Eclipse 0.0.018

Does anybody has the same issue, that number for "Max Players" is not shown correctly?
I mean the controller icon - there should be the number, which I have defined in the game settings ...

And here my game settings:


 

9 hours ago, GRKNZNGN said:

Does anybody has the same issue, that number for "Max Players" is not shown correctly?
I mean the controller icon - there should be the number, which I have defined in the game settings ...

And here my game settings:


 

Interesting find.  The plug-in doesn't look at the max players and it only looks at the play mode to set the that image.  The images for the play modes are in LaunchBox\Plugins\Eclipse\Media\PlayMode: 

 

I took a look and I don't think the plug-in API exposes "max players" property on a game.  I can add a feature request to the bit bucket to ask them to make max players available to the plug-in interface.  If we get that then I can include a small update to support max players where it would first look at max players and if there's a value there it would look for an image in this folder like 1.png, 2.png, 4.png, etc...  In the meantime, you can try changing the play mode from simultaneous to 4-player simultaneous and it should show the right icon.  

Edited December 4, 2021 by Fry

Yolo'ed the latest Bigbox update and Eclipse is still working great  

Could someone check and see if this reproduces on their machine with the latest Launchbox update and Eclipse?

1. Go to the game select screen

2. Idle for several minutes

3. ---> Instead of the screensaver coming up, it will enter the game instead.

 

Thank you!

-CRLR

8 hours ago, CrocketRauncher said:

Could someone check and see if this reproduces on their machine with the latest Launchbox update and Eclipse?

1. Go to the game select screen

2. Idle for several minutes

3. ---> Instead of the screensaver coming up, it will enter the game instead.

 

Thank you!

-CRLR

I'll have a look.  To confirm, what version of LaunchBox are you on?  12.6?  I'm running 12.3 on my development laptop and cannot reproduce this behavior.  I yolo'd the latest update on my arcade cabinet a day or two ago and wasn't able to produce it.  I actually just fired up my arcade cabinet up so I could have the attract mode screen saver on in the background.  It updated and was running fine. 

So to confirm a few things: 

1.  What version of LaunchBox are you on?  Is it 12.6?  

2.  Are you able to reproduce this issue every time or is it something that just happened once?  

3.  Do you have any other plugins installed in your LaunchBox\Plugins folder?  (I recently put out a big box auto play plugin that would automatically launch into a game so this issue got my mind thinking there but that plugin should launch immediately into a game when big box loads up for the first time only).  

4.  Are you on the screen where all the game boxes are or are you on the game details screen where you can pick play game, 

It will probably be a few days before I can debug this due to holiday festivities but I'll look into it when I get a chance. 

 

4 hours ago, Fry said:

I'll have a look.  To confirm, what version of LaunchBox are you on?  12.6?  I'm running 12.3 on my development laptop and cannot reproduce this behavior.  I yolo'd the latest update on my arcade cabinet a day or two ago and wasn't able to produce it.  I actually just fired up my arcade cabinet up so I could have the attract mode screen saver on in the background.  It updated and was running fine. 

So to confirm a few things: 

1.  What version of LaunchBox are you on?  Is it 12.6?  

2.  Are you able to reproduce this issue every time or is it something that just happened once?  

3.  Do you have any other plugins installed in your LaunchBox\Plugins folder?  (I recently put out a big box auto play plugin that would automatically launch into a game so this issue got my mind thinking there but that plugin should launch immediately into a game when big box loads up for the first time only).  

4.  Are you on the screen where all the game boxes are or are you on the game details screen where you can pick play game, 

It will probably be a few days before I can debug this due to holiday festivities but I'll look into it when I get a chance. 

 

Merry Christmas Fry! Thanks for taking a look and responding. 

1. I'm running Launchbox version 12.6

2. I'm able to reproduce the issue every time. I created a debug log (boot, bug of moving into game, exit) but didn't attach it because I think I solved it.

3. I only have Eclipse folder, Eclipse.dll, System.Speech.dll, and WpfAnimatedGif.dll in my Plugin's folder.

4. When I'm on the screen with boxes, after a few minutes idle it presses a button and goes to the game details, then about 30 seconds to a minute later it presses the button again and starts the game.

Solved: When loading another bigbox theme, it looks like it's doing some kind of hyperspin rotation (tried with Coverbox). I assume this is Attract Mode? Should I have Attract Mode enabled with Eclipse? I tested again by turning off Attract Mode and it no longer jumps into games, and the game image screensaver comes up again! I think it was my setting for Attract Mode being turned on with Eclipse.

 

Glad to hear you got it solved!  That kind of makes sense, I had forgotten to mention that in the install notes to turn the standard attract mode off since this plug-in can't make use of it.  I will add that to the release notes.  Thanks for the heads up and troubleshooting!  Merry Christmas to you!

I've installed onto a second machine and I seem to have broken my Bigbox "genres" view. I accidentally tried to run the eclipse theme without the eclipse.dll file installed. I received a fatal exception. Now that I've added it, all my bigbox themes look like this no matter what I select. 

I tried refreshing all image and coverflow caches, it didn't help. I took a look but I'm not sure where the Genre theme information is listed in Bigbox.

 

Is there a way to reset Bigbox's theme information?

 

I am able to go to Esc Menu > View Platforms and get Eclipse to load, but it's not loading on launch even though it's selected as the Theme to load under options/views. I get this weird broken screen instead, regardless of what I select in Esc Menu > Options > Views including different "default startup views" or "Themes". It doesn't matter what I select there anymore, it's all broken and takes me back to something like the screenshot above with "Genres". I seem to have really screwed it up by accidentally running eclipse without the .dll haha - hopefully it only affects Genres, it'll make it easier to narrow down what's going on.

 

If the themes can't be refreshed/fixed then if I know what xml files impact these areas I could pull them from my working setup. Any help and insight would be greatly appreciated! I'll continue tinkering with it in the meantime.

Edited January 16, 2022 by CrocketRauncher

Update: Fixed

I'm not really sure how, but I fixed it with some options adjustments (like default loading Platform instead of Genre, which wasn't initially working) and a reboot. Theme selections and options are working again as normal now Noting this here in case anyone runs into a similar issue with a boneheaded install like I did. 

I investigated this and found that I've mistakenly delivered this funky "FilterView" with the Eclipse theme along with several other views when really all I should be delivering is Platform Wheel 1.  I need to delete all the other views from the theme so that they properly fall back to the default when Eclipse is not in use.  What happened is since the plug-in files weren't there, the theme blew up (probably showed an ugly error message) and then switched to the platform 1 wheel view from the default theme.  When you switched to "show genres" it was still on "eclipse" and loaded up my funky FilterView which had nothing but that hard coded string in there (not sure how it got in there like that).  I'm going to remove all the other views from Eclipse except for the PlatformWheel1FiltersView which is the only view that is used by the theme to avoid this in the future.  

Awesome Fry! I'm glad you were able to reproduce it, just like you said it did give me a really ugly error message when I tried to load without the eclipse.dll. I was fully expecting my idiocracy to just be documented and moved on from, but it seems you've been able to make this into a nice bugfix development opportunity. I'm quite happy it ended up being useful to future builds that I'm sure I'll also break unintentionally in new and exciting ways haha ^^; Thanks again for the theme and continued development, it's far and away my favorite.

Cheers!

Tried out the latest version 0.0.5 and it seems to be working well so far! Thanks again Fry!

Really enjoying this theme. Thank you so much Fry.

I hope you don't mind some minor thoughts below.

On start-up, the positing in the History seems to be random or mid-way through the list. Not sure if this is a bug or expected behavior for an attract-mode, but I'd love to be able to jump right back into the last game.

I do have a paper-cut that might be an issue. I (very) often accidently open the left side menu. Is it possible to stay at the end of list rather than scrolling back to the beginning? Or can the sidebar be changed to only open on a hotkey, and not when scrolling? Or, a visual indicator (scroll bar?) to show the scrolling list is about to scroll back to the beginning? Sorry if this is a setting somewhere that I missed.

Being greedy, would it be possible to add some automatic categories / sort orders, namely Highest Rated, Unplayed, Most Played, Single Player, Recent Releases, etc.? This may be an existing configuration - Lunchbox playlists? - that I am unfamiliar with.

Regardless, yours theme is my daily driver. Its fantastic!

Cheers,

PS. I have no microphone on the PC, I'd love to be able to fully disable voice search

 

Good suggestions @launchbox_saropa. They all look pretty doable. I will look into them. 
- the startup behavior is intentional. It picks a random game from your favorites. I think we should add a setting that lets you specify what list you’d like to start in and whether you would like the first game, a specific game, or a random game from that list 

- for the settings pane, I think a simple change can be made so that it won’t open when held. I will think about a configuration for this behavior

- for the additional categories, I think highest rated, most played, never played, recent editions are good ideas. For single player that would be a play mode so you should be able to see that from play mode. What might be nice here is to give a configuration screen that lets you pick and combine lists from different categories. I need to think a bit more on this. 
 

- disable voice search (while it hurts me to hear such a thing), I should look into ways to make sure it doesn’t cause any problems if you don’t have a mic 

Glad you like the suggestions.

BTW, I have noticed a hard PC lock-up after running the latest version for a while (i.e. hours), but not sure if the source is Big Box, or Eclipse, or something else.

It is repeatable, but the hard-lock (no blue screen) means I can't easily check if its a memory leak or file-lock. If I get time I'll try older versions and report.

PS. it is clear voice is special feature - I've no doubt it'll be hard to put that OFF switch in 🙂

That’s interesting, I have not experienced that yet. I have let it idle for a few days and haven’t had any locking up yet. Can you describe the hard lock?  Are you leaving it on for long duration?  Are you playing and it locks up or just idles?  Is windows totally locked up and you have to do a hard shutdown?  

Theme looks great with my best of collections. Using the labour intensive 1080p Fanart finding makes the theme look great. Have setup 2 systems so far with my own bezels I've made, makes it look really good. 

 

 

Just a quick video, bezels need redoing just did 2 to test. 

On 1/21/2022 at 8:43 PM, Fry said:

That’s interesting, I have not experienced that yet.

Brother.... Love this theme but I got over 10k worth or games. The load time is too long. Kids wont even play. I never change my setup so why does it need to load constantly? I am on platform flat images. is there a way or could you PLEASE set up a method to turn this thing off? I do not mind it doing it once and saving it somewhere so It doesn't need to do it again.

 

Please.

 

Thank you.

Yeah man until I can optimize it, I probably wouldn’t recommend this theme for a setup with 10k games.  To turn off, select another theme. You can delete the plugin files if you want to completely clear it from your system. 

Edited January 30, 2022 by Fry

18 hours ago, Fry said:

Yeah man until I can optimize it, I probably wouldn’t recommend this theme for a setup with 10k games.  To turn off, select another theme. You can delete the plugin files if you want to completely clear it from your system. 

No I do not mean that. I mean if I always have it set as platform why would it need to update every time? Even if I go into the menu and come out it will restart the process. I am asking can it save all this information on my NAS and just read it from there afterwards.

Or to turn the option to cache off completely. Not turn off the theme. I am not sure if you were offended by me asking but I think we all know how to remove a theme. 

I like the theme. Just witnessing the kids just drop the controller and run off is disappointing after I set all this up for them. 

No offense taken here, friend.  I saw your message on my phone and I read and responded too quickly.  I misunderstood what you were asking and thought you were asking how to turn the plug-in off and change to another theme because this one loads too slow for you. Code changes are needed to optimize the loading.  I'm super swamped with family and work and as this is a hobby project of mine, changes to it will come slow.  I do agree there is a ton of room for improvement on the loading but it will be some time before I can tackle those.  All this being said, I want to clarify what is going on when it loads up.  There are two main things that are happening: 

 

First - Images are scaled and cached to match your resolution

This process looks for any images in the LaunchBox images folder and creates a scaled copy of the image in the plug-in folder to help with performance while running the plug-in.  On subsequent runs of BigBox, unless new games or images have been added, there should be no building of the image cache.  If you add a handful of games, you may see a few seconds of loading to scale and cache any images that exist in the LaunchBox images folder that do not exist in the plug-in media folder.  When this is happening you should see the progress bar message, "updating image cache".  The image cache for the plugin is saved in a folder at this location: LaunchBox\Plugins\Eclipse\Media\(1920x1080)\Images.  If you are seeing a long window for "updating image cache" every time you load the theme then something is going wrong where the files are not saving here or they are being removed or something.  My guess is that the delay you're seeing is actually on the next step where the game lists are created.  

 

Second - Game lists are created

This process occurs each time BigBox loads.  This process goes through each game, creating sets of games like games by platform, games by genre, games by release year, etc.  For each game it also loads the box art, logo, and background images into memory.   When this is happening you should see the progress bar message, "Creating game lists".  This has to be done each time BigBox loads.  I agree there's not only room for optimization here but I can also make some changes so that this process doesn't have to reoccur every time you go out into the BigBox settings menu and come back into the theme.  When you go into the BigBox settings menu and then come back into the theme, BigBox reloads the plug-in and this process is reoccurring.  Some code changes here can probably be made to avoid this.  

 

Both of these processes need a big time overhaul to work asynchronously and load as you go.  This is going to be a big undertaking for me so I wouldn't expect it super soon.  I may be able to get a couple of small tweaks out relatively quickly that help to stop the reloading from occurring when you come back out of the BigBox settings.  I'm also looking into reworking the way the game list sets are built to make them configurable.  That has the potential to reduce some of the loading that's being done by specifying that you only want games by platform for instance and you don't care about loading up the games by genre, playlist, developer, publisher, etc...  

I'm glad you're enjoying the theme and sorry to hear about your experience with the performance.  I will post updates as time permits, maybe get something out this week that can at least keep it from reloading the game lists when you come out of the big box settings screen.

 

Edited January 31, 2022 by Fry

I am thankful you gave such a detail on what is happening under the hood. Also I am so glad you did not take my msg as hostile. Text can do that sometimes. Lastly... Pishhh I know what you mean about family. Life is no joke... esp now. No one has time to relax anymore. How can we... we are bored to death.

This is the best-looking theme. Rule of thumb... if kids like it... usually it is a hit. I see it when I look up at my rear-view mirror and see the kids singing a song... next thing you know that is a hit... On how they gravitate towards specific apps on their tablets and now this... they NEVER wanted to use Launchbox. I am not even joking. They are like... ah... can I go play on my (Anything).

But when I installed this... wonder kicked in. That was soooooo cool to see. So what I do now is I keep it running in the bg. (I use moonlight using an dummy dongle to stream to the TV). So computer seems idle but it is running the theme in the bg.

Only thing besides the loading is the search. because I am using Moonlight the Nivida shield controller voice search does not seem to work. Searching for the odd game is a bit hard. so I got to make a huge favorites list. 

 

How about setting up a patron or something? 

On 1/21/2022 at 8:43 PM, Fry said:

That’s interesting, I have not experienced that yet. I have let it idle for a few days and haven’t had any locking up yet. Can you describe the hard lock?  Are you leaving it on for long duration?  Are you playing and it locks up or just idles?  Is windows totally locked up and you have to do a hard shutdown?  

No lock when running launchbox + eclipse or even games left overnight. But of course launching a game requires a user interaction which I think turns off "attract mode". It could be that the "attract mode" is running the lock occurs. I noticed the lock occurs after 1 hour. Maybe I have a corrupt movie / image error in library - but all mine defaults from emumovies.

Windows is totally locked - not in sleep mode, no blue screen, no response from ctrl-alt-delete. Requires a hard boot  (power off).

PS. Still loving the theme!

On 2/3/2022 at 12:30 PM, launchbox_saropa said:

No lock when running launchbox + eclipse or even games left overnight. But of course launching a game requires a user interaction which I think turns off "attract mode". It could be that the "attract mode" is running the lock occurs. I noticed the lock occurs after 1 hour. Maybe I have a corrupt movie / image error in library - but all mine defaults from emumovies.

Windows is totally locked - not in sleep mode, no blue screen, no response from ctrl-alt-delete. Requires a hard boot  (power off).

PS. Still loving the theme!

@launchbox_saropa do you see an "Eclipse.txt" file in your LaunchBox folder next to LaunchBox.exe?  If so, could you send it to me?  That will log any exceptions that occur while running the theme.  I still have not produced this hard locking issue.  I have left my laptop and my arcade cabinet on for a few days just letting it run the attract mode and it's not frozen up like this for me.  It's possible there is some system resource issue.  I'd also be interested to hear if you can find anything in your windows event viewer after you do a restart that indicates any errors.