Fry

Another good option is to create your own video snaps:

Sorry for the late reply. Yes this bug seems to have been introduced whenever I reworked the startup process to improve performance. I've been super swamped with family and work and no time to work on this project but one of these days I plan to address this and several other items. Also in case anyone is interested, I have a little proof of concept that I've put together that reimplements my game wheel which improves the performance of loading and scrolling through games a ton. It's going to require a full reimplementation as the original source code is a bit of a mess and it's all tangled to the wheel implementation. If anyone has any interest in taking over the code, it's posted, feel free to fork it and do whatever you want with it. Just throwing that out there as I'm too swamped to work on it at the moment but definitely plan to get back to it one of these days.

I'm not aware of any theme using those youtube links to play videos in themes. I might be wrong and maybe there's an easy way to do that but if not, that could be a good idea for a plugin. Normally when you see preview videos in themes, those are video files that are in your LaunchBox\Videos folder: The easiest way to get videos downloaded automatically and saved properly is via the EmuMovies integration. It has a one-time cost. If you have an EmuMovies account, you can set your credentials in LaunchBox under Tools > Options > Integrations > EmuMovies. With an EmuMovies account linked, LaunchBox can download videos if they are available: Also when you edit a game and update metadata, LaunchBox can download the videos: If you don't want to pay for EmuMovies, you can also download any video file and when you edit a game, you can add videos manually. You can associate any number of videos with a game. With this particular theme, it will play the first video. I believe there are some options and other themes may be able to play a random video for each game and change which video is played or cycle through them. Hope that helps!

Which platform are you having that problem with? I'll see if I can reproduce the issue and get it fixed. I agree, this would be good. I plan to add this feature some day. I can add this to the backlog of features. It would be pretty low for me because I use the voice search for that. I don't think I would center the selected item because my goal with this theme is to mimic the netflix UI. But I've seen others suggesting the settings are too easy to accidentally open so I would look into making it configurable to activate the settings with the escape button only or with going left from the first item so you can choose how you'd like to activate them. The biggest problem is the limited number of inputs that are available via the plugin API. We only have up, down, left, right, page up, page down, enter, and escape to work with. I could make it configurable to specify whether the random game button searches across all lists or just across the current list. Then you could set it so the random button only selects a random game across the current list and go to games by play mode and hit the random button. I had considered it but many of the descriptions are very long and I felt it takes away from the netflix style aesthetic to have either the description cut off or scrolling. Also, the more I looked at them, I didn't care to have them there. I could look at adding them with a configuration to turn them off as I wouldn't really want to see them but I do understand the desire to put them there. The ratings show the community rating in white and the user rating in red. For most lists, the percentage is just the user or community rating as a percentage. Those are mostly there for the voice search functionality. When you do a voice search, each phrase that is recognized comes with a confidence rating. I use that and some other logic to generate a percentage that indicates how likely I think it is that this is what you were searching for. Not sure if that makes sense. Anyways, I could look at making it configurable for you to hide those fields. Thanks for the suggestions and I'm glad you're liking the theme so far. I will add them to my backlog and bring them in as time permits. Don't expect anything super quickly as I'm super limited on time to work on this at the moment but I'll see what I can do.

Ohhhh man I’m real dumb. I did not understand that you were saying to just open the index because that’s already a feature in big box. Unfortunately this theme doesn’t support most functionality that you get from the standard theme engine because the entire UI for this theme is built from the ground up. That’s the only way I knew how to create a theme with this look that has multiple wheels on the screen at one time. So this theme won’t be able to take advantage of the index feature.

I agree, I would like to add that functionality to jump to next/previous letter. I have been thinking about it and adding it either as a double tap left/right or by adding a configuration that would let you choose what you want under page up and page down so if you don’t care about the random game or the voice search function we could use page up/down to jump left/right. Ideally we could get more key bind options for plug-ins. I requested it here a while back. Go vote for it if you are so inclined: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5624/expose-additional-button-events-bindings @faeran regarding open index, is that an API you’re suggesting to help with implementing a jump to next letter feature or are you saying there’s already a feature like that built into launchbox? I’m not familiar with it.

Nice I’m glad it’s performing well for you. It performs great for me with 5k games too when I have game images on SSD. For another machine that uses old hard drives, loading all those images from spinning disks is slow and makes it feel sluggish. The setting in BigBox to show hidden games and show broken games will work fine for any theme other than this one. Since this theme doesn’t use the standard theming engine, those settings don’t impact this theme. I checked the plugin API and there doesn’t appear to be a way to get those settings so if I want to add support for them, I will have to read the BigBox config file. I try to avoid reading the config files as much as possible because those types of things can easily break when an updated version of LaunchBox is released. For now, I’m content to just keep broken and hidden games out and there’s really no configuration for it. One of these days when I solve all the other problems, I will add a setting for this so you can control whether or not to show broken or hidden games on demand.

@launchbox_saropa I've uploaded version 009 that will not include games marked broken or hidden. FYI - I'm doing some proof of concept with new approaches to building/loading the lists of games that should greatly improve the performance. It will probably be some time before I can incorporate that stuff into the theme and get a release out but I'm still slowly working on it as time permits.

I wonder if I broke this in the recent update. I thought I was filtering out hidden and broken games. Eclipse does not look at that BigBox setting. I will see if I can read those settings from the plugin API to determine whether to display broken/hidden games.

I think I’ve found a bug in the latest version when you idle in the attract mode for a long period, at some point the video previews stop working. I haven’t been able to identify yet exactly the conditions for this issue as I’ve had it running the attract mode for several hours and come back to picking games and everything is fine but the last two times I left my cabinet on overnight, I’ve come back to find the video previews not playing. Moving around in the theme and selecting games, everything else seems fine it just seems the videos aren’t playing. I’ll add some additional logging and exception handlers and turn on the native launch box logging to see if I can figure out what I’ve changed to cause this problem and get it fixed.

It makes sense man, everyone has different wants/needs for their lists which is why making that all configurable will be really nice. Here's another one-off build that has series as default list set and includes the favorites list in the series list set 42435430_Eclipsev0.0.8b-SeriesDefaultIncludeFavorites.zip

This makes total sense. I spaced out and forgot you can have multiple series for a game. Here's a one-off build that will default to showing games by series. Series does not (by default) show favorites or history. Did you want to include the history or favorites list in your series list set? It would be another tiny code change to include history or favorites lists if you'd like them with series. Let me know and I can re-release a one-off build with those included. I'm excited to fix this issue so that it's totally configurable so people can set up their lists however they like. 1187005192_Eclipsev0.0.8a-SeriesDefault.zip

You’re right. At this time the default is hard coded to platform and there’s no way to change that via user configuration. My plan for the next update would give you this control to (a) define your own lists and list sets, (b) specify default list set and list. This will probably be some time before I can get this out. In the meantime, it would be super easy to do a minor code change and release a special version that defaults to series. However it almost sounds like what you’re trying to achieve would be better off as playlists. Super Mario and Sonic would be valid series but I would think Party games are more of a genre. 8-bit era and 16-bit era is more of a general categorization. Since you’re mixing the metadata fields that are grouping and filtering games, I think playlist is more applicable. Let me know if you would like a one-off build with either series or playlist set as the default and I’ll be happy to throw it out there.

Version 0.0.8 out with a minor fix related to the background loading of images. In the prior version, if you were idling on a game that is showing the default box front for a game not yet loaded, once the game files were loaded the box front would automatically refresh but the clear logo, game details, and preview video would not refresh automatically. Now, if you are idling on a game that hasn't yet loaded, once the game files load, the clear logo and video preview will pop in.

You have to press left when on the first game (as opposed to holding left). So if you’re in the middle of a list and hold left it will cycle back to the first game but won’t open up the settings wheel until you hit left again. Yeah sorry about that. I was able to get that and a few other bugs fixed in 007. I am seeing a few more minor bugs around how the games are loaded up asynchronously so I’m hoping to get those fixed up soon. Thanks man, it’s getting there. I feel it still has a long way to go. I will look at adding some of those configurations you mentioned like enable/disable voice recognition and adding the recent editions list, top rated lists, etc

Thanks man, I'm glad you are liking it.

Alrighty, I've released version 0.0.7. This significantly reduces the boot up time of the plug-in by generating lists and updating the image cache in the background while the theme is in use. I would highly recommend anyone who is using this theme to update to this version and delete your image cache so that it can be regenerated. The image cache is located at ..\LaunchBox\Plugins\Eclipse\Media\(WxH)* *where (WxH) is your monitor's resolution so somethiing like: (1920x1080), (2560x1440), (3840x2160), etc... Delete that folder and the next time you startup big box, it will be recreated with images of the appropriate size. Images will pop in as they are loaded so you will see something like this as as the images are scaled and cached in the plugin folder:

@Kinglifer i've released version 0.0.6. If you want to give it a try, it should load much faster. Game images will load in the background after the lists are created. I haven't done extensive testing on this version yet, there could be some bugs but so far it's loading much faster than before. @launchbox_saropa, I made a change so that when holding left, it won't open the settings. You have to tap left to open settings now. @anyone who is using this plug-in, this is a bit embarrassing but I found a bug in the (very long and annoying) image scaling process which was actually scaling images to the wrong size so we were not getting the benefits of the image cache because images were still having to be re-scaled as they are loaded into memory. I've tweaked things so that the images in the cache will be created with the correct size. However, this will only occur if you delete your current image cache and have the plug-in rebuild it for you. To delete and recreate the image cache, go to ..\LaunchBox\Plugins\Eclipse\Media and delete the folder that has your monitor's resolution (like 1920x1080). Then reload BigBox with the plug-in enabled and it will go through that long annoying caching process. I know this is annoying and will continue working on further improvements so that the image caching occurs asynchronously the same way lists are loaded. But for now, I recommend this because the performance of the theme is greatly improved when images are scaled to the proper sizes.

@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.