Please add regions

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winterslang
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:18 am

Please add regions

Post by winterslang »

PAL is not a region.
Its a resolution standard for old tv´s that was used in Europe, Thailand, Russia, Australia, Singapore, China, the Middle East etc.
An Xbox360 game for example can not be PAL or NTSC since the device uses HDMI which is usually minimum 720p no matter where you live in the world.

Please add Asia, Europe and US as regions. In addition to the already existing country drop-down, that should be sufficient.

Its important to keep track of where the games was released in regards to functionality and pricing.

Thank you.

Leo_Pride
Posts: 630
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2018 2:10 am

Re: Please add regions

Post by Leo_Pride »

This is a trickier ask than you may realize.

While our primary goal is to provide raw data absent the specific demands of outside actors, the reality is that this is one area where the scene may have a somewhat outsized impact on how we handle said data.

Historically, related files would follow a UNEJ-type region coding, with the corresponding Universal / North America / Europe / Japan (Australia often falling between the latter two, occasionally releasing both; Japan being used as the generic Asia catchall until specific other nations had native releases) files being accordingly named. This is something we could have handled better; in the early days of console releases, it was (and still is) not at all uncommon to see the conflating of NTSC/PAL/NTSC-J display standards with the corresponding NEJ regions - to the detriment of also-existant standards like SECAM.

Perhaps, going forward, we could introduce proper UNEA/J support as some sort of Region field that locks to the Country field, and use a unique name for it (region_unea or region_natl spring to mind) so as to not break functionality used by projects that use the (what I'll call) "Display Standard" field as a substitute for correct regional support. This could also help alleviate the issue of "No Country" releases, since those technically only exist as an alternative to defaulting to a Universal region where the Release Country isn't set.

Of course, this is all subject to the whims of the developers, but it's something I'd also like to see implemented.
We're curious to see how new projects use TGDB API.
If you have a new public project, please provide a link to it so we can highlight cool new applications! 8-)

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