BaNaNaS cleanup, renewal and improvement

[planetmaker]

Do we actually *want* that?

No, I don't think we do want that. GRF making would become Reddit.

That in itself is not an argument against (nor for). How does that manifest? What is bad about that? What is better? Is no rating or sorting better than any? If you want a rating but not "all the people". Who should make the rating or categorization? On what basis?

I'm a lot on stackoverflow - and a rating of upvoting and downvoting works there well (but downvoting costs a sort of carma which you gain by upvotes of your stuff by other users)

[Pyoro]

The main issue I'd see with rating is handling versions - so version 0.2b was bad, but 0.3 is great. Do we kick out ratings every time or keep them? I've seen some problems with systems that use comments and reviews - it's hard to tell for the user whether bad ratings are still applicable. "3/10, too buggy" -> changelog: - bugfixes -> "do I still need to worry about this or not?"

Also, I vaguely remember this being discussed, but making it easier to share/create/maintain GRF lists might help a lot for "casual" user. Just download the "Auz GRF collection" and you got a reasonable selection of GRFs that fit and work (assuming someone put it together that way) ^^

[PikkaBird]

The best way to approach curated collections would be a rework of the "presets" system, which is currently very old and basic.

Currently, presets are stored in your openttd.cfg, and trying to load a preset with missing grfs simply fails (and blanks your active NewGRF list). a rework which turns presets into "collections" could include:

- Moving presets into discrete files, so they could be distributed
- Allowing missing files to be automatically downloaded
- Allow multiple presets to be loaded simultaneously, and display presets as a single, expandable entity in the "Active NewGRF files" window
- Provide handling for the same grf being present in multiple presets, or in a preset and "loose".

[agentw4b]

Bananas are a black hole that takes the files but does not allow them to be removed. Why do you prevent authors from deleting bad old files?

[andythenorth]

Bananas are a black hole that takes the files but does not allow them to be removed.

If you don't like the service, you can opt not to use it

EDIT: planetmaker gives a more helpful answer below - old savegames.

[planetmaker]

Bananas are a black hole that takes the files but does not allow them to be removed. Why do you prevent authors from deleting bad old files?

What would you think if <random person> would come and tell you "no, you cannot continue to play your favourite savegame"? That's what you're advocating here:

It's smple: people will have maps with that require a particular version of a NewGRF. We want to make sure that people can continue playing their games they started. So any person who has a game which requires it, will be offered the NewGRFs needed - whether it is considered obsolete, broken for whatever reason or not - as otherwise the map itself is broken. To ensure that people can continue to play, we will never remove a NewGRF or AI or GS.

Authors can disable general availability of their NewGRFs, AIs or GS for all other cases as you can set the minimum and maximum OpenTTD version your content is offered to.