[Feature Request]: Add an option to sort by chart author

[hitonisan]

Is there an existing issue for the feature?

• [X] I have searched the existing feature requests

Describe the Feature

This would add a new tab to the Sort Mode Menu, labeled "Chart Author". In this new sort, each tab would contain all of the files that share the same chart/step author (according to the file's data).

Files that do not have a chart author named in the file will be grouped under "Unknown Author".

How Does The Feature Add To The Game?

This gives players a simple way to see all of a particular chart author's files they have in a single group. This could be advantageous if someone wants to look over or play through a certain chart author's charting style, or just wants to see how much a particular stepartist is responsible for.

To my knowledge, the only alternative currently available is the search feature, and requires the knowledge that "author=" is needed as a prefix for the search. Even if this is known, you will still see the results placed according to the current sort mode (e.g. song pack), so results could potentially be quite scattered.

This may also help with searching for certain stepartist names should they be similar to other names, as you will see the name groups right next to each other in the sort menu. The standard search finds names as substrings, wherever they are in the author name, which could make things difficult if you have a short author name like Mat (you'll get Mad Matt files as well searching this), or be unfortunate enough to have "Unknown" in your author name (which would get you lost in a sea of "Unknown Author" matches).

Additional Context

This would probably need to make use of the CREDIT field in the SM file. If this field is empty, it might instead check the author name provided next to a chart difficulty, e.g.:

//--------------- dance-single - Agyll ----------------

The behavior to follow should both of the above exist (and both are different names) is probably something to discuss. It could either give priority to one of the above fields, or find songs that match any of the given author names (assuming a song being able to appear in more than one tab isn't a problem).

[poco0317]

chart author sort is already present in Rebirth and proves that organizing songs by author is actually not that great because the groups all differ by 1 letter or misspellings or whatever. Basically, I have 680 packs loaded for 40000 songs. Switching to author sort that creates 3800 groups. Most of them are 1-2 songs with names that would match other groups or just complete nonsense.

[hitonisan]

The fact that Til' Death is my main theme would explain a lot regarding why I didn't know about this.

I can see the problem with the sheer number of groups - a lot of cases where players have isolated contributions to song packs or used their CDTitle to express some text other than the author name. That kind of dilution's probably going to be present in any kind of solution to this search. I still consider a chart author sort nice to have around, but I can see the grievances with it too.

If I might vent a couple other thoughts I had, then: -There's the possibility of using wildcards in searches. This is a huge stretch, though, as there's probably only a handful of players that know enough about regular expressions to make this useful, and even fewer that would care to learn them for something like this. It's really unlikely that this would be worthwhile. -One alternative approach would be to have the author groupings be by the first letter of each author name. This would still result in some scrolling on the player's part, but would considerably cut down the number of groups someone would have to deal with. Maybe pairing this with the search function could limit the problem of finding short names at points other than the start of a name (like how "Mat" and "Tim" show up in "Ultimatum".

The combination of the chart author sort and an author search to restrict the groups that show up also seems fairly effective in Rebirth's current setup. I'd still say having a chart author sort of some capacity in Til' Death could be worthwhile, though which way to go about it (per name, or per starting letter) has tradeoffs with both choices.

[SauceBucket]

Pull Request #1255 adds the new "StepAuthor" search, which uses the authors name as an alphabetical search.

[poco0317]

1255

[poco0317]

nvm what am i thinking