Feature request: Make AppDB serve gamers better

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miumau
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Feature request: Make AppDB serve gamers better

Post by miumau »

Dear everybody,

first of all, thank you for making Wine the nice piece of software it is. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I can play Windows games on Linux, and that they actually work.

Then, to the content of this message -- and my apologies about this being a very likely repost. I just wanted to add my +1 to a potentially very old argument, along with my reasoning.

The background and motivation. I'm interested in playing games. I'm interested to do that as easily and as effortlessly as possible. I use whatever means.

I noticed that for a certain game, there was only a 'garbage' report in the AppDB. I decided to give the game a try anyway. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually worked perfectly! Next, I thought that lets help out this nice community by sending a review that reveals that the game actually works!

The review was rejected.

I had done the sin that I openly mentioned in my review I had used Wine through a third-party launcher, which is apparently a sin and a political taboo to do (I start to understand why there is a million linux distros out there with this amount of playing along together -- but thats another subject).

After the rejection, I read from the AppDB Test Result Guidelines about such third party wrappers that the related reports 'do not help in identifying where Wine may need to be improved or fixed. '. But this is not, as a gamer, at all a question I'm interested in. I'm interested in the question can I play my game on Linux, right here, right now? And if yes, with what means? I thought that the primary purpose of AppDB would have been to inform people which games are playable (based on Wine) and which are not. To this purpose, I thought I had sent a very valuable contribution to the database. But no. To the trash.

How about adding some 'third party software was used' tab to the AppDB? This way, the hardcore enthusiasts of *developing* wine could filter out such impure results they don't want to see, whereas gamers would still get valuable information what they can do and what apparently they can not.

In any case, thank you for your hard work on Wine.

Best regards,
Miumau
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Bob Wya
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Re: Feature request: Make AppDB serve gamers better

Post by Bob Wya »

@miumau,

I hear where you are coming from. I'm speaking (well typing) as just a Wine user and someone who choses to maintain a few AppDB pages.
As Wine user it really clicked with me how important the project is (and how powerful it is)... When I finally got full dynamic lighting working - with a manual registry tweak - for a Windows (only) game I love.

The main 3rd party wrapper for Wine, Play on Linux, tends to use custom patches and a rather dubious build system for their downloadable Wine versions.
There aren't really any FOSS wrappers for Wine - that just provide a GUI launcher (well except for q4wine - but that's not terribly functional).

Wine is one of the projects where the less you know the more unhappy your experience will be. Things break frequently... Typically as your Windows application(s) get a significant update that break exisiting Wine support.
The community maintained Play on Linux scripts can't keep pace with Windows applications that get regular updates.
Actually reading through the Wine user documentation will probably not hurt you and will (in the long run) make your wine usage experience a more pleaseant one!

Looking at things from the other perspective - to yours - as an active maintainer of a few applications (well 13 at present) on AppDB...
I get pointless test submissions from Ubuntu and Linux-Mint users - who have not even bothered to read the documentation I've typed on the (very same) AppDB page.
These test submissions are really short and contain no useful information... Other Wine users would have no idea - what will work or won't work with the given Windows application or game - if they only had these micro-brief test results to go by.
From my perspective I get the most helpful test submissions from Gentoo and Slackware users...
Why? Because they are forced to think - even during the installation process for the OS they have chosen to run!

This simply comes over as lazy and annoying. Especially as I don't get paid for writting and updating the documentation - which I try to maintain to a high standard (and spend hours constructing and later updating)!
A lot of AppDB is just a wasteland of unmaintained or poorly maintained application wiki pages - simply because people want to just consume/use Wine and not contribute back anything...

Wine was uncomfortable journey for me personally - at the start. Like many folks I started using Mandrake Linux and then Ubuntu - I wanted to be able to control everything with a GUI application.
It's kind of like the 5 stages of loss model. In this case the first step to acknowledge is that you have to understand how to run Windows programs, under Wine, from the commandline / shell!

Just my $0.02 anyway. 8)
Bob
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dimesio
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Re: Feature request: Make AppDB serve gamers better

Post by dimesio »

AppDB test reports are supposed to document in the report every step needed to make an app run. Merely saying "I used <some third party app>" doesn't tell the reader anything.

What you need to do is manually test whatever tweaks were applied by whatever third party app you used and give explicit step-by-step instructions in the test report. Users should be able to reproduce your results based solely on the content of your test report.
miumau
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Re: Feature request: Make AppDB serve gamers better

Post by miumau »

Thank you for the comments. I see better now how the thing looks from the other side. Maybe it'd still be useful to have some mechanism to get information from the 'unwashed masses', especially information that is positive and currently missing from AppDB. :) Of course confirming those submissions can be hard additional work, but I wonder why somebody would send a false positive report.

And just to clarify, I did not just report that I used some third party app. It was just one line in a much longer statement. I meticulously filled all the fields that were asked, including the Wine version that was relayed on, as well as such information of my computer that I thought could be useful: I think it was CPU, Ubuntu version, graphics card and what drivers. I did not use any specific tweaks for the game. I had simply requested the third party GUI to install Steam, and then installed the game itself from Steam. That was all. It worked.

I agree, personal laziness is strongly involved here. I could have tested with vanilla Wine, but being part of the ignoramuses, I'm not quite sure how that happens. Doubtlessly its explained very well in the manual. But see, its 2017 and who reads manuals to play games? I'm not sure games even have manuals anymore. That was back in the eighties, with Commodore 64 and such. Today, double click is the sort of the biggest mental leap a user can be expected to do. Second, after I learned whats not allowed in an AppDB report, I had unfortunately already uninstalled the game and was too lazy to start from scratch, download it, and so on.

Maybe in the future as a courtesy to the nice Wine project I could try to figure out how to install and play a game with some pure command line magic and try to contribute some report that way.

Thanks again,
Miumau
C0rn3j
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Re: Feature request: Make AppDB serve gamers better

Post by C0rn3j »

If the application has only one report which is ages old rated garbage, wouldn't it be better to have a new entry that says it runs, even if it is not described perfectly? I think that the information that the application runs at all is very valuable to an entry that only has garbage reports.
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dimesio
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Re: Feature request: Make AppDB serve gamers better

Post by dimesio »

C0rn3j wrote:If the application has only one report which is ages old rated garbage, wouldn't it be better to have a new entry that says it runs, even if it is not described perfectly? I think that the information that the application runs at all is very valuable to an entry that only has garbage reports.
The issue raised by the OP is the use of third party wrappers such as Wineskin and POL. Test reports using them are not accepted, and it has been explained why.

There is nothing to prevent those projects from maintaining their own application databases for their products.
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