Suggestions for Quake Injector

[Maxi]

Copy-paste from recent discussion in chat “A weekend of Quaddicted future”:

@Maxi

So here some suggestions about Quake Injector
They are not so important or necessary and as I see now, not related to restructuring of database itself

Anyway, first suggestion is for sorting - there are 2 types of ratings - one is user votes and another one I’m not sure, probably made by moderators?
And Quake Injector has only moderators rating
If you sort by “users rating” - it gives you pretty relevant results, score is float-type (with point), so its less absract then numeric 1-5 values and it takes in consideration number of users voted

Offtopic: sometimes this kind of rating system not working good, like on Amazon, when product with 5 stars, but rated by 1 user will be higher, than product with 4.5 stars, but rated by thouthands of people. It can by fixed by some smart formula, but on Quaddicted it’s already working good enough, so it’s not necessary

Back to the topic: but if you sort by moderator’s rating - sorting algorithm can’t know which map to set first on this list when all of them with 5-stars rating considered as “same rating”
So results are not so relevant in my opinion - there are lot of maps from 1997 at first places
No disrespect to old maps, but if a new user (as it was in my case) will install Quake Injector to see best-of-the-best maps, he may not get the results he may be expected
So, adding users rating to Quake Injector would be my first and main suggestion

Others small and not so important
So, here’s ideas:

• Make some link/button to the right menu to go to page on quaddicted for selected map (to read comments etc)
• Maybe make map started by double-click
• Maybe add sorting by last play (obviously it doesn’t need to be in global db, just on local machine)
• “Tags” column won’t fit the screen, but still can be used for filtering

Another thing I think we should discuss is the best way to deal with conflicts for files
I noticed (when installed a lot of maps), that usually - it’s a conflict of txt files like readme
May be it should be auto-renamed to something like “mapname.txt”, just to ask less questions from the user
But I’m not sure what about other cases, if there any filename conflicts, when it can broke some other mods/maps?
What should be better to do then? Maybe place this maps in separate folder like a mod?
Ok, that’s a lot of text, but that’s all for now
Sorry for small mistakes
I forgot to say, that adding link to page on Quaddicted for selected map would promote voting, because now if you want to vote you should go to site and search the map manually by name

@Spirit

awesome thoughts!

user ratings should totally be available in the QI as well as all tags (btw quaddicted already uses a nice weighted average for the user-ratings, after https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html )

being able to sort by user ratings should fix the bad “new user” sorting as the order would be more representative i think

i always wanted to have comments and ratings functionality right in the injector but we didnt have a developer on it for ages who would integrate that (also i would have to write an API for the website for it). for a successor this would definitely be one of the major new features requrested

file conflicts are a major pain… megaman and I did some minor work on that years ago, marking files as “non-essential” (like countless “readme.txt” files) making those not trigger the conflict warning iirc. i have no idea how to handle this well. eg many people bundled the same skyboxes in their maps, what if the second map to include them overwrote the earlier one, then the earlier map gets removed (including the files), now the second one would be broken. autorenaming would work for other files, but not for those referenced in the “code” of a map or mod. :\

@Maxi

I’ll probably try to investigate this thing about filename conflicts and what maps/mods have these problems

Apart from installing them like mods in a separate folder, I had an idea to backup files with same filenames and check before launching these conflicting maps - what version of conflicting file is currently installed and change it to necessary version from backup before launching

It’s not a beautiful solution, but still better than breaking mods/maps without possibility to repair what was broken
But just installing in a separate folder should work, as I understand

Also, I remember about another thing - engines/sourceports
I remember you wrote some something about supports of engines too
But they are totally different beasts, than mods and maps and shouldn’t be in the same list and same db table
But, still it’s good to think about them too, in relation to rearranging database
Current version of Quake Injector supports only one engine in preference, and probably good enough for near future, but when thinking about new structure of db, it makes sense to think about different engines too

I’m not too familiar to this topic and if support of particular engines for some maps - is a relevant issue
But probably it won’t hurt to consider in advance some db columns for that thing - like “required engines” and “recommended engines”
Probably not engines, but features of this engines
In case of “features” it can be just one column, I think
So QI would know itself, how required this feature is
This could be optional field to be set by creators of the map or moderators
Even if support of different engines is not priority feature for future versions of QI, it could be helpful to add that thing in advance, not to change db structure and API in the future