Fry

Perfect, I think that’s a great approach

I guess an alternative design could be a plugin on the second machine that runs in the background and watches for a file or something that has a game ID. The plugin on the first machine could write a file on the second machine whenever a game launches and Whenever the file appears, the plugin on the second machine could find the game, Launch it, and remove the file.

The reason I mentioned a CLI interface would be that any configurations you have through launchbox would be honored. For example, additional applications that setup key mappers, AHK scripts that run on game start, multiple monitors showing marquees, etc. I agree if you’re just trying to launch the game then you may as well use the emulator command line. But if you have any of those configurations on games then you also need to take care of setting them up via command line too. It sounds like Fursphere is considering a setup with two machines and launching a game on one machine would also launch the same game on a second machine. I guess. It sounded like they are thinking a plugin on machine 1 would implement the ISystemEvents or IGameLaunching plugin to get triggered when a game is launching and then call some home built API running on machine 2 to say hey, this game just launched. Then the API on machine 2 would like to launch the game in big box on machine 2 so that the game launches with all the configurations that it should have on both machines. It sounds like a pretty big project to undertake and I’m not sure of another good way for one machine to launch a game in big box on another machine using the IDataManager interface. I mean I totally recognize that once a plugin code is executing, you can use IDataManager to get a handle on a game a launch it. Maybe I’m over complicating the design?

Yeah it would be awesome if there was a CLI for BigBox or LaunchBox so your API could call in externally to launch a game without something like AHK. I don’t believe anything like that is available. You could possibly take the idea of my big box auto play plugin and have your service edit the settings json file to specify the game to launch in there and then launch big box. Then Big Box would load and auto start the game.

In case it helps, I have a few plug-in projects that I maintain in this github repo, feel free to review/steal anything you find in here: https://github.com/AtomFry I'm not great at WPF so if you do check them out, take what you find in there with a grain of salt as there are probably lots of better ways to do things in WPF than what I've done but I figured I'd share in case it helps to give you some more ideas.

@walter10h, I've uploaded a new version with a setting you can use to turn off the game preview volume. In LaunchBox under Tools > Manage eclipse, on the other tab, you can now set the default video volume anywhere from 0 (muted) to 1 (max volume) where 0.5 is the default volume.

https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse yep. It’s pretty messy. I cringe at a lot of the decisions I made to get some of this stuff to work. I’m slowly starting to refactor away the bad stuff. There’s still tons of anti-patterns in there that need to get fixed.

Thanks for the kind words. Regarding audio settings, I haven’t coded the audio for game previews to be linked to the big box settings. I don’t think the plugin API will give me access to the value of those settings and unfortunately if you have a mute or volume button bound, the plugin API wont fire those inputs to the plug-ins. I do think there’s a nice opportunity for a setting that lets you mute the game preview videos as well as turn them off completely. That shouldn’t be too hard to add so I’ll add it to the list for enhancements. In the meantime, On the latest version you can go into launchbox and select tools > manage eclipse and there are a handful of options you can select for the page up and page down functionality. You can select volume up and volume down for them to manually turn the volume off for now but you’d have to do that each time you boot into BigBox so it’s not ideal but it’s an option. Also not ideal because then you lose the ability to do other page up/down functions like voice search, random game, or paging games. Just thought I’d mention it as a stop gap until I can add some options for you.

I'm not 100% sure what you're asking. This theme only provides one view which is the platform wheel 1 view. Were you wanting to use a different view?

I've got a few minor bug fixes in the works. Basically if you change any setting on the manage eclipse screen, you need to hit save before editing custom lists or those changes would be lost. There's a bug where saving the custom lists reloads all the settings from the file. I've got a few other minor fixes done too. I will see if I can find more stuff to fix before putting out another release.

Regarding All category, do you happen to have a playlist called All with one game in it? I ask because new in this version is if a playlist is set to be included in platforms then those playlists will be included as lists in the platforms category. Regarding the one game repeating 8 times, it's always worked like that. It basically fills up the screen with box images. So for example, if you have a list with only two or three games in it, those two or three games will repeat all the way across the screen. Technically, it does scroll through the games but there's no animation on the scrolling so it doesn't look like anything is happening. That's interesting about the file permission error. I will look into that. I'm assuming it's a bug with using the config for the first time if a restart fixed it. I haven't experienced that but I will try with some fresh installs and see if I can reproduce it.

I've released version 0.0.10. This includes a pretty significant code overhaul so it should probably be taken as a beta release. If you update and run into any problems, please let me know and I'll see about getting them addressed. You can always roll back to the prior version by downloading the 0.0.9 version and overwriting the files. Added new settings menu item in LaunchBox to allow configuring settings (Tools > Manage Eclipse) Added custom game lists functionality Added setting to specify default list group Added enlarge box art function Added flip box art function Added setting to disable voice search Added setting to control duration of delay before fading from background image to preview video Added setting to enable/disable screen saver Added setting to specify how long until the screen saver starts Added settings to specify whether hidden or broken games are included in lists Added option to disable opening the side pane by pressing left at the start of a list Added volume up and volume down functions Added page up and page down functions Added support for "Include playlist in platforms" option Added support to play additional applications from game details Fixed bug where background images that are too wide would not fade properly Installation/Update instructions If LaunchBox or BigBox is open, close it Download the latest version - it will be a zip file Extract the zip file to a folder Inside the extracted folder copy the Plugins, StartupThemes, and Themes folder Paste the folders into the LaunchBox folder If you had a prior version installed you will be prompted that the destination has files with the same names. Choose to replace the files in the destination Eclipse settings To manage settings for the plug-in, open LaunchBox and select Tools > Manage eclipse. Lists Default group Specify which list category group to load on default The default value is to group games by Platform Show game count in list description Check the box to show the count of games in the list description Include broken games Check the box to include games marked broken in lists Include hidden games Check the box to include games marked hidden in lists Inputs Page up Select the function that should occur when page down is pressed Available options: Page up Page down Voice search Random game Flip box Zoom box Volume up Volume down Page down Select the functions that should occur when page up is pressed Available options: Page up Page down Voice search Random game Flip box Zoom box Volume up Volume down Enable voice search Check the box to enable voice search functionality Uncheck the box to disable voice search functionality Open settings pane on left press Check the box to enable opening the settings pane when pressing left on the first game Uncheck the box to cycle to the last game of the list instead of opening the settings pane Regardless of the selection, the settings pane will open when pressing the escape key Versions Enable additional versions Check the box to allow selecting additional versions from the game details screen for games that have multiple versions of games combined as additional apps Display field Select which field is displayed on the game details screen to indicate the additional application version Suppress "Play" from version description When combining multiple games in LaunchBox, the additional versions of the games are added as additional applications and are given a name that starts with "Play", ends with "Version...", and combines the revision and region (i.e. Play (USA) (REV 1) Version) Check this box to suppress the word "Play" from the start of the description so that it doesn't display as "Play Play (USA) (REV A)" Suppress "Version..." from version description When combining multiple games in LaunchBox, the additional versions of the games are added as additional applications and are given a name that starts with "Play", ends with "Version...", and combines the revision and region (i.e. Play (USA) (REV 1) Version) Check this box to suppress the word "Version..." from the end of the description Only additional versions with emulators Check this box to only include additional applications that have an emulator path specified Exclude run before Check this box to exclude additional applications that are set to run before the game launches (generally these are not games) Exclude run after Check this box to exclude additional applications that are set to run after the game exits (generally these are not games) Other Enable screen saver Check this box to enable the screen saver Screensaver delay Use the slider to specify the amount of inactive time (in seconds) to delay before starting the screen saver Video delay Use the slider to specify the amount of time to delay (in milliseconds) to delay on a game's background image before starting the game's preview video Custom lists Custom lists can be added (i.e. favorites, last played, most played, unplayed, top rated, etc...) General Description Enter a description of the list that will show in the theme Max games in list Enter a number to limit the list to a number of games Enter 0 for no limit For example you may create a list for top 20 games, enter 20 Filter Filters let us create a custom list by specifying what fields to filter on Specify the field, operator and filter value to apply to the create the filtered list of games Examples Games that have more than 50 community rating votes Field: CommunityStarRatingTotalVotes Operator: GreaterThan Value: 50 Games that have never been played Field: PlayCount Operator: Equal Value: 0 Games that have been played Field: PlayCount Operator: NotEqual Value: 0 Games that are marked as favorites Field: Favorite Operator: Equal Value: True Sort Specify how the games in a list should be sorted Assorted groups Specify which list groups the custom list should be included in

Im pretty skeptical of the possibility of LaunchBox running on Vita. The PS Vita is not running an android OS. There are ways of porting android games to vita by wrapping them in some kind of translation layer that translates the android calls to equivalent vita calls. I’m not sure if that’s what you’re referring to? If that’s the approach you’re thinking, a developer would have to build the wrapper and the feasibility of that kind of port depends on what kind of calls the launchbox android app makes.

As I recollect from the fellow who originated this plug-in concept, I think the version of reshade that we were redistributing with the plug-in was a special version that was only for bezels. I'm not sure if it supports other types of shaders. This may have something to do with why he eventually took those files down. I don't know much about reshade but if somebody does, they could probably replace all of the reshade files in the LaunchBox\ReshadeManager folder with a different version of Reshade that does both the bezels and the other shaders properly and there shouldn't need to be any change to the plugin since it will just copy and replace whatever files are in the LaunchBox\ReshadeManager folder over to the emulator folder on game launch.

Cool man. As always, I'm dragging my feet to wrap up the release due to time constraints. I'll get it out one of these days For the screensaver images, it's using fan art backgrounds.

Not to say this would be the best way but you could have an enum with values of default, platform category, platform, playlist, game. Then have a grid with columns for type (the enum), value (I.e. the platform category, platform, playlist, or game) and then columns for all those selections of what image to use for what thing. You’d have to define the tie breaker order like game specific setting trumps all, if no game specific setting exists then the platform is used. If no platform specific setting exists then the playlist setting is used. If no playlist setting exists then the platform category is used and if no platform category setting then the default is used. Just a thought. Not sure if it’s worth it. Shouldn’t be too bad to create the data model and save to a json file. Might be kind of annoying to do the dynamic lookups on values depending on the type that’s selected. And like you said it could wind up being a ton of metadata to maintain. Do you mind sharing the code for this plugin or are you keeping it closed ?

You can request enhancements by clicking Help & Support > Request a Feature and filling out a bit bucket ticket and then hope enough people vote for it that it would get prioritized. You could also build it yourself as a plug-in using the plug-in API: https://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com/html/4cf923f7-940c-5735-83de-04107a6ae0e6.htm

Here’s a list of what I’ve gotten done since last release. I should put this out soon: - Added settings screen in LaunchBox - Setting to let you pick default list group so you can choose if it loads into games by Platform or Playlist or Genre or whatever - Ability to create custom game lists - pretty similar to the LaunchBox auto generated playlists so you can create lists like most played, least played, highest rated, recently added, etc… - Setting to disable voice search if you’re not using it - Settings to let you choose what function you want for page up and page down. I’ve added some new functionality you can bind to page up/down: page up/down, Flip Box, Zoom (enlarge) box, Video volume up/down, and the old options of voice search, random game - Setting to control how long in milliseconds the background image shows before it fades to the video preview. Can set it to 0 so it will go straight to the video preview - Settings to show/hide broken/hidden games - Settings to enable/disable screen saver and how long in seconds until the screen saver starts - Setting to specify whether pressing left when you have the first game selected will open the settings pane or if it just cycles backward through the games. You can always open the settings pane by pressing esc so this just toggles whether pressing left can open the settings pane - support the “include playlist in platforms” option on a playlist created in launchbox. If a playlist is set to include in platforms, it will now be included in the games by platform group - fixed bug where background images that are too wide wouldn’t “fade” properly in progress: - add support on game details screen to launch different versions of the game if you have different versions added as additional applications in a game I will probably release a new version once this is done. After that, additional functionality on my mind are: - playlist management from game details (add game to playlist, remove game from playlist, create new playlist) - emulator save support - enumerate and display details about game saves and save states in game details. Let you launch into a save (need lots of research and thinking about if/how this will work) - more configuration options to show/hide different elements of the theme

I’ve got it added to my list. I’ve got a Trello board to track my progress. You can see it here, I think you have to sign up for an account to be able to see it though https://trello.com/b/cqnuTWZz/eclipse Adding mouse and touch support is doable but may be tricky. I think left/right/up/down swipes to move through lists shouldn’t be too bad. Tapping to select the current game (first one in the list) should also be doable. Tapping on any game box to select it would probably require a pretty big change to the way games are selected but is possible. The biggest problem with doing this is that I don’t have any touch screen monitors for windows devices and I will need that to properly test and implement it. I’m not sure if/when I would ever get one. I’ve added it to my list so I don’t forget if I ever do get one.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you're liking it. I've been working on some minor updates to the theme to include some configuration settings. I can add a setting that lets you specify how long you'd like to delay before playing the video snap in the next version.

Just in case it helps, you can look at the link I posted above with the supporting files (you can download ReShadeManager.zip) and it contains configuration files that were put together by nohero, the guy who had the original idea for the plug-in. What the plugin does is copy those files to game's emulator application folder when you launch a game. Those files contain the configurations that are used to add an overlay to each of those emulators. The settings are emulator specific but the plugin lets you override them at the platform or game level. The files are all duplicated for game or platform and you can just change out the bezel image if you want a different image for a game or platform. At the end of the day, the configurations are really emulator specific and it's just copying those configuration files to the emulator folder. I don't know much about how nohero created those files but I know the configurations are in there. So if you download that zip file and go into the emulators folder, you will see Dolphin for example. Everything in that folder gets copied to the folder where your dolphin.exe is. The reshade.ini file has the configurations that point to where the other files are and the dxgi.dll and shaders\bezel.fx and shaders\reshade.fxh are what make the magic happen.