TempusGameIt: Auto-import is in dev

Did some hacking this week and finished building out auto-import of games into the TempusGameIt catalog.  ICYMI, the import works like this:

  1. Pull down the latest version of Discord's detectable's file, which contains game executables by platform (Windows, OSX, Linux), and the Steam ID
  2. Lookup games in TGI by the Steam ID to see if they have been imported.
  3. If we haven't imported them, hit the IGDB API to pull the game metadata by Steam ID.  This gets us the name, description, box art, platforms, and genres
  4. Store the IGDB metadata along with the executable information from Discord in the TGI catalog
I set this process to run every 24 hours, and it imported close to 5000 titles.  Here's the run from last night, and it included a certain popular title, which made me excited to see the process in action.

Starfield is here (even if I'm not in early access)!

It's full of stars!

This sudden explosion of games in the catalog has led to a much more interesting view on the games page, as there are now all sorts of titles that I haven't ever heard of.


So suddenly there's a several new features that we need to build out to make the catalog more manageable and performant
  • Filtering by name
  • Filtering by genre
  • Filtering by what I logged time against
  • Sorting by most popular
  • Sorting by newest
  • Improving the API that serves the catalog to the client so we're not blocking the client as badly when sending down a big update

I also experienced mismatches on my local machine, where the scanner would find "launcher.exe" and associate it with a game that I didn't have.

:til: about Aura Kingdom

Interestingly enough, Discord solves this by including the parent directory in their executable, which means that I can fix this by taking this into account when path matching in the client.

All in all, some great progress made and I think this will help a lot if more people are interested in trying it out.

As always, you can see what's on tap by visiting the Trello board.

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