[Update] Aurora Game Hub - Alpha 9

     I can't believe that, what may be our biggest release yet, is being released today. As I mentioned on my last post, I'm pretty busy this year with school and stuff and was not expecting to get any time to work on Aurora until summer break. But, thankfully the one month break from school this month was enough time to let us make Alpha 9 a pretty nice release. 

     I must say that a lot of the features and work that we did on this release is made possible thanks to the year or so of work we did previously building the foundation of Aurora. We couldn't possibly be able to get these features done as fast as we did (yes, one month for these features is pretty fast) as we did if we hadn't done a lot of internal restructuring and making an effort to build the Aurora App Engine that powers much of the Aurora UI and backend. 

Anyhow, onto the features! Here are the 3 biggest things we added to Aurora:

1. You can add your own custom cover art image now!
2. Big improvements on Auto Add
3. Settings! (much more to come in future releases)

Lets dive deeper into each one.

Custom Cover Art

     So, this is one that you guys have all been asking for and I expected would require a lot more work than it did. But, as I said, Aurora was surprisingly able to easily support custom art. The way we enable you to add the custom art is a little less mundane then just popping up a file browser and letting you select an image. I've long thought File browsers in them selves are really contrived and harder to find/select a images then they should be. When I started thinking about how you would select images on Aurora I instantly imagined some UI where Aurora would recede into the background and you would be able to drag your image from *anywhere* on your computer. I find that most times I tend like to drag and see the image I want to select then dive into the file browser and figure out which image I want.

     You see how the image will look as it is re-sized to fit into Aurora and you can cancel and drag in another image if you wish. There is so much more nuanced connection to an image when you drag it, the physicality of the interaction makes you really consider the cover art you pick and hopefully find it easier to select an image than through the just the file browser which would be a lot more tedious. You can set a custom cover art from the "edit game" pane (select game -> flip -> select gear icon) and from the "manual add" section of adding a game. Just hover over the current Cover Art and you should be able to click and add your image from there.

 

Improved Auto Add

     In my last post I introduced the ability to have Aurora search through your computer for games and allow you to add them through the Auto Add feature. I mentioned it was pretty crude and needed some work, which is what I've done. I improved the algorithm to make it more accurate in selecting executable and also improved how aurora picks Cover Art by taking the name the game finder algorithm retrieved and making adjustments to guess the Cover Art through Aurora Cover DB. It won't always be accurate, so you'll sometimes have to edit the cover art later after adding the game or you can manually add it your self. I also added the ability for Aurora to automatically look for new games in the background so you don't have to wait for Aurora to refresh when you go into the Auto Add UI. You can turn this feature off in the settings however (as you will soon see).  There are still tweaks that need to be made to the game finder algorithm but things seem to be much better now. Let me know if you have any big annoyances about Auto Add :)

 

Settings

     This is something I also thought would take a while to do, but thankfully I was able to implement the key value storage system for settings in the last release to keep track of which way you organize your library. Carlos had some time and worked on the backend while I worked on the UI. At this point we are starting with 4 settings to be able to figure out how to best get the settings to work in real time and to be able to build a flexible UI that will accommodate much more settings in the future. On the home page of this website I put in the coming soon section that "Easy Settings" were a feature, this is what I said about it "We've all seen our fair share of terrible settings screens. We promise we wont treat your precious settings screen like a garbage dump."  I hate how applications find the settings screen to be a last minute afterthought. Settings is going to be important to Aurora, its the bridge to our power users who want some more flexibility and we plan to do our best to keep the settings screen clean, organized and simple. 

     For now 4 the settings we have is: Ability to disable the sound effects, the ability to enable one of our power user features: WASD navigation (which basically allows you to use WASD keys as arrow keys, FPS style, to navigate inside a grid of the library and use the mouse to scroll between grids), and the ability to disable background game search mentioned in the _Improved  Auto Add _section. and finally the ability to manually download and update to the latest AuroraCoverDB which we have just updated with 150 more high quality high res cover art in this release. But we plan to add more, in fact we would love to know what sort of settings you guys would like to have most. Just e-mail me with the top 3 settings you want in Aurora and we will consider each ones :)

   Those are the biggest of the changes we made in Alpha 9, but we fixed a bunch of bugs (and probably added a few new ones) and other smaller improvements here and there. You can see the full list of bug fixes in the "Change Log.txt" file if you are interested. 

Get Alpha 9 Now!

The Future

     Now, lets talk a little about the future. Alpha 10 would likely be released sometime in the summer, because that's the next time I will be off school long enough to work on Aurora. At this point I think the library in Aurora is basically feature complete, aside from minor tweaks and polish there aren't any more big "features" we plan to add to the library in V1. The next release will focus on more Settings and an overhaul of Navigation throughout Aurora. The navigation right now is not as good as I want it to be, this may require a rework of how we do navigation to support 2 big features I hope to get done: Game Pad support and Custom Key Bindings through settings. Hopefully these features appeal to you guys, if you have any feedback on how you like or hate the navigation in Aurora, please e-mail me me :)

Thank You!

     Finally, I would like to thank you all for your feedback and support in reporting bugs, making feature requests and just being overall enthusiastic about Aurora Game Hub, 2013 was a great year for Aurora and I hope 2014 is an even bigger one. Your feedback and interaction is what keeps us going, so if you want to be part of the community please check out one of the 2 social sites we have set up through the community page.

Thank you all again,

Happily, Sammy Guergachi.
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