish and the way you're planning everything is amazing, I'm a computer engineer I think it's the right thing to do. The agile aproach is great but things like the Data Model must be clear from the beginning to try cover every corner case possible.
Hi pharum, nice to have you here!

Thanks for your encouraging words, this is really appreciated. Planning everything upfront is as important as it is impossible.

You just cannot consider every corner case out there, but I hope that we will have most of them covered without drifting too much into "German over-engineering" or wasting too much time. And building a solid legal and technical basis is essential, as we've learned from other projects' problems over the years.
pharum wrote:First of all, I've been looking at the test pages on the wiki (the monkey island one) and I'm not sure how you're storing the compilations. Is it a Game with a specific game type and relations to the different releases that it contains?
Basically, yes. Every compilation will have its own game entry
flagged as such. This is necessary because compilations, just like every game, have their own release histories which we need to document. We will then mirror every compilation release to the games contained in it. While this is quite some data duplication, I think it is necessary, because the mirrored game releases will have slightly different data in it. For instance, while we will link all the media covers to the compilation release, the mirrored game release will only have the media with the game on it linked. BTW I wrote
a blog piece about this some time ago.
pharum wrote:Another thing I'm curious about is what you're going to store about each game. I know that you're going to store images of different types but, are you planning this types to be like categories?. Let me explain, for example, you have screenshots or different types of covers (BTW I like your approach about the box model for the covers, with the covers stored like that you can make a 3d model of the case, right?) but, how about maps, artworks and things like that? Will they have some special place like "Extras" or "Maps" on the database or you're not going to store them?
Basically, we will try to store everything about each game.

All the things that come with releases
will be stored as goodies. We just need to expand the data model for this, e.g. separating between digital and printed goodies, or link the goodies to the packagings or media where they belong to, or find a way to document goodies outside releases, e.g. from internet sites. If you take a look at
our UML model, you will find a group "ReleaseContent" which shows the current state.
Screenshots and covers are stored elsewhere in the data model. Screenshots are not implemented, yet, but will have tags attached to it like screen resolution, graphics mode, or game content shown. Covers already
have types implemented, too.
pharum wrote:Are you planning to link to external resources like reviews or guides? (for example, link to a specific entry on gamefaqs or a review from some online magazine).
Yes. But as we aim to really preserve things forever, and as links tend to often die, we will always prefer screenshots of online reviews or dumps of game FAQs. Having said this, we will of course respect the copyrights, so such stuff will be stored as a non-visible backup of the link, I think, just in case it dies or we'll get author's permission to publish it at Oregami.
pharum wrote:Well, these are some of my doubts and if I keep reading the forum maybe there will be more (hope you don't mind if I ask...

). I'll try to help bringing new ideas and when the time comes to start developing maybe I'll be able to help.
We certainly don't mind answering questions. Questions and doubts are really important to further improve our planning. And the time for developing is now, please just watch
gene's developer diary, and jump in if you feel like.
