After publishing my December 2012 article on cross-platform support in Humble Bundles, I received a lot of requests for further detail on the quality of ports and the status of outstanding bugs. This was something I had hoped to touch on, but it proved to be a topic that warranted more time and research than I could give to be adequately explored.
Following discussion in assorted forums and IRC channels, PCGamingWiki.com contributor soeb and myself have started a wiki enhancement project which aims to provide additional details on Humble Bundle titles on Windows, Mac and Linux.
What We Want To Do
Being involved with centralising and raising awareness of this kind of information (both good and bad) is a really worthwhile endeavour, and not only has the potential to help out gamers who are looking for workarounds, but also to highlight that cross-platform consistency is valuable to gamers, and in some small way highlight games with "better" cross-platform support.
In particular, we're looking to focus on the following items:
- Per platform release dates, porters
- Links to bug tracking systems and other support mechanisms
- Links to changelogs where available
- Where titles can be bought, and which platforms are supported by each source
- Cross-platform compatibility of game features (saved games, multiplayer, DLC availability, etc.)
- Details of save/config directories and whether XDG is being followed (and whether developers have a history or noted opinion regarding XDG)
- Unresolved issues that can not be fixed by end users
- Unresolved issues that can be worked around by end users
- Any sort of howtos that help with any aspects of installing/running the game that may not be obvious (installation howtos, game pad support howtos, etc.)
- Command line options and other less visible settings
Where To Start
Soeb is maintaining a progress page to keep track of areas that still need attention, but for the moment. To summarise though, here's a list of things that would make for a Good Start™:
- Check for any Humble Bundle titles which already have articles, but aren't linked correctly to the Humble Bundle page
- Create articles for Humble Bundle titles which currently don't exist
- Update existing Humble Bundle title articles with per-platform release dates from here
- Add bug tracker links for icculus ported titles (bugzilla.icculus.org)
- Remind soeb or myself about any items that might be missing from the progress page
Resources
Links for all Humble Bundle titles (even articles that don't exist) can be found on PCGamingWiki's Humble Bundle page.
When creating new articles on PCGamingWiki, please use the sample article as a guide. Though many of them are out of date, it also wouldn't hurt to have a look over the other pages in the Manual Category.
When looking for additional details on titles, these are good places to look for or request information:
- Official sites for games
- Official forums for games
- Official bug tracking/reporting systems
- Developers' news/blog posts
- Contact developers directly via email/Facebook/Twitter/etc. (remember to be courteous!)
- Humble Bundle support pages
- Steam forums and Game Hubs for games
- Wikipedia pages for games
- Mobygames.com game profiles
- IndieDB.com game profiles
- My article on cross-platform support in Humble Bundles (and the accompanying source file)
Update: Nearly Done!
So, it's been a bit over a month, and we've hit some key milestones:
- 100% Article creation
- 100% Per-platform release dates
- 100% Porter details (excluding titles ported internally)
And that's including titles from the most recent Humble Bundle. It's been a great project to be involved with, and it's personally gratifying to know that the data I've gathered for my articles is now out somewhere where others can make use of and improve on it (and vice versa - thanks to the contributions of others, I discovered two release date discrepancies in the research for my last Humble Bundle article).
There are still a couple of bits of pieces we want to poke around with, and I thought it might be nice to allow another week for any "last minute" contributions that anybody would like to have counted as a part of this project. We're calling the 20th of March the final date for the Humble PCGamingWiki Enhancement Initiative (though, future contributions to articles for Humble Bundle titles will always be welcome!).
For anybody looking for something to contribute, we're feeling like there are still a few blank spots regarding Linux specific issues, and there's definitely still work to be done with adding details of official forums/support contacts (if anybody's looking for somewhere to start, adding links to the Humble Bundle support articles that contain update release notes/bugfixes would be fantastic).
If there's something you want to add, but don't think you'll have time, make sure to post it on the PCGamingWiki forums, or mention it in the #PCGamingWiki IRC channel so that others have a chance to help make sure your info gets contributed to the wiki!
I'll be making another post after the 20th to look back on what we've achieved and what outcomes there might be.
In the meantime, I'd like to ask everybody who reads this to be sure to tell anybody they know who might be interested in being involved/supporting what we're doing. It'd be great to have a big push for the last week!
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A note from Cheese
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance to everybody who considers contributing!
soeb deserves a huge amount of recognition for this project. Without soeb's efforts, it wouldn't be happening.
It's worth noting that this is an entirely community driven effort without support or endorsement from the Humble Bundle team. We do have support and encouragement of PCGamingWiki administrator Andytizer.
If you've got any thoughts or questions, you can touch base with soeb or myself.