Playlist Auto-Populate Suggestions AND (OR) (NOT)(Resubmit by original author)

[This issue is a duplicate of #4563, posted by IceLancer SR from my forum post. I've decided to let that post be the official one for this issue due to its traffic. Please close/delete this one.]

Hey all! Hope everything's doing all right :)

What you've got for your Auto-Populate system is great so far. It's really helped me come up with some interesting and varied playlists, and I have a couple suggestions that may improve this awesome feature: a smaller one and a bigger one.

(If my statistical theory here is super wrong or confusing, please feel free to correct me or just ignore this, as it's been a long time since my Elementary Statistics class in community college, and I'm just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks, to paraphrase a certain wacky inventor. :) )

First, AND/OR (boolean) operators, that we set for each field across the board. Or, nested boolean operators: for example, a playlist's fields could all be set to AND, meaning all of them must be TRUE, but within the fields is a group that is set to OR, meaning that while all of the the fields' conditions must be TRUE, in this particular field, either or all of the sub-fields' conditions may be TRUE and the main field condition would still be TRUE.

I'll give an example. This is hypothetical, but say there were a selection of games with titles starting with a certain name, but there are other undesirable elements within the title. So, we set up a playlist like this (the indenting implies that: all of the OR sub-fields - any or all of these must be TRUE, would be taken as one AND field - at least one of these must be TRUE; this might be reflected as spacing or indenting in the user interface):

AND: Title Contains "Mario" AND: (OR): Title Contains "Bros." AND: (OR): Title Contains "Kart" AND: (OR): Title Contains "Party" ... (any other desired Mario franchise)

So, this means all the titles like Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Mario Party 4 would be added to the list, but other titles like Mario is Missing or Mario's Time Machine or Hotel Mario would not.

EDIT 10:12 AM - I just realized that this boolean operator addition could also assist in solving the issue I reported in Troubleshooting, the one about making multiple Source Does Not Equal statements makes all of them be ignored and all consolidated sets be expanded... just put each Source Does Not Equal statement in in OR sub-field under an AND field.

Also, I have a suggestion for one field set (a field plus conditions) that you could add.

The Community Star Ratings have seen great use in making my True Classics playlist, which include those games released in or before 1984 with a Community Star Rating of 3.5 or higher. But, I would like to have a standardized sample size when determining which games go in this playlist. I mean, currently it doesn't matter if a game has only one vote in the community that is 3.5 itself, or 50 that average out to 3.5 or higher, and I am seeing some obscure games that, while they're probably really good, don't have enough public saturation to determine their 'classic' status, in my opinion.

So, let's have a playlist field for the number of community star ratings (above or below a target number), that average out to my desired star rating. I can set the minimum to 20, for example, and that might be enough public saturation for a reliable sample size.

A practical example: Currently, there are 80+ community star ratings for 1942, which has an average rating of 3.54. That makes the game the first on my True Classics list and well-deserved!

Conversely, Ant Attack, a ZX Spectrum game, has eight community star ratings which average to 4.31. Now, because of these ratings I have no doubt that Ant Attack is an excellent game.

But, I'd like the True Classics list to include games, like 1942 (Arcade), Adventure (Atari 2600), Berserk (Atari 2600), that have a relatively large cross section of the community agreeing that the games stand the test of time. Just to ensure that when I start playing them, I'm going to have a great time, every time.

ALSO, to keep the playlists in check, if a playlist is taking, or will be expected to take, past a certain threshold of processor time to populate, over a certain amount of iterations, the option should be given to freeze the playlist, change it to a normal static game list to save on display and processor time. Also check boxes for "Don't ask again for this playlist" or "Don't ask again for any playlist", just to cover all the bases.

So... there you go. Hope these help, or at least get some ideas going. :)

Take care! Originally written by EazyCheeze1978

Original forum post at: https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/46809-playlist-auto-populate-suggestions/?tab=comments#comment-298458

IceLancer SR's addendum: This is something that LB is seriously lacking. I create playlist with containing "Alien" and i get all bunch of games , right and wrong. It needs more statements so we can actually REMOVE unwanted games from auto populate

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