Dolphin Progress Report for June and July | Hacker News Reader

Dolphin Progress Report for June and July

nl.dolphin-emu.org

123 pointsjandeboevrie9 comments

That ci infrastructure of theirs always seems super cool. Not sure if this is common when working on graphics related projects but must be extremely helpful to get a picture diff of the output.

I belive this is the result for the commit that fixed the simspon game (for some reason they never provide the link in the post): https://fifoci.dolphin-emu.org/version/58e12395c242a839ce561...

relevant render comparison: https://fifoci.dolphin-emu.org/compare/4891635-4889700/

Could the link be updated from the Netherlands version of the page to English?

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/08/04/dolphin-progress-rep...

The blog is still in English, but the rest of the site isn't (which I clicked onto afterwards).

I think these progress reports are fantastic and super smart. It gives a strong impression of a healthy project with a lot of momentum, and helps us all appreciate how difficult and how much work goes into it. It also serves as a kind of constant marketing for the project, hopefully picking up new contributors along the way.

Kudos to the team! If only other major OSS projects operated similarly!

Since it's not immediately obvious...

"Dolphin is an emulator for two recent Nintendo video game consoles: the GameCube and the Wii"

The name comes from the fact that "Dolphin" was the code name for the GameCube, hence the part numbers starting with "DOL".

the list sorting problem is great miniature of the "users using the software in ways you didn't expect" thing.

I’m just surprised that anyone reported this. Oftentimes, users will find workarounds of their own when the software changes. In this case I expect that at least some users rather than reporting how alphabetical sorting affected them, would prefix the cheats with ascending numbers or letters.

So if the user had a list that consisted of

- Infinite Health

- Infinite Car Health

- Timers Frozen

- Infinite Ammo

- ...

The user might rename them to

- 000 Infinite health

- 001 Infinite Car Health

- 002 Timers Frozen

- 003 Infinite Ammo

- ...

- AAA Infinite Health

- AAB Infinite Car Health

- AAC Timers Frozen

- AAD Infinite Ammo

- ...

And if the user was anticipating adding more cheats or reordering the cheats, they might number the sequence with gaps in the numbering between each of the entries and at each end.

For example if they had an initial set of 23 cheats they might put a gap of floor(1000/((23 - 1) + 2)) = 41 entries between each entry, numbering them as

- 041 Infinite Health

- 083 Infinite Car Health

- 125 Timers Frozen

- 167 Infinite Ammo

- ...

Allowing them to insert or rearrange quite a few entries before having to renumber any of the others.

- 041 Infinite Health

- 062 Timers Frozen

- 083 Infinite Car Health

- 167 Infinite Ammo

- ...

Though perhaps more likely you would see them name their cheats something like the following

- A_Infinite Health

- B_Infinite Car Health

- C_Timers Frozen

- D_Infinite Ammo

- ...

And to rearrange it as above they would change it to

- A_Infinite Health

- A_Timers Frozen

- B_Infinite Car Health

- D_Infinite Ammo

- ...

And a few edits later the list would look like

- AAAAA_BEST FAVORITE NEW EDIT 2

- AAAA_BEST FAVORITE NEW

- AAA_Best favorite

- AA_Cool cheat

- ...

Or they might be the kind of person that loves to cobble together some crazy solution wherein they store the names and cheat codes in an Excel file, and use Excel to manage the cheats, and renumber them by entering 000, 001, 002 into the first column of the sheet and select those three cells and then drag the handle in the bottom right of the select downward to continue the series of numbers. Then they export it to CSV and open the CSV in Notepad, do some find-replace operations and then copy-paste the result into their INI file.

Or they could be the kind of person that is familiar with some scripting language, for example Python, so while this user won’t touch the code of Dolphin, the user could still write a little script that would renumber the cheats in their INI file for them after they’ve reordered or added entries.

Thankfully, someone reported the issue though, and so these kinds of workarounds will not happen in this case.

And the kind of person that is most helped by the reverting of the behavior is perhaps the type of person that would otherwise stay indefinitely on the last version of Dolphin that had the entries appearing in the order they appeared in the INI file, and who would then miss out on all of the other improvements coming after that.

> I’m just surprised that anyone reported this. Oftentimes, users will find workarounds of their own when the software changes. In this case I expect that at least some users rather than reporting how alphabetical sorting affected them, would prefix the cheats with ascending numbers or letters.

They likely would have if the software had always ordered cheats alphabetically. But when you have a working system, and an update ruins it, people get annoyed (and I don't blame them).

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