The funny thing is, that even some very old Games use the Games Explorer, and it has even some advantages over the regular start menu, but it's more like a candy feature.
I want to look into awesomeing up our Games Explorer support (as one of the few full-time Vista users in the office), but I haven't spent much time on it yet.
Hahah, just me. :P You guys are great. I've looked into the editing of the Games Explorer Registry section and have been able to rename them a little better, and with the icons you gave us I've been able to make it pretty. Only thing is it's still missing the ESRB/WEI info and other minor details.
The episodes aren't ESRB rated, and it's likely that they won't be... at least not for a while (aside from the Adventure Company release, which will get an ESRB rating for the entire season).
It's cool that people are going out of their way to better integrate Sam & Max with Games Explorer. Is there a way that your work can be saved to a file for others to use, or is it done only by manually editing your registry?
Computer > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft> Windows > CurrentVersion > GameUX > Games
Inside there will be a bunch of weird named Keys. {2A5AA5C2-018F-4916-933C-82319B7D9D7A} is the name of my Reality 2.0 key. in there you can modify different strings. Only a few are present however, and manually adding them seems to do nothing for me. I's missing simple ones like Genre and Publisher that I wish I could add. If you click around and find other games under the same folder that have been fully supported by the Games Explorer, you'll see what I mean.
I've been using Games Explorer as my primary game launchpad ever since the Steam UI update and so I noticed ToMI supports the Games Explorer, but the behaviour seems to be different depending on episode.
I installed the full season from the DVD and noticed episodes 3 and 4 display their OFLC rating but the other episodes don't and episode 2 has a weird drop shadow box surrounding its icon.
There are a lot of inconsistencies between episodes and seasons--not just in the Games Explorer. Installer file names, default install directory (Sam & Max season 3 has a different default install directory than seasons 1 and 2), a few seasons on Steam will load incorrect information into the registry. It would be really nice if they had someone they could task with finding these inconsistencies and deploying fixes.
Comments
Are you the same person who emailed in to support about this, or someone different?
Just curious if we've got one person asking about this or two.
It's cool that people are going out of their way to better integrate Sam & Max with Games Explorer. Is there a way that your work can be saved to a file for others to use, or is it done only by manually editing your registry?
Computer > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft> Windows > CurrentVersion > GameUX > Games
Inside there will be a bunch of weird named Keys. {2A5AA5C2-018F-4916-933C-82319B7D9D7A} is the name of my Reality 2.0 key. in there you can modify different strings. Only a few are present however, and manually adding them seems to do nothing for me. I's missing simple ones like Genre and Publisher that I wish I could add. If you click around and find other games under the same folder that have been fully supported by the Games Explorer, you'll see what I mean.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173432.aspx
Don't know if this is still a problem for you guys - if it is, I've made a program that should fix this problem for you.
You can download the lates version of my app (Vista Game Explorer Editor) from my website: http://ryzza007.googlepages.com/vgee
I installed the full season from the DVD and noticed episodes 3 and 4 display their OFLC rating but the other episodes don't and episode 2 has a weird drop shadow box surrounding its icon.