Fictionarium, successor to Fabularium

Hi all,

Well, no build yet, so I thought to at least drop a bit of a progress report.

I was able to get the import of zcode to kind of work, however then I stumbled upon the usability issue that you probably encountered: auto add and manual add both first copy the file to its destination (if that’s configured so) and then try to add the entry into the game database. If the latter fails, or is cancelled, then future additions fail because the file at the destination exists. This new required file import approach exacerbates the problem to the point of being almost unusable. Long story short: I had to refactor this now, rather than later as I had hoped, and it’s still not quite done yet.

Secondly, the Android recommend using “room” API to handle persistent structured data rather than using SQLlite APIs directly. Another effort I wanted to postpone until later but that seems to mean that if I do it later, your database with the games would be reset and it’s something I would rather avoid. So, I am also pulling this into the first build.

Finally, the gamedata directory structure is hard coded to be constructed from IFDB IDs. This construction happens automatically every time, so IFDB IDs can’t really be changed unless you also move the directory to the proper location by hand. As some of you have mentioned, it is also difficult to match the gamedata to a game. Anyway, this would also be more difficult to correct later than now, on the first build.

Well, I hope I did not bore you too much with these details but they are a reason for the delay.

Will keep you posted and thank you for your patience.

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It’s actually really interesting to learn about what’s going wrong, personally. I also noticed that Fabularium’s “remove game” on the main page doesn’t work: you have to manually go into the files and delete it. Which isn’t a major problem, but it’s notable.

Good luck on continuing this!

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