Reboshua wrote: ↑16 October 2023, 23:08
I'd like to have the ability to select attributes of a past game and filter game replays that only had those attributes. For example, only show me game replays where the bonus round cards were x,y,z and the other factions were a,b,c, etc.
Should be an easy db select.
cheers!
Not when the databases are wiped within a day or so of the game finishing... (without BGA doing this they would need ridiculous amounts of storage space - you might think from the game replay functionality that this is all kept, but that's an illusion, replays work by basically saving the messages sent to the game's front-end which describe what happened in a way the UI can understand. That's obviously not queryable in the same way a database is.)
Not to mention that, even if this was technically possible, the developer of each individual game would have to decide which search criteria to allow to be used, in order to write those db queries. That could work for games still under active development, but it wouldn't do anything for older games, many of which don't have active developers making improvements to them any more. (I'm not sure if you know but individual games are almost all developed by volunteers - even those few who are paid by a publisher to do it almost certainly aren't paid for ongoing maintenance years after release. Sure in theory the BGA core team themselves could do this, but I doubt it would be enough of a priority - and anyway, as I explained above, it isn't even technically possible, so the conversation really ends there.)
EDIT: Actually, there's yet another fundamental technical limitation here, even if the game databases were all kept alive - the database is obviously updated with every single action a player takes. That database only holds the *current* state of a game, so is basically useless for reconstructing the entire history of the game, which is what you seem to want.
