Fangame Directory Reorganisation

Community
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The Fangame Directory has served the community well for many years. However, the post has finally reached the forum’s character limit, as illustrated in this post.

As a result, it needs to be reorganised. I think that the opportunity should be taken to discuss what people want from the directory before taking any action. I have two broad ideas for the future of the directory, which I will discuss below.

Idea 1: Spread the FEU Directory over multiple posts
Instead of having one post cover every game, multiple posts would be shared amongst several games. FE8 would have a post of its own, with FE6 and 7 after that. Lex Talionis and FEXNA would have a post as well. After GBAFE and engines inspired by it, there would be posts for SNES, NES, Tellius, DS, 3DS, and Switch hacking. Translation patches could also have a post of their own along with the various miscelleanous projects that don’t fit anywhere else.

There are currently four columns in each table of the hack directory: project name, project creator, chapter count, and thread link. Screen space is a concern, but it may be useful to add some extra information, such as the project age rating or a brief note section indicating a hack is a telephone, for example. Projects are currently unordered within their tables: sorting by release date or alphabetical order would make sense to me.

The main benefit of this is that it keeps everything on FEU, and users could freely edit the posts to add hacks without any trouble. However, it would still be at the mercy of Discourse forum limitations and there’s every chance the split posts could reach the character limit again.

Idea 2: Host the Directory externally
Rather than having everything in a forum post, a spreadsheet would be created that would host the directory free from any Discourse technical limitations. Each game would have a tab, and each tab would have a variety of columns detailing things such as release dates or the project’s status. Adding a brief image of each game could be considered. Screen space would be of little concern and many columns could store information. The Complete/WIP/Cancelled split would be transferred into a column in this arrangement.

The same points about ordering projects would apply to a spreadsheet as split forum posts, but a spreadsheet can be manually sorted as the user desires. A spreadsheet would be easier to maintain, and would never run into any character limits. The main drawback of an external solution is that it is at the mercy of the external provider, such as Google. A seperate account would be needed to edit such a sheet, which would cause some additional friction for editing.

I would appreciate any feedback or alternative ideas for the Fangame Directory’s future.

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Havin’ it be separated by different posts sounds fine enough really. Doubt the character limit would be too much of an issue then.

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Looking through forum posts on the default Discourse Forum, there are something I found about about increasing max post length if you’re still looking into that.

I’m not well-versed in coding, but as I understand it, this suggests downloading the assets for a plugin linked in the post, creating a copy of it (forking), and adjusting the yml file in the new version to any set max length you may want before applying it to the site to circumvent the default limit. The problem seems similar to ours, The solution is relatively recent, and it also seems legitimate at first glance, as multiple Discourse staff members provided this solution. This could be a potential remedy if I’m not wrong. However, I don’t know if you may have already tried this, or if there would be any conflicts I’m not aware of, so this would need more looking into by someone with more coding knowledge than me (and someone with access to the forum’s source code of course).

If I’m wrong and this link doesn’t help, then I say go for the Google Spreadsheet. the spreadsheet style would lend itself well to organization of hacks, especially because we could separate each game into its own spreadsheet table on the same document. As you say, it also has almost no issue with space, as it potentially has 384,000 to 10 million rows depending on how many we use. The only problem is the ability to edit likely being more difficult like you mention, and there could hopefully be ways around that. If we can’t find a solid solution for the character limit, Google Sheets seems like the next best thing to me.

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I second this. I feel like using an external source to cover the games would be too much of a hassle, so simply using multiple posts to do that works just fine to me.
Can’t deny it, but at one point one of the posts (very likely FE8) will eventually hit the character limit, but can’t that just be fixed by having a second post to cover the newer titles?

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I’m not a fan of the fangame directory thread because it cannot be automatically sorted based on some criteria (eg. how popular or new a thread is) and the determined order creates bias. Additionally, threads stop counting the number of clicks for new links past a certain point, so it looks like nobody has ever tried certain projects.

My slot machine project is doing well!

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maybe someday someone will try pokemblem

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Despite my personal distaste of the thread, I understand that many people do like it, so I’ve kept it linked at the top of Getting Started pin for years.

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An alternative I linked is to simply browse the latest in Projects, which can optionally be sorted by “top”:
https://feuniverse.us/c/projects/17/l/top?period=all
But I think this sorts threads by the number of likes on the first post, which doesn’t consider views, unique visitors, or number of actual downloads. I don’t think only popular projects should be played, but I do think it should be easy for users to find the most popular ones if that’s all someone wants.

I think it’d be cool to have projects on a site like projects.feuniverse.us, and to have as much of it be automated as possible based on the tags most threads have, with the option to add other info by kind souls like Darrman who feel inclined to do so. Could even have a section of each project page editable as a wiki, maybe, and anyone with a forum account could edit it.

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I am going to veto increasing the character limit and extending the FEU site (either to make a proper wiki or some kind of auto-scraped project listing).

The former is going to increase our already-difficult backend storage woes without even solving the problem, long-term (we’re just going to hard-ram it again in a few years). The latter would be neat, but it’s a maintenance/implementation burden that I’m not really convinced is worth the effort.

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That’s understandable.

@Darrman you have a site, right? I’m open to replacing the fangames directory link in getting started to a page on your site if you end up setting something up there for the fe projects.

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Thank you for your feedback. My main concern about a Google Doc was needing an account to edit it, but apparently it is possible to allow anonymous editing without an account. With that, I believe that a spreadsheet is the way forward. Google’s whims may be fickle, but the directory would be free from any forum limitations. I’ve made a quick mockup of how the sheet will look (so excuse the mix between engines here).

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It shows off the basic layout and a few corner cases such as what I’d aim for with various hack translations. The category and status columns serve as replacements for the split custom/reskin and complete/WIP/cancelled tables. I would add in a few extra categories, a few of which are illustrated here. The main extra one I’m thinking of would be a different colour for shorter hacks (<10 chapters or so?) The benefit of a spreadsheet is that screen space is not a concern, so extra column suggestions are welcome.

I’ll start porting over the directory in a few days unless someone can convince me to take a different course of action.

I do, but right now I’m currently leaning towards the spreadsheet option. I appreciate the offer, though. I’ll almost certainly make a new thread with a link to said spreadsheet, so linking that would be appreciated when the time comes.
Speaking personally, a romhack wiki is a good idea (and I would be open to hosting one on my site) but as Cam said, it would be heavy maintenance. It would need a lot of preperation and planning.

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On further thought, I’m not as opposed to opening some kind of wiki under the FEU domain if we can find a lightweight solution. Most wiki-type software i’m aware of is pretty annoying to self-host (especially if we wanted to tie it to an FEU account).

Auto-scraping project threads would be the coolest solution, it’s just also the most complicated one.

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If something like that happened, I’d love to help on the writing end for some kind of wiki for sure

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I’ve been working on porting the directory over to a spreadsheet and filling out all the new columns. One place I’d like some feedback on is hack categorisation.
Right now I’ve come up with this:

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I would like some feedback on the categories. The main thing I’m weighing up is whether or not PMEs should be categorised seperately from reskins, but the finer details are all open for discussion and subject to change.

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PMEs should for sure be separated from reskins, as with the differences in stats and such PMEs bring to the characters, I find it different enough from the overall experience.

Also, I don’t exactly understand the Assembly category. What hack exactly would fit that criteria?

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Probably stuff like the skill system.

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i think PMES should be reskins, since they dont change the story mostly and most PMES are FE8 edits.

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My main concern with a spreadsheet anyone can edit is the possibility of a troll destroying, even if it is unlikely, someone having an offline copy would be a good idea,

as for PMEs I think separating them from reskins is good, while similar they are constructed differently and as such the experience can be wildly different, a reskin will be more cohesive to one style while a PME will have many people’s input as such it can be a very different experience.

Sometimes you want to play through a cast cobbled together from multiple people’s ideas, other times you want to look at a single creative’s work.

Either way I think a tag of some kind would be good.

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Thank you for all of your feedback. I chose to split PMEs out into their own tag. An offline backup is being kept, too. The directory itself can be found below.

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To be fair, almost anyone could edit the original fangame directory too, so I’m not as concerned. But someone keeping backups is still a good idea-- and dating when these backups were made, too-- in case something happens to the account of the document owner.

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On mobile I can’t scroll through the top where you choose which sheet / category (I can’t click the fe8 one, for example).

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Also, maybe a column for which fe6/7/8 hacks have a self randomized version? I’ve done it for around 30 or so hacks, so might be worth noting.

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There’s alternative links at the bottom of the landing page to each tab. That does still leave the problem of getting back to the front page: maybe I’ll add in a “return to front page” button somewhere. I’ll think it over.

As for self-randomised hacks, the idea I have in mind for them is to give each hack a row for the self-randomised version. To take an example, Dark Stone Self-Randomised would be on a different row from the original Dark Stone with the release date and credits adjusted where appropriate.

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Can you make a duplicate of the sheet that is not editable? That way if you want to edit the doc, you need to specifically click the alternate link that says [EDITABLE]

=ImportRange("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1GGsGcjFBCr5xFSfN4-WmiFCYvqg7qci7_r6hxa4gvKM", "FE8!A1:Z200")
You can use importrange() like this to automatically copy each sheet over into the view only version. Just makes it so users are less likely to accidentally vandalize the sheet.

Speaking of which, I was messing around and made it so the sheet is now view only… which I cannot revert because it is now view only lol :sweat_smile: