Save list of installed and saved games for faster startup times

[m8t88]

Issue:
At the moment, whenever Rai Pal is started, it will have an empty list of games in all tabs and will scan all to populate the list. This can take upt o 10 minutes, depending on how many games are installed or owned across all the different supported store fronts.

Idea:
Save the games list internally for faster start times.

Potential approach:

• Only automatically scan the library if there is no game displayed yet in any tab
• Save all scanned items as JSON inside the app's folder
• If present, automatically load the JSON on start of the app
• Do not automatically trigger a scan when a JSON is available to load
• Clicking on the "Refresh" button will overwrite the old JSON and create a new one after a successful scan
• (optional) Rename the "Refresh" button to "Scan Library"

Since all items are already in a structured format after a scan in memory, maybe the requirement can be covered by implementing an internal import/export functionality.

[Raicuparta]

This has been in my plans! I guess I forgot to make an issue for it. But I'm surprised it's taking 10 minutes for you, I don't think that's normal. How many games do you have installed? And how many show up on owned?

[Raicuparta]

Well, not exactly a fix, but one big difference now is that as soon as I can't figure out the game's engine (which is a quick operation, just checking for the existence of some files), I just give up and don't show those games. Before, it would still scan those other games to check their bitness. But since Rai Pal can't really do much with those games, I'm just skipping them for now.

I still want to include those games eventually, since I wanna let people run for instance UEVR even if Rai Pal fails to recognize it as an Unreal game (can happen). Kinda crazy how big of a difference it made though. Also I actually forgot to include that in the changelog, woops.

[m8t88]

I see, interesting side-effect. With this, the caching requirement is a no issue for now but could still help in future when you reenable to include the unknown engines. Will let you know if any future version will increase the start up time again.

[Raicuparta]

Yeah the caching issue is still open, it will come eventually. But I also have a few other ideas to make the scans faster.

[m8t88]

I noticed that only the first scan right after booting up the computer will take the longest. Last scan for installed Steam games was 101809 ms. If i refresh later, it will only take about 2785ms again. Refreshing also has a lot less debug output.

Maybe I/O to the logfile is eating up time. Would it be possile to selectively activate the detailed log entries like

[2024-01-04][19:52:57][INFO][rai_pal::debug] 0ms # check if game exists
[2024-01-04][19:52:57][INFO][rai_pal::debug] 0ms # before creating installed game (D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Pistol Whip\Pistol Whip.exe)
[2024-01-04][19:52:57][INFO][rai_pal::debug] 0ms # check if is unity exe
[2024-01-04][19:52:57][INFO][rai_pal::debug] 25ms # get os and arch
[2024-01-04][19:52:57][INFO][rai_pal::debug] 6ms # get unity version
[2024-01-04][19:52:57][INFO][rai_pal::debug] 0ms # get unity executable
[2024-01-04][19:52:57][INFO][rai_pal::debug] 33ms # after creating installed game

via a config option?

[Raicuparta]

yeah i actually wanted to do that ever since I added the extra logs, but i was lazy because i haven't added any persistent config stuff to the backend yet 😅