[Secret Squirrel]

Originally Posted by CHz

Been playing with linking releases. Nice work.

Thanks! And thanks for the thorough comments.

Originally Posted by CHz

My #1 thought is that there should be some way of grouping or culling "similar releases." It would suck to see Infinity Gene in the list three times for the Evolutional Theory album. I think this could be potentially difficult/impossible to automate without adding a way to manually group releases, though.

Actually, I was thinking that there would only be one link for any product, but that you could hover over the link, and the hover text would give the full detailed breakdown - every release and every classification relationship. I was pondering some exceptions, like if it's linked to 2 releases, and the releases have different names and platforms, then maybe we can put both links. However, we don't really want "Best of", or "2500 Series" to trigger new links, since they are also just reprints.

Originally Posted by CHz

• Same title on different platforms: could group as "Space Invaders Infinity Gene (iOS, XB360, PS3)"
• Different title on same platform because of localization: not showing both "Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles" and "Akumajo Dracula X Chronicle" on the Dracula X Chronicles OST (ideally this would be selectable by language preference)
• Different title on same platform because of limited edition, reprints, etc.: Little Busters! Ecstasy Tracks would hopefully show just "Little Busters-EX" and not "Little Busters-EX, Little Busters-EX (First Press Limited Edition)"
• Different title on different platform because of retitling ports/remakes or localization: (EDIT) Little Busters-EX was later ported to the PS2 and PSP as Little Busters Converted Edition. Both EX and CE releases are covered on Ecstasy Tracks. Maybe at that point it would be better to ungroup and show "Little Busters-EX, Little Busters Converted Edition."

You pretty much outlined it all here. With those rules, we could automate this and I think the result would be reasonable. By the way, the links already do change with the language setting.

Originally Posted by CHz

Some of these cases could also be solvable by being stingier with creating releases or looser with creating products. (EDIT) Could also just collapse all specific release info entirely: hide it all until the user clicks and then show all covered releases without having to worry about grouping and shit. It'd certainly work better with the new vertical listing than it would have before.

We could do something like that too. I was leaning towards the hover text instead, and will probably implement that. However, some of you guys are pretty good at clever designs, so we should leave it open for replacement with something better.

Originally Posted by CHz

This is cool, and I've already run across a couple of uses for it. Is the plan to show both the main product and then the specific release separately?

We could do that, since these are special cases.

Originally Posted by CHz

ANOTHER THOUGHT: I'm going to end up linking the Little Busters-EX and CE releases to a number of albums. Looks like 15. No big deal, has to be done at some point.

Suppose the game is rereleased again later: another port, or a Best Edition or whatever. So I add another release. But now I have to go back through those 15 albums again and link them to the new release too. This is lame.

Yeah, that would be a lot of work for minimal gain. We could add a couple of features to remedy this. One would be a "reverse linkup" page, where you can select which albums link to a release from the full list of the product's albums. Another idea is to allow you to copy the album-release relationship from an existing release when you create a new one.

Also, much of what we talked about in this post is applicable to the classification, which will be coming along shortly.