Development article for Awen's Games Library concept (and other developers assisting him with this with project).

The source of this new concept

Many of these ideas started been discussed in these threads in the XBMC feature suggestions forum:

Games Library Concept

To allow XBMC users to reference and play Games.

Games may have various forms such as Emulated Roms, Standalone Executables, (XBMC plugins ?)...

The idea is not to compete with über roms integrators, but to offer a rich and detailed interface to play from XBMC.

inspired from 1) minimizing the glitches between hard context changes, consistency with other library look'n'feel

inspired from 2) a lot of information about games on the web, description, genre, credits, snapshots, cross referencing, statistics

inspired from 3) suggestion for user, statistics about playing, 'most played' tab

?

Python Integration: scrapers and all
Dedicated GUIs
Platform Portability
Game Information Dialog
Emphasis on Immersion
- Soft transition between app contexts
- Ambient sounds (skin dependant ?)
- Detailed game description

Task List

Better GUI: intermediary solution for settings and various record forms
- Versatile solution inspired from plugin settings
- Record forms: executables
- Game Description über Panel
- Game Category Listing
Database
- Tables finalization
- Auto rebuilding, at least for roms (is that a good idea ?)
Better Thumbnail Management
- Animated thumbnails ?
- Icons for Categories, and executables
- Overlay support: rating
Standalone Executables Support
User Info Support
- Last Played
- Most Played
- Rating
Plugins Support
- Python bindings
  - 'Plugins' Field on the 1st Game Menu Page
  - Contextual Plugin on Game Basis ('Get Info', 'Get Rom' ;))
- Native C++ History.dat parsing support as a plugin testbed

project 'scrapers friendly' + use of dedicated community files (like mame's history.dat)