Filtering & Tagging

[progets]

This would be a great feature. Why not leverage the additional information you get from the HS .xml files?

[Pieter Hulshoff]

Please elaborate how this feature should work?

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[progets]

It would be a way to write filters/rules and then toggle them when in the RetroFE GUI. If you have a lot of roms in a collection it can be time consuming to find things.

Examples;
show games where the hs.xml file <players> = 2
show games where the hs.xml file <genre> = Flying
show games where the hs.xml file <year> contains 198
show games where the hs.xml file <manufacture> = Atari

[Pieter Hulshoff]

There are two ways of handling this:
1. A search function; this is on the to-do list.
2. Playlists; this is already available in bit bucket.

[Dunuin]

2. Playlists; this is already available in bit bucket.

The playlists are great but static, which is a disadvantage is some situations. For example:

1.) you want to filter games by system, genre and number of supported players and you have 40 systems, 30 genres and 4 players. So you need to setup 40 * 30 * 4 = 1200 playlists...each filter value adding to it will multiply the amount of work.
2.) you need to do alot of preparatory work before you can filter out games and can't do it impulsively
3.) everytime you update your romsets you have to edit all playlists and add/remove the new games

I would like to have something like a simple filter-menu. You press a button on the controller/keyboard and a menu pops up. With the Up and Down keys you can switch between menu items (number of players, genre, system, region/language, ...) and with the Left and Right keys you can step through the predefined values the metadb is using (1P, 2P, 3P, 4+P) (Platformer, Puzzle, Shooter, ...).
The filter will be used on top of the static filtering by checking the items of the collection/subcollection/playlist against the dynamic filter and the metaDB.

So you could easily filter out any games your not interested in at the moment in seconds. And you can do it all without keyboard and mouse. Such a menu would also be a good place for your search function by the way.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

That feature's on the to-do list; I agree that it would be beneficial to be able to filter out games on the fly, but I haven't found the time to program it yet. Actually, I haven't even quite figured out HOW I want to program it yet.