Giantbomb API Feature Requests

I wanted to create this thread as the main place to request features for the staff to work on in the API. It seems that there are quite a few developers ready to make some really compelling apps, but currently some of the missing features makes that very difficult or impossible. Here are few of the ones that I would like added, and I would hope other developers could add in what they're looking for - together we can really expand the Giantbomb brand to a host of cool apps and utilities with the right support from the API's developers.   
 

Sorting:

Yeah, sorting sucks. You could get around that by mirroring everything locally and implementing your own decent searching and sorting methods, but that's hardly practical.

The thing with news is that I'm not sure it uses the same license as the wiki stuff. Contributions to the wiki are licensed as CC-BY-NC. And I get the feeling they don't even like doing that. Most gaming sites like to retain the copyright over editorial content and like to make it available under free or sorta free-ish licenses. I imagine Giant Bomb's staff would be the same way. They don't mind making an RSS feed available; many sites do that. But making it available through the API with primarily CC-BY-NC content makes it look like the news would be available under that license, even if that's not what they intended. I'd only like to see news made available through the API if they explicitly state that they've released it under the CC-BY-NC license. There's too much licensing confusion already.

I'd love a list of authors for... well, about everything that the API can retrieve. For news and video though, you can currently get that from the RSS feed, through the dc:creator element. Yeah, it doesn't give you everything you want. But I haven't seen anything happen on the API development front for a very long time, so I'm not sure you'll ever see any of these enhancements. :(

For anyone that was wondering, the 4 feeds are: 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Giantbombvideos,  http://feeds.feedburner.com/Giantbombnews,  http://www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/, and  http://feeds.feedburner.com/GiantbombAll   
 
Although, unfortunately it seems that even things like news and videos - and to a certain extent "ALL" doesn't exactly match the site's content. It seems like it gets posted and so forth at different times and sorted differently.  Oh well. C'mon Giantbomb! Give us developers the tools to really wow you! 

I actually already posted this over in the Editing & Tools forum for the main giantbomb guys to implement into the site, but then I thought you API guys could do something with it...
 
I suppose it'd be easier to link back to that topic instead of typing it all out again:
http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/editing-tools/820/a-new-advanced-search-feature/391410/#2

One major missing piece is dlc - a game resource has no idea what dlc is available. Also, dlc reviews are lumped in with the game review without a way to discern which is which.

I might be missing this, I'm not sure, but as far as I can see API search results do not return the game platform. I see this as kind of critical. Any chance of adding this?

Hello, just to put my two cents in here, I'd like to also say that I'd love to see the sort be expanded upon, as well as the addition of a sort direction (ascending or descending).
 
Then to also have the console platform information in the result of a search query would be great too.  Having to run a loop and lookup game platforms for each result item is a bit clumsy.
 
Thanks and good work on the API thus far.

 For security reasons, you should really consider adding an API Key Secret which can be used to sign API requests with. As it stands there's nothing stopping a person from stealing another person's API Key by snooping their app's http requests or even just googling ( http://www.google.com/search?q=api.giantbomb.com+api_key shows a few). It's a fairly standard feature of most developer APIs, and just a Good Idea™ (at least if you're trying to restrict access to your API at all).

Agree that platform data on search would be useful, rather than having to hammer the API with checks for every result.

I would also echo the need for returning platform information in the Games resource... Including Genre, Publisher, and Developer would also be extremely helpful.

 As a UK based dev, I would love the ability to return UK box art (or any other country for that matter!) if available. Even if all images were available as URL's, with a caption, and we had to look for any with UK in the title (Halo CE for example, has a UK box art file which is not available via the API).
 
Hopefully this can be included in the proposed rewrite.
 
And I also would love the full genre, publisher and developer information within the standard search request - although I imagine there could be problems with queries where different devs have worked on different platforms etc - hanheld versions are often different devs.
 
Thanks for everything we have so far!

After using the API for awhile now, I definitely agree we need better sorting, especially for searches. Right now I recursively do a search and fetch all results so I can reliably display results (i.e. exact matches go to the top and then sorted by popularity!).
 
In addition, I'd love to see the Achievements resource exposed (I don't even know how you get that info, Xbox API?).
 
I also would like to reduce round-trips to the API so a way to manually pre-fetch relationships would be awesome. Example, I would love to show platforms on search but in order to do that, I'd have to re-fetch the platform data per each game in the search... when search already takes 100-300ms, adding that again and again... not fun. I already am forced to do it when a user adds a game (I fetch platforms and soon am going to have to fetch releases too).

I just wanted to make a list of great in game music, but noticed (I think) that GB doesnt grab specific tracks of soundtracks, which I find kinda sad since gamemusic is one of my favorite genres of music. :) So I guess Id like a dataentry for musical tracks out of the game OSTs.

Hello,

I'm posting here but what I'm looking for might already be available in the current API and I simply overlooked (because it seems like what I'm doing is a bit overcomplicated compared to my very simple goal).

Basically I want, every few days, to execute a batch that retrieves all the Xbox 360 and XBLA games, along with their genre tags and their release date.

So right now I have to do it like this (there are some extra internal things for caching and such, but this is complete as far as the API is concerned):

1. Get the list of games (/games/), filtering using "platforms" and "field_list" for id/game
2. Get game details (/game/id), filtering using "field_list" for id, name, releases and genres
3. Get release details (/release/id), filtering using "field_list" for game, platform and release_date

Could this be done in a simpler way? My main issue is really with the release date, which causes a lot of extra queries when that info could be available directly in /game/.

And if it can't be done, could it possibly be added to the API that the releases information for /game/ includes the platform, because some old games have been released on tons of platforms and in the end I have to do 20 or queries to find the right release...

Thanks

Hi,

what do you think about adding CORS header to your json responses?

I know, that you are supporting jsonp as a result format, but making plain json based requests/response handling would make life easier using javascript in modern browsers....

Thanks & cheers

Christian

My request:

Add "platforms" of the games to /search/

I realy miss that.

I'd really like to be able to get images with a specific tag (I only want screenshots, for example).

I second that. The API only allows retrieving 30 images from the gallery and I expect that these are the 30 last uploaded?