Eclipse 0.0.018

Definitely unique! I don't know how you're doing that but keep it up. This is interesting.

14 hours ago, Dan Patrick said:

Definitely unique! I don't know how you're doing that but keep it up. This is interesting.

Thanks!  You can use the plugin API to add custom user interface controls to a theme and handle events like up, down, left, right, enter, esc, page up, and page down. 

https://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com/html/921cbe56-8200-e3cf-b8f4-2af213ae728a.htm

 

Its all done by the plugin that gets all the games in LaunchBox and creates lists of games by their metadata values. Then those lists are grouped into “list sets” by the type of metadata. Once you have that, it’s a matter of laying the images out on the screen and handling the up, down, left, and right events to move the lists around. 
 

The code isn’t pretty but you can look at it in the GitHub link in the description if interested. 

This is a cool concept for sure. Heres things id like to see if possible. 1) Faster startup if possible. 2) Second screen marquee support. 3) Quicker scrolling through games if possible. 

 

 

21 hours ago, northnut said:

This is a cool concept for sure. Heres things id like to see if possible. 1) Faster startup if possible. 2) Second screen marquee support. 3) Quicker scrolling through games if possible. 

 

 

Agreed on all three! 

Did scrolling through games feel choppy for you? 

Do you know about how many games you have?

Do you know about how long it took for it to load up for you? 

This looks fantastic, thank you!

19 hours ago, Fry said:

Agreed on all three! 

Did scrolling through games feel choppy for you?  Yes feels choppy

Do you know about how many games you have? 18391 games

Do you know about how long it took for it to load up for you? Initial load was around 42 minutes and subsequent loads take about 45 seconds 

 

The fact that this uses a plugin to build the interface leaves me with questions... My experience with plugins and launchbox is that the plugin can break when launchbox updates from one version to another. Is that something you'd be concerned about, or am I not understanding something correctly?

13 minutes ago, Whatscheizer said:

My experience with plugins and launchbox is that the plugin can break when launchbox updates from one version to another.

With the few plugins that I created, it had only happened ("broke") with the migration to .NET Core (version 11.3).  Which was an easy fix and ended up having nothing to do with LB's API.  I know others have 'broke' over time when using a 3rd party API call, where the 3rd party changed their API.

Though my plugins are all a lot more simplistic than what this theme uses. 😊

I suggest adding some way to put platform playlists. It’s annoying scrolling thru large collections, for example I got 1k+ ps1 games and with one row to scroll, it takes a while to find games. Also I can’t seem to flip box art in the menu like I can other themes

 

great work tho! It’s nice seeing a different theme that’s not a reskin of ones we already have. And unlike the other Netflix looking theme, this one seems to scale well and doesn’t require much setup 

On 10/28/2021 at 10:22 AM, Whatscheizer said:

The fact that this uses a plugin to build the interface leaves me with questions... My experience with plugins and launchbox is that the plugin can break when launchbox updates from one version to another. Is that something you'd be concerned about, or am I not understanding something correctly?

You're absolutely right.  There's always a chance for the plug-in to break when there's an update because it depends on the LB plug-in API and in places where the API does not offer a solution, it reads from LB/BB data files.  Changes to the plug-in API or the underlying data format of the LB data files could break things.  I try to use the plug-in API and avoid going directly to the data files whenever possible for that reason.  If an update breaks the plug-in, generally it will throw an exception on startup and Big Box will revert to it's default theme so it shouldn't be a concern of it ruining your LB/BB install or anything.  

Long term, I've requested some changes to the LB plug-in API to support voice search and the standard theme engine to support multiple wheels on the screen at one time.  If we get those changes, I'll be happy to throw 90% of this code away and rebuild it as a standard theme with a small voice search plug-in.  

10 hours ago, bberan said:

I suggest adding some way to put platform playlists. It’s annoying scrolling thru large collections, for example I got 1k+ ps1 games and with one row to scroll, it takes a while to find games. Also I can’t seem to flip box art in the menu like I can other themes

 

great work tho! It’s nice seeing a different theme that’s not a reskin of ones we already have. And unlike the other Netflix looking theme, this one seems to scale well and doesn’t require much setup 

Regarding putting platform playlists, you can go to the options gear and view games by playlist and it will show whatever playlists you have setup.  I agree, this theme does not suit itself to large collections with full rom sets.  It's much better with smaller curated collections.  Between 50 and 200 games in a platform or playlist seem to work well for me.  When I get into the 600+ it takes a long while to scroll through.  I'm asking for an enhancement to the plug-in API to allow for more button bindings so that I can support page up and page down so that it can jump through the game list faster for longer lists.  Right now, all the available button bindings are in use.  Here's the request if anyone wants to vote for it: 
https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5624/expose-additional-button-events-bindings

Regarding flipping the box art, thanks for the suggestion.  I've added it to my to-do list.  I need to see how I can do this, this is another case where I might need an additional button binding in the plug-in API because all the available options are already in use.  I will add the "flip box art" event to my request for additional plug-in events.  

I really love it! Its amazing, my only complain is that for some reason some videos works but others dont, and as a suggestion I would like to have a achievements section in the game details 

1 hour ago, darkniu said:

I really love it! Its amazing, my only complain is that for some reason some videos works but others dont, and as a suggestion I would like to have a achievements section in the game details 

Good suggestion on adding achievements in game details.  I've added it to my todo list.  Could you give me any more detail on videos that work and ones that don't?  What is happening when a video doesn't work?  The way it's coded is if a game has a video path the video is played but if the game doesn't have a video path then it just displays the fan art background image (or gameplay screenshot if no fanart image exists).  Are those games that you have videos for and the videos aren't playing?  What actually happens?  I'd like to look into that and get it fixed.

47 minutes ago, Fry said:

Good suggestion on adding achievements in game details.  I've added it to my todo list.  Could you give me any more detail on videos that work and ones that don't?  What is happening when a video doesn't work?  The way it's coded is if a game has a video path the video is played but if the game doesn't have a video path then it just displays the fan art background image (or gameplay screenshot if no fanart image exists).  Are those games that you have videos for and the videos aren't playing?  What actually happens?  I'd like to look into that and get it fixed.

I was testing and like you said when the video doesnt exist it uses a image (in this case Sonic Rivals 2) but when theres is a video it fades out to black I can add that the video in there its a .webm I didnt have problems with that before in other themes

Ahh thanks for the heads up. It might be an issue with webm format. I’ll look into that. I think all my videos are mp4 

Just now, Fry said:

Ahh thanks for the heads up. It might be an issue with webm format. I’ll look into that. I think all my videos are mp4 

Steam uses webm, they play fine in VLC, but WMP needs you to install codecs to play them.

On 10/31/2021 at 1:57 AM, Fry said:

Regarding putting platform playlists, you can go to the options gear and view games by playlist and it will show whatever playlists you have setup.  I agree, this theme does not suit itself to large collections with full rom sets.  It's much better with smaller curated collections.  Between 50 and 200 games in a platform or playlist seem to work well for me.  When I get into the 600+ it takes a long while to scroll through.  I'm asking for an enhancement to the plug-in API to allow for more button bindings so that I can support page up and page down so that it can jump through the game list faster for longer lists.  Right now, all the available button bindings are in use.  Here's the request if anyone wants to vote for it: 
https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5624/expose-additional-button-events-bindings

Regarding flipping the box art, thanks for the suggestion.  I've added it to my to-do list.  I need to see how I can do this, this is another case where I might need an additional button binding in the plug-in API because all the available options are already in use.  I will add the "flip box art" event to my request for additional plug-in events.  

in other themes you can quickly scroll using the alphabet (for example if im on arcade and want to play pacman and its not under favs, i can skip to P instead of scrolling from A) if theres a way to add this feature i think it would solve the large library issue and since other themes have it built in, i dont think you'll need to code anything too complicated? its a great theme and i still plan to use it for my portable LB since its mostly hand picked games but my main collection has 22k+

one suggestion to help with the problem would be in a future release have the platform playlist as the "tv series" and the games as "episodes"  as an optional view

that way its easier to condense larger collections while keeping the netflix design 

still one of the more modern looking themes and i really like the design. the limitations are more of netflix design. 

2 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Steam uses webm, they play fine in VLC, but WMP needs you to install codecs to play them.

Thanks for the heads up. I was looking into implementing videos as VLC but abandoned it when I ran into some issues and got distracted with other priorities. I’ll look into getting VLC to do video play back and I think that will solve this issue. 

1 hour ago, bberan said:

in other themes you can quickly scroll using the alphabet (for example if im on arcade and want to play pacman and its not under favs, i can skip to P instead of scrolling from A) if theres a way to add this feature i think it would solve the large library issue and since other themes have it built in, i dont think you'll need to code anything too complicated? 

This is my plan for page up and page down if we get some additional button event bindings available via the plugin API. Like you said, this is kind of a limitation of the Netflix style UI and the buttons available to the plugin API.

Other themes can handle this because with a vertical wheel you only need up and down to navigate it. That leaves left and right for additional functions like popping open an alphabet for jumping to a given letter. For this Netflix style UI, up, down, left, and right are all needed for navigating so I need another button to pop open the alphabet to jump to a letter. Page up is in use for random game and page down is in use for voice search. If I get additional button events on the plugin API then I will make page up jump to the title with the next letter and page down jump back to the title with previous letter and move the random game and voice search under new button bindings. 

Edited November 1, 2021 by Fry

This is pretty cool and I look forward to seeing it develop. I am impressed with what I saw after the initial three hour image caching (55K games). Runs nicely, but once I hit the BB native options menu by mistake and tried to go back, right back at square one with the image cache (I think, after 12 minutes of the initial pre-caching load screen without moving to the count or displaying, I shut down).  

If/when I do a smaller build or a dedicated living room TV set up, I will absolutely use this. Awesome concept and it is only gonna get better. 

I need to improve my WPF skills so I can load data and images asynchronously. The wheel implementation here is awful and doesn’t work well with large collections. I’m getting my WPF chops up while working on a few smaller plug-ins and then will come back to this one to try to bring what I learn to improve performance. 
 

it shouldn’t rebuild the image cache from going to the options but it does reload the plugin and that triggers all the lists to be regenerated. With my 2k games it’s about 30 seconds. So with 55k games, maybe it would be like 15 minutes. Yikes that’s bad. 

This BigBox theme is really something different. It makes for me very easy to get started with BigBox! It is something unique!👍

Do you have any plans for localisations in other languages on your future release agenda? I could help you by translating into German and Turkish.

Btw. I recently changed the covers of a couple of games - but in BigBox with Eclipse theme there are still the old ones. Is there a way to recreate/update the images cache?

7 hours ago, GRKNZNGN said:

Do you have any plans for localisations in other languages on your future release agenda? I could help you by translating into German and Turkish.

I hadn’t planned on adding localization for different languages but I do like the idea. I will add it to my todo list. Full transparency, I’m not sure when I will get to this feature due to my limited time to work on this project and there are some other higher priority features that I need to get done first. 

 

7 hours ago, GRKNZNGN said:

 I recently changed the covers of a couple of games - but in BigBox with Eclipse theme there are still the old ones. Is there a way to recreate/update the images cache?

That’s strange, it should reflect and automatically update the Image cache.  The way the image cache update works is on startup, it checks for any file name in your launchbox/images folder that’s not in the plugin\media\resolution\images folder and scales the image. If your new image has the same name as the old image, you could go into the image cache in the plugin folder and find the old image and delete it and on the next startup it should put the new image there instead. 
 

Another possibility is that you have multiple box front images for these games. The plugin just takes the first one that LaunchBox gives so you would want to remove the old image from the game in launchbox to make it display the new image in eclipse. 
 

I think there are some major improvements that can be made in this image caching logic and this will be my primary focus when I get some time to work on this project again. 

5 hours ago, Fry said:

Another possibility is that you have multiple box front images for these games. The plugin just takes the first one that LaunchBox gives so you would want to remove the old image from the game in launchbox to make it display the new image in eclipse. 

You are right - duplicate box front images was the reason. First I removed duplicate images. Then I deleted the whole content in "Plugins\Eclipse\Media\1920x1080\Images\". 

On next start of BigBox this folder is filled with correct box art images now. Thanks for this useful hint! 👍

Sorry! I wrote a review before seeing the comments here. Great discussion, thanks for the education and the great Theme, Fry! I hope you plan to continue to work on this, it has a lot of potential.