xevidroid

I only have 2 requests for Launchbox going forward and every time I mention them I fail to get traction, but I'll try again =\ 1) Ability to sort the images, or have them displayed in a specific order in the game-details section. Sorting by date modified etc. I tend to add the screenshots of the game I play and they all show up shuffled, it's a shame because it would be so cool to be able to go back to a game campaign and relive it in order. 2) Let the music keep playing while viewing these images fullscreen: currently if you want the music to keep playing, you need to disable auto-play, if you don't the music stops the moment you open an image..this is again a shame because it would be very cool to be able to browse the aforementioned screenshot diary while the music is playing without having to turn off auto-play. I don't know where to start writing plugins for LB, but if someone thinks this would be doable with a custom plugin, let me know down here and I'll look into it because this has been bugging me for years!

With the recent features touching game boxes and images I figured I'd bump an old pet peeve of mine, which is I'd love the ability to change the sorting order images are served in when browsing a game entry. Right now they seem to be loaded pretty much at random, no matter which order you added them in first. This makes it pretty much impossible to, for example, use the "Screenshots - Gameplay" tag to show a chronological order timeline of a game's levels or story bits, or to create any sort of situation where the order of images makes sense, such as showing images pertaining to different games in a series that share the same entry (think Mass Effect Legendary Edition or the Crash Nsane Trilogy) in the correct order when browsing them later. Ideally this would include a sorting menu where you can manually sort the images through the UI itself, but even just a dropdown "Sort by" in the media section would suffice, and a user would just need to make sure to name the files correctly (1, 2, 3 etc) or use the file's EXIF to determine its position in the list. I know this isn't a very requested improvement but I think a lot of people would actually welcome it despite not having bothered to ask!

Thanks for considering my use case, being this open to creative use of the software is what makes this community and Launchbox so great. Any improvement to this would be great, although it's already functional. I personally use Launchbox as a "played games diary" and hearing the soundtrack when navigating my collection instantly brings back memories and makes me want to leave it running for a bit while I do something else. Thanks for the quick reply anyway.

This is true, thanks for the reply. This does change the behavior quite a bit though. Now every time I click on a game the music doesn't play, also if I click on another game then pause the music, when I hit play it will play the music from the original game and not the new one. The behavior from the auto-play option is much more desirable, and the fact that I have to turn it off to use the program as a "jukebox" of sorts is counter-intuitive and leads to a clunkier experience...just my two cents here on how I would change it. Still, at least now I know how to do what I want now, thanks.

I'd like to keep music playing when the window is not in focus. It seems like there used to be support for this: The proposed solution doesn't seem to work anymore. Is there any way to keep the music playing after you click away from the LB window?

It especially happens when viewing the "add images" tab of the game edit screen. It's very noticeable, the mouse goes from smooth to nearly unusable and laggy for as long as the window is visible on screen. It's very ugly and distracting. If I run the program on a 60Hz screen, the issue goes away. This didn't use to happen until recently. I can post a video of it happening if necessary for troubleshooting, but really you just have to picture what your mouse would look like if the screen was running at 15Hz, and that's it.

@Jason Carr This doesn't seem to work anymore. Is there any way to keep the music playing after the window loses focus? If anything else, I'd love to be able to have the music playing while I browse the game pictures/media.

Restarting did not fix the issue at all, unless it was with internet unplugged. I posted the solution in my last comment, it was indeed a buggy pop up.

Ok I managed to fix this. It was indeed the update prompt, because launching without an internet connection fixed it. I tried a couple of things, it ended up being my monitor resolution/aspect ratio (I have an ultrawide 1080p monitor). I set the resolution to 1920x1080 and the update window was half visible on the right corner of the screen, so I was able to click "yes" to the update popup. Case closed, maybe get this checked before rolling out the new version because really there was no other way around it (no "move window" or keyboard shortcut trickery that I could find, and the pop up doesn't show up in ALT+TAB or Start + Tab).

I opened LB today and the window was completely not interactable, like if there was a prompt somewhere I had to click first (Windows gives me the sound cue that I should close the prompt, probably the one for the update? but there is no prompt, not even off screen). I can't fix this on my end because it's completely stuck. Any way to bring up the prompt so that I can start the update? At least, I think that's the issue.

Sadly I'm not enrolled in the beta (LB is very time consuming to maintain for me so I didn't want to risk anything glitching out - this after I had a bad experience with XMLs losing data one or two years ago..so I didn't get into the beta ?) (btw at the time the issue turned out to be something mostly on my end, but I still got very burned out by the troubleshooting)

@GTi as a temporary solution waiting for an update I could fix the file for you and send it back. I will simply delete the "bad" character, it probably is an emoji somewhere. If you don't need it right now I would suggest waiting for the official fix obviously.

I PMed you. Check line 31872. It's the only instance of an illegal character in the file. Stackoverflow seems to have a few mentions of this causing issues with XMLs so you shouldn't have too much trouble finding a workaround.

I'll add that for obvious reasons the suggested fix of restoring a backup will not work for this issue, so any user not able to edit xml files will not be able to fix this.

Okay so, a couple more details. This is the error. Comparing the file with the one before the update shows no difference in a text editor. The line in question contains the value: &#xC I think this character is not okay to be parsed under the new XML parsing system that was introduced in this version, hence the issue, which will occur for all users who have similar characters in any of their entries. Deleting the unsupported character fixes the issue, and I'm able to load. It probably is just a case of catching the exception in the parsing process.