I've started creating a game manager which, at the moment, can show you a list of your games and have associated commands (e.g. play or visit homepage) and icon groups (such as save games for each game). It's nowhere near finished now, and further on down the line of the project I would like to implement an online aspect where users can browse and download games and where any games you have installed can download updates, additional content etc. via the game manager. As I said, it's in a very early beta stage and has no online support as of yet, but I'd like to hear your comments and suggestions. You can download it from this page, which also has a link to my e-mail address. Or you can leave comments in this thread. The manager requires the .NET framework to be installed.

I don't see how you will accomplish all this, for instance you talk about saved games, but many games save these in their own format sometimes as a part of a bigger archive, not easy to retrieve and updates might change where the save games are stored. Also starting games from a saved game can be very hard without reverse engineering the game itself.

Quote:Original post by f8k8
where any games you have installed can download updates, additional content etc.

How would you do this? Once more, this is game-specific and it's very rare that the game has external tools for this updating without popping up a dialog.

If you do manage to somehow include those features I think it could turn out quite impressive and usefull.

I briefly (I didn't actually add any definitions) looked at the current state of your application. I think you should do things in a more intuitive way or maybe add descriptions, for instance what is a GUID? Can I enter any GUID or do I need to use a GUID-generator? What is it for anyway? The name of the game, its path etc. should be used as an identifier. What do you mean "install for", does it install games? Or do you mean how it was installed?

What if I want to modify a definition? Should I go to "Existing Game Definition" (why does you need to provide install path for this one?), load the definition and then modify it in Create Game Definition and add it again?

Also I don't like how About... in the main menu is a button you should just make a single button appear under it (like Exit under Files). Most applications call the menu Help and have a sub-item called About.