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Great, thank you! I will try porting to .net core, I think they have a system.speech alternative over there

Thanks Jason! Is the BigBox plug-in API supporting plugins created in both .net framework and in .net core? I am considering porting my plug-in to .net core but wasn't sure if it's supported. I think it wasn't supported prior to 11.3.

I did a quick sample WPF application to ensure it's not an environment issue. I'm able to create a standalone WPF application to perform voice recognition functions using system.speech without a problem.

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the troubleshooting forum. I've been working on a voice recognition plug-in for some time and it seems the 11.3 upgrade has broken the speech recognition functionality. I'm getting the following exception when my code references System.Speech. This is the exception: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Speech, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'. The system cannot find the file specified. Here's the code, it was working in 11.2 so I think the change to .net core has caused this. There's nothing special about the code here and it fails as soon as the method is invoked, before log message on the first line. private bool CreateRecognizer() { try { Helpers.Log("Creating recognizer"); List<string> titleElements = new List<string>(GameTitlePhrases.Keys); // add the distinct phrases to the list of choices Choices choices = new Choices(); choices.Add(titleElements.ToArray()); GrammarBuilder grammarBuilder = new GrammarBuilder(); grammarBuilder.Append(choices); Grammar grammar = new Grammar(grammarBuilder) { Name = "Game title elements" }; // setup the recognizer Recognizer = new SpeechRecognitionEngine(); Recognizer.InitialSilenceTimeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5.0); Recognizer.RecognizeCompleted += new EventHandler<RecognizeCompletedEventArgs>(RecognizeCompleted); Recognizer.LoadGrammarAsync(grammar); Recognizer.SpeechHypothesized += new EventHandler<SpeechHypothesizedEventArgs>(SpeechHypothesized); Recognizer.SetInputToDefaultAudioDevice(); Recognizer.RecognizeAsyncCancel(); } catch(Exception ex) { Helpers.LogException(ex, "CreateRecognizer"); } return (true); } I tried copying System.Speech.dll into the plugins folder alongside my DLL but then I get another error when I load big box: An error occurred while attempting to load the plugin "C:\Users\...\Documents\LaunchBox\Plugins\System.Speech.dll" Could not load the assembly 'System.Speech, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31f3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL'. Reference assemblies should not be loaded for execution. They can only be loaded in the Reflection-only loader context. (0x80131058) It appears maybe it's trying to load System.Speech as a plugin? I tried moving the DLL from the plugins folder over to the LaunchBox\Core folder but I was back to the original exception. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestion. Under .net framework and 11.2, I could reference System.Speech and it just worked. Is there a place where .net framework references should go? Any suggestion is greatly appreciated!

That would be amazing, thank you for taking the time to look this over! In the meantime, I've been creating my own search engine and UI and admittedly, I'm pretty terrible at creating WPF UI so it's coming very slowly. But my voice search feature is starting to take nice shape.

I agree, the existing search features in BigBox are great. That is why I’d like to make use of them from the plugin API. Regarding turning it off/on, this plugin is not going to interfere with the existing search feature, it’ll just perform a voice search if you press the voice search button.

I went ahead and created a bitbucket request: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5412/bigbox-search-from-plug-in-api

Hi @Jason Carr, sorry for pinging you 2x on this, I just wanted to confirm whether this would be possible. Would it be possible to add to the plug-in API, the ability to perform a search in big box, (similar to what what is available in a call to BigBoxMainViewModel.ShowGames)? Is this more appropriate as a feature request on the LaunchBox bit bucket? If so, I can add it there. Thanks in advance if you're able to take a moment to consider this.

What’s really awesome about the native search feature is that it displays the results in your theme’s current games view (or something approximating it). If I’m using BannerBox, my results display as horizontal banners. If I’m using a different theme with a cover flow games view, the search results are presented in a cover flow. It’s totally seamless!

These are interesting ideas but what I'm really curious about is whether the plug-in API could support search automation by adding an extra FilterType enumeration value and some code in PluginHelper.BigBoxMainViewModel.ShowGames to call the existing search function and display the results in the same way BigBox performs a search when a user manually keys something into the keyboard and hits enter. I agree, getting all the games and doing my own fuzzy matching wouldn't be a big deal. The difficulty is in creating a user control to display a wheel of arbitrary games that looks like the other game views. It's not very straight forward (at least not for me) and it would be duplicating some code that's already in the BigBox to display search results. If those changes mentioned above are not possible, I will look into creating a simpler user control which shows one game at a time (similar to Grila's awesome Random Game Selector plug-in) but I'd prefer the more seamless UI of the native search (and of course, i'd also love to avoid writing a bunch of XAML).

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't see a "Title" value in the FilterTypes enumeration. I am definitely considering to create my own search result UserControl, doing the search myself, and presenting the results in my own pop up screen but I think the BigBox search screen is much better and would present a more seamless experience than a popup screen. I still need to get my head around creating UserControls in WPF to see how this thing will really work.

I don’t think what I mentioned above is currently possible. @Jason Carr or @C-Beats would it be possible to add another value to the FilterType enumeration called Search (or whatever) that would allow a plugin to present a search for a given string value? Also please let me know if my request is way out in left field. Just kind of thinking out loud here. Thank you guys for all your hard work.

Thanks for the input, @C-Beats! Would you say this would be analogous to a user selecting "View Genres" from the options screen and then going to the Fighting genre? Is there any way for a plug-in to send the user a search view? Say for example, I go out to options and click search and type in "Final Fight" Manually, this works great, it gives me all my final fight games across platforms like this: I'd love to fire off a view like this from a plug-in based on some user input. Really appreciate your input!

http://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com/html/e6984f95-448c-eb5a-7c3f-66ae0a5d8873.htm I see the IBigBoxMainViewModel interface has a few ShowGames methods, one takes a FilterType enumeration and a filter value string. Does anyone know how these work?

I created a little plug-in to audit the custom game images for BannerBox. Not sure if anyone would want to use it but figured I'd share it here in case it's helpful to anyone:

I'm not sure if anyone else would use this but I've found it helpful and figured I could share it. I created a little plug-in to audit my BannerBox custom images so I can easily find which games do not have custom images. BannerBox images won't show up in the standard LaunchBox audit because it uses custom images in the following path for game banners: LaunchBox\Themes\BannerBox\Images\Games\Custom Images 1\{Game Platform}\{Game Title or Game ID.png} Installation Extract BannerBoxAudit.dll from the attached ZIP file and place it in your LaunchBox\Plugins directory. Depending on your windows settings, you may need to unblock the DLL for it to work. Usage To check all games in your library, click tools > BannerBox Audit. I find it useful to sort by the Banner image column to identify any games with missing banners. You can also right click a game and audit one game at a time. BannerBoxAudit.zip

Would it be possible for a BigBox plug-in to perform a title search by passing a search phrase? I've been playing around with speech recognition in C# and was able to create a grammar out of the game titles by reading the XML files in my LaunchBox data folder and using the System.Speech.Recognition libraries, listen to my laptop microphone and have it identify the game titles I was speaking. I thought it could be super cool to be able to press a button and say part of a title and have BigBox provide a filtered list of games matching that search phrase. To make this happen, I think it would require a couple things: An event to know when a specific button was pressed. I see OnEnter and OnEscape events. Is there a more generic event that tells you whether any button was pressed and if so what button it was? I was looking around the interfaces but couldn't find that. Or maybe does somebody have an alternative idea on how this could work? I kind of figure I could define a button and while held down, it would listen and if a match is found it could fire off a search. Another option to avoid requiring a button press could be to have it listening all the time while in the BigBox menus and listen for a phrase like "BIGBOX SEARCH" and then whatever comes after that is the search phrase. A way to send the search to BigBox. I didn't see an event or way to pass a search to BigBox from the plug-in interfaces. Does anyone know if there is already a way to do this? I read on the forums that LaunchBox used to have a Voice Recognition feature but it was removed due to complications with windows versions. I'm curious if the interfaces don't currently support it, whether the hooks for this would be difficult to make available to plug-in developers. Any suggestions/feedback on this is appreciated! It's really just a toy project for now but I thought it could be a really neat plug-in feature to add to my cabinet.

Here's another one (I think there are a few others already) for NEC TurboGrafx-CD, this one featuring Lords of Thunder

@faeran Man this would be great. I’d like to make a few minor tweaks to add some Images to this theme that help users know which buttons on my arcade cabinet to press to make things happen. Would you mind sharing the community theme creator project files for this? Also, thanks again for this amazing theme. I can imagine this took a ton of work to get everything just right and it is just beautiful how well this all came together.

Dude thank you so much...you just saved me an insane amount of clicking! Thanks again, I'm loving the stream replays on youtube. Really appreciate all the time and effort you spend to take us through all of this stuff.

Thank you so much for this series! I am learning a ton! I’m curious if there is a good way to copy all the elements from a vertical wheel games view to a horizontal wheel games view? I would like to tinker with a horizontal wheel with box art on the editorial noir theme. I’ve started manually copying the elements one by one but I was wondering if there’s any easy way to copy most of the elements. Understandably the wheel can’t be copied but I figured everything else could be?

That's probably it. I bet there's a plug-in included in some of the themes I've been playing with. Sorry for the false alarm!

I noticed there's a "TEST" option in the latest 10.11 release. I clicked on it wondering what it was and everything froze for about a minute and then bigbox shut down. I wonder if that got left in there on accident or is there a test feature? I'm a bit out of the loop. No biggie just wanted to report it in case it should be removed. I hope it's ok to post this here since it's after the release (didn't see much sense in creating a whole thread for it).