Author Topic: Game Player builds on Hiatus  (Read 2938 times)

tschak909

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Game Player builds on Hiatus
« on: January 13, 2016, 08:46:15 am »
Hi guys,

Sorry, for various reasons, I've had to ask phenigma to remove the game player from LinuxMCE.

This is temporary, and there are many reasons behind this, all of them my fault, and the decision was mine alone.

I am taking the opportunity to do several things:

* get rid of the 3 GIGABYTE deb packages containing metadata. Replace them with a web service that serves the relevant metadata.
* re-work how metadata is stored and related, so that it can scale much better than what we have.
* provide a way for user overrides without explicitly needing to replace the attributes in web admin.
* provide a way to control the emulators in a consistent manner. This is exceptionally difficult, and systems like Hyperspin have the benefit of a MANDATED OPERATING SYSTEM LEVEL MESSAGING SYSTEM to pass events to the emulators, without requiring patching. Being Linux, we have no such luxury, so I have to do some SERIOUS experimentation and research to determine the best way to control the emulators
* pull the build of the emulators away from the build system, leading to cutting the build time of LinuxMCE in half, at least. (Yes, my stuff was adding hours to the build process!)
* Dockerize the build system to allow for the latest versions of MAME to be built with precisely the dependencies needed, as well as providing a modular way to keep the build up to date.
* Provide a way to select which version of MAME to use. For those of us with varying collections, this is critical.
* Use hashes to identify media and media attributes.

It will all be back, I just need to do some serious re-working of it, as years of experience have shown that I implemented it wrong in the first place. That's okay, it's all a learning experience. I know better, now.

What are your thoughts?

-Thom

tschak909

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Re: Game Player builds on Hiatus
« Reply #1 on: February 01, 2016, 04:17:40 am »
I take, from the silence, that I can take my time and fold back in Game Player functionality, when I've had chance to do things right?

-Thom