SongCreditsAll

This task is unfinished This is a wiki task that requires more thought or peer review. An important issue that needs to be solved, which will appear at the top of Sega Retro:Todo until this message is removed.

Possible upgrades?

I've been adding a lot more song credits recently, and it's nice to see the tracks increase game by game, album by album. But it's also gotten me thinking more about some things that could maybe improve it (though I wouldn't know how to code them in).

• 1 "with XX"

This is something that's objectively just missing. When the credits were added manually, the credits also included mentions of people who worked with the artist on a certain thing. You can still go to Fumio Ito's manually added credits and see mentions of Takenobu Mitsuyoshi for co-arranging his Virtua Fighter 3 songs, Ryoichi Hasegawa for co-writing lyrics to Daytona USA 2 or see all the people who helped him compose tracks in the Border Break games. Go to Fumio Ito/Song credits and it only shows the titles and credits for the person whose page your on, and if you're only checking that page it can give the impression they're solely responsible for those roles. So then you have to double-check every game page.

• 2 Name + Description

Currently, when pulling from a game/hardware's Music credits, SongCreditsAll only shows tracks with names if they have Names at all, otherwise it uses the Description. I think it makes the most sense to have both of them show up side-by-side to provide more information on the Song credits page. It can also help with separating songs in games where multiple tracks use the same title. Think Sonic Adventure 2 where there's multiple versions of "Masters of the Desert" (I assume for either the Eggman fight or Sonic fight, haven't checked which is which yet) or Mahou Kishi Rayearth (Game Gear) where a couple songs remix the opening theme from the anime. Writing titles for those so they don't get condensed into one track by SongCreditsAll is more of a workaround than should be necessary.

Maybe we could also comments since those do sometimes have information that's relevant to the artist or says if the song is reused/remixed from another game, but they can get long and aren't as formulaic so it's probably not the best.

Oh and of course we'd like RolloverText to actually display properly (look under the Yakuza games here for an example) and credits with Japanese characters to display (I've replaced all of those with English translations otherwise the tracks from albums like Ryu ga Gotoku 8 Original Soundtrack or 404 Game Re:set -Error Game Reset- Memorial Album wouldn't be shown at all). But those are old bugs to fix, not something new. --Nicolaas Hamman (talk) 15:21, 5 November 2024 (GMT+2)

1: With the server as it is now, this might be a bit too demanding - it would need to do a cargo query for every song. I imagine I tried this when originally writing the template, although I might have been lazy too

2: In theory this can be done - I'd have to regenerate the table though since there is no "description" field, so there might be a few hours where songs mysteriously disappear.

3: There's also likely a solution to the rollovertext issue, it's just annoying to deal with. I'd recommend not changing the credits, even if things don't display, because we might forget to change them back, i.e. pretend that they work, and one day they actually might!

None of these templates are protected if you want to have a go for yourself ;) -Black Squirrel (talk) 09:01, 5 November 2024 (EST)

As can see from the small change I did end up making (switching Jun Senoue for Masafumi Ogata), I did try to make them work with those features, but I just don't know how. And because all the templates have to work together, I don't think I can't brute-force my way into them working.

Normally I wouldn't reply if I hadn't figured out a solution (bad etiquette I know), but I do need to note something else I noticed that actually needs fixing, not just improvement. As seen on pages like Chiho Kobayashi/Song credits, the pages only display credits from the first MusicCreditsRow on a page that the person appears in. So here, both the NAOMI and Dreamcast versions of Virtua Tennis and Virtua Tennis 2 have been added and linked to her, but only the NAOMI versions show up. --Nicolaas Hamman (talk) 15:21, 5 November 2024 (GMT+2)