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Tips: Database Entry - Game Manager


Reg
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The below screen shows the Game Manager, take a look at the bottom panel for the game entry.

181216_Database_001.png

Here you will see lots of details about the game.

This is something new ( as with the game manager ) with this version of MFME and ideally all layout releases should have this filled out.  This creates a .DB file within the released game as shown below that the game manager reads from.

181216_Database_003.png

This is shown above for the entry at 17:41.  A very small file, but when filled out offers the icing on the cake when viewed as above.

To complete this is very easy, from the game manager go to Add / Edit Notes and the screen pops up as below, click Save when done.

181216_Database_002.png

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I didn't think you'd not release, but thought, you might want to keep them as a surprise. But I guess that would mean hope, you would only be able to show a very tiny list of machines lol.

I've finally completed the first part of my tidy up of my Game Manager. I've spent at least 6 hours, loading in machines and renaming them. Like you I just like the machine name shown and none of the other spiel like FUAT! or thanks too, so and so, etc..that's what the notes in the layout are for IMO.

I currently have 855 machines in total.

It's a mammoth task and I'm not sure what my next part is going to be. Amongst the things, I need to do are

1/ Get a screenshot of each machine.

2/ Delete some very poor looking layouts.

3/ Delete some duplicates, particularly where I have 1600 & 1280 versions of the same machine, as we no longer need to worry about resizing.

4/ Decide whether to resize layouts within the editor to get rid of side art, although as V5 remembers the layout state on close, I might just close most off at first.

5/ Decide if I want machines to be named, 100% correctly or not. I.E. Club before the name of all club machines, or leave it if club appears at the end of the name of the machine. Also machines named Casino, do I want Casino Crazy Fruits, or Crazy Fruits - Casino.

6/ Enter details as per this thread, add/edit notes, maybe simply, but a task loading and entering details of 800+ machines.

7/ Correct any spelling errors, I've made during renaming layouts.

8/ My head hurts.

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...don't worry, I have plenty of surprises!!!!

...nice work on your tidy up but once that is done, you've got the cabinets and flyers to worry about !

So, piece of advice, try to keep a directory structure and naming such as...

Club Desertislandfruits

- DX

-- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

-- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

- DX1

-- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

---clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

- Classic

-- £250

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

-- £250

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

...so what I am showing here, is regardless of the type of layout keep the naming convention excatly the same across ALL OF THEM.

When you then drop flyers or pictures onto the Game Manager the you would only need to drop one instance on one of those layouts and it would appear on all four as it pulls it from either the Cabinets  or the Flyers directory that is in the same folder as your MFME.

Staying tidy early saves you a lot of work later.

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23 hours ago, Reg said:

...don't worry, I have plenty of surprises!!!!

...nice work on your tidy up but once that is done, you've got the cabinets and flyers to worry about !

So, piece of advice, try to keep a directory structure and naming such as...

Club Desertislandfruits

- DX

-- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

-- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

- DX1

-- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

---clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

- Classic

-- £250

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

-- £250

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.gam

--- clubdesertislandfruits_epoch.ram

...so what I am showing here, is regardless of the type of layout keep the naming convention excatly the same across ALL OF THEM.

When you then drop flyers or pictures onto the Game Manager the you would only need to drop one instance on one of those layouts and it would appear on all four as it pulls it from either the Cabinets  or the Flyers directory that is in the same folder as your MFME.

Staying tidy early saves you a lot of work later.

Some good advice, about staying tidy, as it will definitely save time later. I decided to go for number 6 from my list, add/edit notes, so far only a handful of machines done, but going to get more done while, watching the football, takes away some of the monotony of it all. Can't stand in life, doing anything routine or the same task for more than an hour or so at a time. Never be good at data entry or on a factory line.

I think, I'll also start doing some of the other stuff along the way, such as deleting really poor DX's of machines, I'll never play and duplicate layouts, that I no longer need due to V5 scaling.

Hoping v5.x or whatever the next MFME update, is out at some point, I hope it doesn't muck anything up, after all the work done. Anything I can do to ensure all work is saved, even if V5.x tries to overwrite any changes etc...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, my Game Manager is finally starting to really come together, but there is still much work and tinkering to do.

Having completed the renaming of all layouts previously, I've set about entering the details in the add/edit notes and while I was at it, taking a screenshot of each machine. I'm now roughly about 150 machines out of 861 away from completing that task. I'm hoping to get that part completed by Monday, while the footy is on over Sunday and Monday, which is well ahead of my original target, which was by the end of January. It's quite addictive once you get going and you start seeing the results, I.E I just do one more layout lol.

Also, I've deleted some duplicates and I expect to delete some more amongst the final 150.

Anyway, I still have to fill in the odd detail on some machines, where I can't tell who the manufacturer of the machine was (most are old machines from the 80's without an alpha) and sometimes the price of play can't be confirmed because, the layout starts to loads, but errors with an alarm, or just keep initialising, so I can't enter coins until I find out how to sort these issues. Didn't want to spend time trying to figure it out as I was going, because, I'd still probably have had 700 layouts to do.

Once I've done the final 150, I'll make a start on finding cabinet and flyers for machines. A handful of downloads at least contain flyers already (I'm looking very happily at Pook here).

Also correcting any errors I find that I've made, for instance I don't want some machine notes to contain MPU5 and for some to have MPU 5. I expect I will be going through the game list and loading up machines several times.

After that if I can work it out, I'll hopefully get a decent video up on youtube, to show the progress as it really does look great and might encourage others to do a tidy up.

Ultimately, it will always be an ongoing project as it will never ever be 100% complete, due to a lack of cabinet pictures/flyers of machines in particular. But I'm actually really enjoying trying to get it as complete as possible and discovering, some excellent machines and DX's I'd forgotten about, along the way. 

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10 hours ago, wearecity said:

Anyway, I still have to fill in the odd detail on some machines, where I can't tell who the manufacturer of the machine was (most are old machines from the 80's without an alpha) and sometimes the price of play can't be confirmed because, the layout starts to loads, but errors with an alarm, or just keep initialising, so I can't enter coins until I find out how to sort these issues. Didn't want to spend time trying to figure it out as I was going, because, I'd still probably have had 700 layouts to do.

Great comments there and you're clearly as addicted as I am to doing this.

Would it help if I started uploading cabinets to this site for pictures that people can choose to use ?

I quoted the above - in that scenerio to keep Game Manger looking neat and only with working games, I would go into the configuration of the game and check WIP.

That way it won't show unless it's actually got the WIP filter checked in Game Manager and you know that you only have the "working" ones in view.

170101_WIP.png

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Oh yes the more flyer/cabinet pics the better.

Yes that's a good idea to check WIP. I was going to write it down or add notes, to the notes tab, but I'd already gone through quite a few before, I thought, hey wouldn't it be a good idea to start noting what isn't working correctly lol.

I will be going through all the layouts again, so will start to do that when I start from the top again. I have a pretty good memory anyway and can remember many of them, just like I remember comments, about issues, some layouts had when they were released, years ago, like only pays out in 10p's or only plays in door open mode.

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So just a quick update, managed to finish off renaming all the layouts today. Once I got started, thought I may as well finish them all off, as I didn't have as many as I thought to do.

So I now have all the layouts named how I want them, with a screenshot of each machine. There are some, screenshots, I need to update with better ones, as some layouts came with a very low res BMP, or I'd took some years ago.

Got a handful of flyers, now showing in the flyers tab also.

Still next up, going to reload and deleted some of the worse looking DX's and some duplicates, will be a lot easier to sort through, now I have the screenshots. Also put some more flyers and cabinet pics in place.

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  • 2 years later...

In the game manager if you already have pre-existing snap shots how do you get them included so they show up?  Is there a folder you can throw them all in?

 

ETA... don't worry I've worked out it... just being a dick, carry on nothing to see here... :):)

Edited by Geddy
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Not Retired from FME June 2022

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