[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

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Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #570, on November 28th, 2017, 01:20 PM »
FIX: In game pages, users with tradables/wishlisted will now be considered active if they're inactive but have a valid e-mail address (allowing them to respond to your offers). Previously, this was only the case in Match pages, but I didn't see any reason why it shouldn't also be the case in Game pages.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #571, on November 30th, 2017, 04:42 PM »
NEW: A feature I worked on for a while... Bundle search! You can now search for bundles by name. This, of course, includes expired bundles. As always, the search is real-time and super-fast. It indicates the bundle's name, number of games in it, year of release, and bundle site.
The banner shown next to the bundle is from the most wishlisted game in the bundle.

If you type 'indiegala', 'bundlestars', 'fanatical', 'groupees', 'humble', 'humble bundle' or 'humblebundle', the search results will show you all bundles from those sites, most recent first. If you type 'positive', you'll get 4 bundles (3 from Humble Bundle, 1 from Flying Bundles). If you type 'flying positive', you'll get no results because the sites mentioned above are the only ones I'm willing to support (because they're the most popular AFAIK, so if you get many results you can just add 'indiegala' to only see results from that site, for instance.)

I'm also considering to add support for studios, but right now you could just go to the /studios/ page and do a Ctrl+F browser search to find who you're looking for... I don't know if it's worth the hassle..? Also maybe a search tab for junk items, i.e. items that are normally NOT returned by the game search results.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #572, on November 30th, 2017, 11:47 PM »
NEW:

- Quick Search for Studios (includes number of games per studio, and banner for their most wanted game.)
- Quick Search for Junk (i.e. demos, non-tradable stuff, and anything that's not returned by a regular game search.)

Well, that's one busy search box now... :^^;:
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #573, on December 1st, 2017, 02:57 PM »
FIX: Another 3000+ videos were tagged as such. Seriously this is getting annoying, considering I have to work on these things for hours, and it's stopping me from working on actually useful features.
I'm even tempted to mark all episodic videos as 'junk'... Only reason I'm not going to do that is that I can't easily differentiate between the 'master' app (which contains all episodes), and the individual episodes. (Not all episodes are conveniently titled in an obvious way.)

Still, there are now close to 5000 'episodes' on the database, it's absolutely ridiculous. I'm aware this is mostly because Valve recently started to return episodes as 'regular' apps within its Steam Store API, but it doesn't change the fact that it sucks balls.
In fact it might be simpler to just move ALL movies to the 'junk' tab, and assume that if you're looking for a specific regular movie that's been bundled in the past (here's looking at you Groupees), you'll simply go to the Junk tab. Maybe rename that tab to 'Others', and put it next to 'Games'.
Or I could also mark all videos as junk, except when a video has been bundled before, I don't know. It's less logical, but more practical.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #574, on December 9th, 2017, 05:09 PM »
FIX: I haven't posted anything this week but rest assured I keep working on the site every day (despite having to deal with flu at home this week.)
Mostly, I fixed more game/bundle database entries, reworked some icons to use Unicode (thus saving about 3KB worth of gzipped data in the main CSS file download, save bandwidth, save trees!), and also updated Day mode to be 'watchable', as it had fallen victim of my not checking it out too often when updating designs. The background is back to a pure white, corners are darker, buttons are less gray, and ratio colors are darker and more readable (among other changes.)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #575, on December 10th, 2017, 05:51 PM »
FIX: Manually checked hundreds of demos & trailers to see if they were as marked. Most of them were but a dozen of each were improperly labeled, so I fixed that.
Also, I added a simple video player for video junk (trailers & teasers). I also double-checked that all of the 'delisted' videos are ACTUALLY not delisted, they're only marked as delisted because their parent game is, or because they're now viewable on the Steam client. So I've marked everything as not delisted, except for three videos (APB, a Zoo game and a trailer for FEAR whose ID later got reused as a Tropico 4 DLC, I'm guessing!), which I did mark as delisted.

There you go... No one cares, but at least a couple games that were marked as demos are now in the regular search engine.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #576, on December 12th, 2017, 09:25 PM »
Before I forget...

NEW: Add "-delisted" to a title in the search box, and it'll hide all delisted items. This can be useful if there are a lot of delisted items that come up (was useful for me when I took it upon myself to mark all Mighty Quest for Epic Loot DLCs as delisted...)
(Note that it has to have the minus sign before the delisted word.)

Also, Barter seems to have switched its game database to use steam-tracker data for delisted items; unfortunately steam-tracker doesn't cover everything, so there were dozens (if not hundreds) of items that were improperly marked as available after this move; I've double-checked all of them and marked them as delisted anyway; also, I kept a log of all of those incorrectly handled items, in case the Barter admin wants them (list of Barter-compatible item IDs.) I'll provide them if requested.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #577, on December 13th, 2017, 11:05 PM »
NEW: Finished yesterday's change to the search engine.

(1) Now you can actually type delisted to restrict all results to delisted items.
(2) And you can also use the minus sign to dismiss anything in the name, not just delisted items.

Example:

agarest dlc -zero -> Returns all Agarest DLCs, unless they're for Agarest Zero games.
grim -gog fandango -> Returns Grim Fandango, but not the GOG version.
black flag uplay -> Returns AC4 Black Flag, but only the Uplay version.

Note: the store stuff was implemented long ago, the only new thing is the minus feature. I simply didn't bother to document it. The following terms are accepted as store names: "gog", "gog.com", "itch", "itch.io", "uplay", "origin.com", and the still very much dead "desura", which I can only imagine you'd include in a search with a minus sign. There's no support for 'Steam', because there are many games with 'Steam' in their name. This is also the reason why I'm only accepting 'origin.com' and not 'origin' -- you still want to be able to find Ys Origin on Steam or GOG... Please tell me if you can think of other games that may have the aforementioned store names in their name.

Akylen

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Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #578, on December 14th, 2017, 03:14 AM »
I feel that the search feature and others are better suited as documentation or I am afraid it will be lost on the vastness of the forum.
Didn't realise the store stuff had been implemented before for example. Quite nice  :D

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
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Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #579, on December 14th, 2017, 08:04 AM »
Well, at rhe very least it'll be mentioned in the monthly change log too. Okay maybe I should make a topic for it. Perhaps link to it in a help pop-up. I'm not done yet with the search engine. I'm quite fond of it. For instance, I need to add a way to show all results when there are too many. Maybe an extra page, sonerhing one can permalink to.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #580, on December 14th, 2017, 03:13 PM »
NEW: I updated the search engine again.

The main difference since yesterday is that it no longer accepts 'gog' for instance as a keyword, but '+gog'. Why? This is so I could add more keywords to the list without fear of getting conflicts with the game name.

So, without further ado, here's the new list:

'delisted' to look for delisted games or exclude them from results
'dlc' for DLCs (Steam or GOG)
'steam' for Steam games or Steam packages
'package' or 'sub' for Steam packages only
'gog' or 'gog.com' for GOG.com games
'itch' or 'itch.io' for itch.io games
'origin' for Origin games (I removed the .com, which is now unnecessary due to the rewrite)
'uplay' for Uplay games
And 'desura' for Desura games

Example search:
furi +dlc +gog -soundtrack

As in, "I'm looking for a Furi DLC on GOG, I don't remember the name, but it's not a soundtrack."

- You can also use only keywords if you want. "+dlc +gog" will list all GOG.com DLCs for any games, limited to the first ~20 it finds, of course.

- An added feature is that the keywords are now case-insensitive (this wasn't the case before today.)

Disclaimer: due to how the search engine optimizes search speed, you may get unwanted results in some situations. The 'solution' is to press Space and then Backspace. Easy to remember-- space+backspace. It's been that way since the beginning (basically it's how quick search works in Wedge), but because of the new keyword system, it happens a bit more often when using them. I'm considering getting rid of that optimization (making it 100% accurate but possibly slower to get new games because it means one server hit per letter entered), or possibly doing a server hit only when you haven't typed anything for like 300ms, I don't know which is best, I'll try to look into it and make it as good as I can. (As always!)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #581, on December 14th, 2017, 03:44 PM »
FIX: Sometimes, the icons would show up as garbage (actually their ISO-8859-1 representation), due to the server not specifying the utf8 charset on text/css content. I was gonna fix that by setting it, but instead decided to look at removing the UTF-8 characters and replace them with char codes -- turns out, it actually saves space in the gzipped CSS, in addition to saving space by not sending the charset header... Cool.

(If you understood the paragraph above, then you're a web developer. Otherwise, please move on.)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #582, on December 17th, 2017, 01:49 AM »
FIX: Went through the last 2000 entries added to the database (58k to 60k), and spent 2 hours just fixing games to be 'demos' or 'dlcs' etc, and I flagged hundreds of entries (yes, hundreds...) as videos. (Also fixed dozens of video titles that were labeled as 'Adding' on BVG, thanks to their parent being known.)

Seriously, Valve, you need to do somethin' about your videos. Every episode of every stupid Naruto show gets its own app ID, it's quite simply nearly worse than Steam Direct.
It's becoming even more urgent for me to add an 'episode' type, as opposed to just 'video' or 'vijunk' (= trailer junk). These apps *can* be bought independently, I just don't know anyone who would... Really looks like a waste of app IDs to me. (And database space here... Since you can't retrade episodes... Then again, the trading site isn't really my end-game, I'm more interested in making it a Swiss knife of Steam helper features.)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #583, on December 18th, 2017, 12:03 AM »
After fixing another ~50 episodes to get the 'video' tag today, I decided to go for an 'episode' app type, so there it is. Unfortunately my sql queries to automatically turn episodes into that type were unsuccessful, I was only able to transform ~500 items out of the thousands that are in the database now.
I'll look at the 'Episodic' tag and probably change all of these to episodes, but (1) they'll need to have a parent (which isn't always properly populated in the database) because a parent-less episodic video is usually the show's Steam store page itself (e.g. when you type 'berserk', it'll show you a page where you can buy all those pseudo-DLCs that are episodes. Oh, and don't buy those Berserk episodes, they suck. And I don't think Steam has the 1997 show.) (2) within the same show, some episodes are properly tagged, some aren't tagged at all. Gonna have fun with that...

I'm hoping you guys will accept that I'm never going to have the perfect database anyway. Well, until the day I write my Steam scraper and actually deal with episodes (which aren't presented the same way as DLCs are.)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #584, on December 18th, 2017, 10:35 PM »
I manually force-canceled 15 old accepted offers that were obviously not completed at all. I also force-completed a dozen offers that seemed to be completed but either both users didn't bother to confirm it, or one of them didn't, and they were stuck in half-completed limbo.

I should probably work on some way to auto-complete and auto-cancel offers after a few weeks without updates... I don't know.

Also, reminder: I added a 'Cancel' feature for offers in 'Accepted' mode, as requested many times. Please refer to the topic 'Offers to cancel manually' (or some similar name) where I'm asking for feedback/tests. ;)