Proposal: Game Executables

[Peter 0]

I've designed a script that uses a list of game executables, which I built from an outdated discord dump and my own steam library. One person just got in touch to share some other executables he found, which made me realise that there's no central location for information like that.

I'm suggesting to add the information to the wiki to turn it into that central location. It looks like it'd go under the Game data heading, perhaps with the variations such as if the Steam version is different from the original.
Other than my personal use of it, it could be useful for example if people need to whitelist things from a firewall.
It'd also be nice if one page could combine everything together, I'm not sure if wikis have that functionality though.

 

Here are the sources I currently know of:

mine: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Peter92/MouseTracks/master/config/AppList.txt

linked to me: https://gist.github.com/NodusCursorius/24ab96aa4dbaf11f13cff16e6e5a7edf

linked to me: https://gist.github.com/Gr3gorywolf/1757c79ce1152966bf77bf8c6d069161

discord: https://gist.github.com/Scrxtchy/8f0814475fd9cab5b35fcf8882144ef4

unknown: https://gist.github.com/DevNvll/67b3d2113d8cd5c67295b27b5d3b96a1

[Vetle 19]

From Steam: https://gist.github.com/vetleledaal/24d71999df0394904c73bf7d41149a68

To get the information, you can run https://github.com/SteamDatabase/SteamDatabaseBackend and gather the information from the appsinfo table, on rows where Key = 50.

To roughly extract the data, I used something along the lines of https://gist.github.com/vetleledaal/8908f5847b561361136f5698e11ed1f5 (yes, it's messy)

[Andytizer 269]

I can see this information being used for firewall opening/closing. However I’m not sure it’s important enough to put near the top of the page - I suspect it’s a valuable but niche piece of information. Perhaps it could fit inside the Network section which will also contain port numbers, or the Other information section. 

Apart from the name of the executable, what else can be done with this kind of data?

[Peter 0]

Oh awesome job with extracting that list from steam, it'd not crossed my mind to search for APIs.

I agree that it's quite niche information however, so if everything is ordered by importance then it'd be better lower down. I personally reckon it'd suit "other" more than "network", purely because the executable name is not related to networks, it's just the action that can be done with that information is.

As to your last line, are you meaning what other similar data could be added, or what other actions could be done other than using a firewall?
If you mean similar data, other than including the launcher executable, I only have one other idea but it's quite relevant to my script. As a practical example, all Windows Apps are sandboxed inside ApplicationFrameHost.exe, and the way I'm detecting the game is to query the window title. I'm not sure if it's possible for firewalls to act off it though, so while the window title would be useful for me, I guess it depends on if anyone else can think of a practical use.

[Aemony 141]

On 10/5/2019 at 10:42 AM, Andytizer said:

I can see this information being used for firewall opening/closing. However I’m not sure it’s important enough to put near the top of the page - I suspect it’s a valuable but niche piece of information. Perhaps it could fit inside the Network section which will also contain port numbers, or the Other information section. 

Apart from the name of the executable, what else can be done with this kind of data? 

Honestly speaking, I don't see much use of PCGW to carry this sort of data as there's very little use for it. The matter of firewalls are not really relevant in 2019 as it was back in 2005 or earlier, since nowadays every game worth its salt uses hole punching techniques to facilitate traffic past firewalls, or even multi-tiered NAT environments -- where a firewall opening wouldn't have the same effect as it did a decade ago.

Of a similar matter is UPnP (requesting the firewall of a router to open a port automatically), where most games simply don't bother supporting UPnP as hole punching techniques achieves the same end result without support being necessary (or even enabled) in the router. Not to mention that UPnP is often recommended to be disabled due to being a potential security concern.

For most titles this sort of data can be retrieved from Steam (as evidenced by Vetle's post), or by alternative sources like Nvidia's display drivers, as they use the executable filename to apply their driver-level overrides for games.

This sort of data goes more into being a general-purpose technical database of PC games than what PCGW currently tries to align itself to being, I think... Ugh, a wiki is not exactly the most friendly system of these sorts of things...