importer Flashpoint Importer for Launchers 0.7.5.5

1 hour ago, Syllius said:

Wow, there it is. I'm in a bit of shock right now. lol So, once my drive arrives and I get 12.1 Ultimate, can I ask what type of errors that you anticipated when you mentioned earlier about the latest version's compatibility issues? This one seems to work now and I'm wondering if I should try to locate an archive of a more robust older working version or trying to build out a library through what I have a result with now. Any advice is appreciated and considered heavily!  Again, I can't thank you enough, I needed a win tonight!

Can you link me to where exactly you found a copy of Flashpoint Infinity that was labeled as 12.1 as I still have yet to see such a thing, lol.

The situation with Ultimate right now is unfortunate. It has a number of issues, largely due to uncaught bugs. Namely:
 

• Broken configuration files you have to manually edit after downloading
• Missing games
• A version.txt file that incorrectly identifies it as "Infinity" even though it's actually ultimate
• Packaged in a format that can be a bit tricky to extract on Windows

There's another issue or two I can't remember at the moment that, along with the incorrect version.txt file, would require me to add temporary "hacks" into FIL and CLIFp to correctly handled some of these issues, only for them to then need to be removed again once the next version of Ultimate comes out once those problems are presumably fixed.

Technically, it might not be that bad in the end, but I've haven't even really had time to look much at Ultimate myself and am largely going off what I've heard from others and what you can see on the Flashpoint Discord. The fact that it may be a pain to get working with my tools has discouraged me from prioritizing it much as I currently don't have much time to sink into it as mentioned earlier. I might get around to releasing an update for it before the next update, or I may not. Can't say at this moment. I'd like to get around to it sooner than later but I don't want to make promises I can't keep.

So essentially, I'd just consider Ultimate to not work with FIL period until further notice, meaning that at least for the moment you'd need to stick to Infinity. If it makes things easier for you, you could get a collection going with Infinity and then switch it to Ultimate later as long as you keep the installation path exactly the same.

P.S. The error you ran into after creating a test playlist is due to an oversight by me when I added the feature of using icons from playlists. I forgot to account for the fact that user made playlists won't have them. I'll be sure to fix this for the next release of FIL which I can handle soon since unlike with the Ultimate situation I know exactly what needs to be done to fix that.

Came right off their site. I believe that's where I picked up the previous version, too. I attempted to grab a couple other games, and started testing them. Lots of white screens, but I kind of feel like that's some sort of firewall conflict on my behalf. Still trying to figure it out. When I attempted to import a few of the ones that were playing, though, I started getting a key error for server from the config.json in Launcher. I think I had switched it from PHP to Apache at some point, but switching it back didn't seem to help. I believe the only ones I added were from the Adult Swim playlist. I imagine this, amongst other things, is probably some of your frustrations. I'm not terribly prolific at the inner working of programming, but if you ever want someone to bear the burden, I'll be keeping right up on your updates. I'd be more than happy to help try and test out functionality when the new version drop if you think it'll be feasible. Wish I had a bit more understanding of the internal machinations of the server.

 

26 minutes ago, Syllius said:

Came right off their site. I believe that's where I picked up the previous version, too. I attempted to grab a couple other games, and started testing them. Lots of white screens, but I kind of feel like that's some sort of firewall conflict on my behalf. Still trying to figure it out. When I attempted to import a few of the ones that were playing, though, I started getting a key error for server from the config.json in Launcher. I think I had switched it from PHP to Apache at some point, but switching it back didn't seem to help. I believe the only ones I added were from the Adult Swim playlist. I imagine this, amongst other things, is probably some of your frustrations. I'm not terribly prolific at the inner working of programming, but if you ever want someone to bear the burden, I'll be keeping right up on your updates. I'd be more than happy to help try and test out functionality when the new version drop if you think it'll be feasible. Wish I had a bit more understanding of the internal machinations of the server.

 

Ah... interesting you went as far as checking the launcher executable's file version. While that in itself is perfectly reasonable, that version number doesn't always match the entire releases version number, which in this case is still just 12. That's what the target version is aiming for. If they actually update the whole release to something like "12.1" it will say so on the website and should also say that in the title bar of the launcher once it's running. So for now all is well in that department.

As for the other stuff, here's what I'd do: I'm going to push an update for FIL as soon as I can, perhaps even tomorrow. Once I do, download it and then get yourself a fresh, unaltered copy of Infinity to avoid any potential issues that could arise from specific config settings. Run it once with the standard launcher and update it using the button in the upper left corner (it may prompt you to restart during this). Then, once it's updated try using the new/latest version of FIL with it and then let me know if you continue to have issues with certain games.

I'll be sure to inform you when I post the update.

Absolutely indebted! Thank you very much and I appreciate the info about the version number. I think that once you had mentioned it and I went to the archived version of the downloads, I just assumed the original download I'd made was 12.1 since the archived version is labeled 12.0. I had no idea though that the version numbers were target number, though I think I remember reading something this evening about not using trailing 0s in release numbers, but that may have been a GitHub tad-bit that flew by me in my frenzied state. 😃 I'll keep an eye out and, again, all my gratitude!

 

To clarify, the releases of GitHub, labeled like so:

Quote

FIL Release v0.7.1.2 (Targets FP v12.0)

First lists the version of FIL itself, and then in the parenthesis shows the matching version of Flashpoint that particular release was designed to work with.

It shows "12.0" to specifically highlight that it's meant to work with the initial revision of Flashpoint 12, as sometimes if you just show the major version (12) without the ".0" it can be interpreted to mean the whole release range of 12 in its entirety, and not just 12.0. For example, Qt, a library I use extensively in the development of these tools is often mentioned in accordance with its major version. I.e. Qt 3, Qt 4, Qt 5 or Qt 6; however, there are many minor versions of Qt within these, so even though there is a Qt 6.0, simply writing "Qt 6" generally refers to any minor release of Qt 6 (so it could be 6.4.2 or 6.5.1, etc.).

So here, I use 12.0 to distinguish that I am specifically referring to 12.0 and not any release of Flashpoint 12.

Trailing zeros are generally to be avoided for the 3rd and 4th places, often referred to as "build" and "revision" respectively (though there are other names). So you wouldn't want to do 5.0.0.0 or 5.0.0, but 5.0 is fine since it helps to disambiguate the above situation, as explained.

That's absolutely awesome! I've looked at version numbers for decades, but have only had a very distant relationship with programming  and had no idea that the numbers were classifications of updates. I always just assumed it was to have a wider range of numbers to choose from for branching versions. I've always wanted to get more into it and recently looking at some of the tutorials for building C# plugins has really been tempting me to try and start learning how to use Visual Studio. I've always found it really intimidating though, heh, I usually get to about the library inclusion and function building parts of the curriculum and start feeling overwhelmed. 

 

8 hours ago, Syllius said:

That's absolutely awesome! I've looked at version numbers for decades, but have only had a very distant relationship with programming  and had no idea that the numbers were classifications of updates. I always just assumed it was to have a wider range of numbers to choose from for branching versions. I've always wanted to get more into it and recently looking at some of the tutorials for building C# plugins has really been tempting me to try and start learning how to use Visual Studio. I've always found it really intimidating though, heh, I usually get to about the library inclusion and function building parts of the curriculum and start feeling overwhelmed. 

It's further complicated by the fact that there's no hard and fast rules, but rather just "best practice" which of course people argue over. It's also become more common over time to leave out the zero when showing release numbers in more "user facing" contexts since it looks cleaner. Even though the FP12 release on the website is specifically 12.0, they started leaving out the zero so they only list it as 12, which can then be confusing since it contradicts what I said earlier. The "stricter" use of version numbers does include keeping the 0 when it matters though as I explained with the Qt example.

Yea, this kind of stuff can be really intimidating at first, and dealing with the tooling is it's own nightmare, but it definitely gets easier as you go. Starting with example projects that are already fully working can be a good way to get a better sense of what really matters and what doesn't for a particular goal (e.g. loading in an external library) as it's definitely easy to get lost in the myriad of facilities and to know what exactly is relevant for a given task.

Anyway, I uploaded an update to FIL. As I said before, try it out with a fresh copy of FP12 Infinity and then let me know if you run into issues with games working again, or just how to use FIL in general.

Edited October 17, 2023 by oblivioncth

On 10/17/2023 at 6:58 PM, oblivioncth said:

It's further complicated by the fact that there's no hard and fast rules, but rather just "best practice" which of course people argue over. It's also become more common over time to leave out the zero when showing release numbers in more "user facing" contexts since it looks cleaner. Even though the FP12 release on the website is specifically 12.0, they started leaving out the zero so they only list it as 12, which can then be confusing since it contradicts what I said earlier. The "stricter" use of version numbers does include keeping the 0 when it matters though as I explained with the Qt example.

Yea, this kind of stuff can be really intimidating at first, and dealing with the tooling is it's own nightmare, but it definitely gets easier as you go. Starting with example projects that are already fully working can be a good way to get a better sense of what really matters and what doesn't for a particular goal (e.g. loading in an external library) as it's definitely easy to get lost in the myriad of facilities and to know what exactly is relevant for a given task.

Anyway, I uploaded an update to FIL. As I said before, try it out with a fresh copy of FP12 Infinity and then let me know if you run into issues with games working again, or just how to use FIL in general.

Thanks again for the quick turn around! Just grabbed it and sitting down to do the installs now!

Can't thank you enough! Apparently, my wife had built up a tremendous amount of nostalgia for "Hot Dog Bush" over the years! Lol, you really put a ton of laughter in the air here! It seems to work very smoothly and I don't want to tinker with anything at the risk of breaking it. Can I ask if there's any way to do bulk downloads or perhaps drop in the missing game info from an Ultimate install? The sea of blank of entries in LaunchBox has me in challenge mode now!  =D

6 hours ago, Syllius said:

Can't thank you enough! Apparently, my wife had built up a tremendous amount of nostalgia for "Hot Dog Bush" over the years! Lol, you really put a ton of laughter in the air here! It seems to work very smoothly and I don't want to tinker with anything at the risk of breaking it. Can I ask if there's any way to do bulk downloads or perhaps drop in the missing game info from an Ultimate install? The sea of blank of entries in LaunchBox has me in challenge mode now!  =D

You should be good to just swap to Ultaimte when the time comes, but if you would really not mess with it too much, you could try to copy the Images and Games folders from Ultimate into Infinity which then would make them more or less equivalent. The legacy games would be a little more complicated to copy over but those can also still be downloaded on the fly when you try to play them so it wouldn't be a huge deal.