This one github.com/vassalengine/vassal/ … -650332147 is actually not such a bad idea, BGG has a neat API where thumbnails and images for a given boardgame could be requested.
Example: boardgamegeek.com/xmlapi2/thing?id=276025
The modules would only need to provide the BGG id for this.
Sounds good?
What if you were playing a game hot-seat style with no connectivity? I am not sure I’d want to be forced to pull stuff off BGG in a module.
Now if you were talking about pulling data off BGG and into the wiki that would be a good idea. But that would reqiure coding quote a heavy duty bot.
With due respect etc, sounds like a terrible idea, imho, entangling the source code with a separate, quite commercially (again imho) oriented, entity. The common model with such sites is to sell up once they reach a certain size. And in any case, everyone who uses vassal already knows where it is, if they need it.
I think some sort of hooks with BGG would be great. As it is we use their 150px gamebox image in the content header, title match as well as match other data they already have built. Problem is its all manual entry for the designer/user in the wiki. And we have to continually verify/check it all
To negotiate some sort of data share/link/hook with them and our module space relating to data displayed could be an interesting concept
I looked into it, they do have a web api, even two versions of it, an old one and a new one.
The api works too, spits out way more info than we would ever need. Full game title, localized titles, small cover art, big cover art, etc etc etc.
Problem is, this api was apparently developed by someone who doesn’t work for BGG anymore, and they dropped all development and all support of it. They let it run for now but they might turn it off tomorrow. And the only other option is to scrape their html and that can easily end up in a maintenance hell.
There is an alternative, the site “Board Game Atlas” has a working API, but I don’t know how reliable it is, how committed they are to support it, and how good their board games database is compared to BGG.
I do actually “personally know a guy” who works on BGG web tech these days (used to be a gaming buddy in former decades). So if we waaaanted to “ask them about whatever” I’m happy to reach out. You know, maybe the “new guy” gets interested in maintaining the old thing, or whatever.
I’m not clear on what the purpose of this is. We have box thumbnails in the wiki already. Do we want BGG to be able to change the thumbnails we display? If so, why? Are we missing a lot?
If the idea is to display the box art somewhere else, where? What’s in that place now?
I think the idea is to one-up the module manager and make it display the games like a modern media center would display the movies/series/music albums, with nice artwork standing on a nice shelf.
I thought it’s a good idea at first but after looking into it, I’m not so sure anymore, there is no reliable source for this data and in the worst case we would have to provide this data ourselves i.e. become a full fledged board game database with a full fledged web API. Maybe an intermediary solution might work, some modules already include the artwork, we could make the ModuleManager “nice” and put these artwork images on a nice shelf.