marph

Thanks again @faeran for considering our thoughts! I totally see that you don't want to add redundancy and I see as well that it's far from trivial to come up with a logical organisational structure which incorporates all the many features while also presenting all of this in an easily understandable way to the user. I am looking forward for what you guys will come up with. Thanks a lot for all the hard work🙂!

Thanks @faeran for considering a more streamlined integration of the (great!) Game Discovery Center (GDC). Basically I want to present a logical, hierarchical, self explaining menu to the user, with a simple, uniform design. I figured out that I have to set the startup view within BigBox to “Platform categories” to start at the playlist root from LaunchBox (Why isn’t it called “Root view”?). Currently I have the following playlist hierarchy or menu structure respectively: Arcade Computers Consoles Handhelds Playlists 2-Player-Games 4-Payer-Games Genres Horror Platformer Puzzle Racing Pinball … Favorites Favorite Game Franchises Pokemon Resident Evil Wipeout ... Star Rating Star Rating 4+ Star Rating 4.5+ … To Play … I use the theme “Pulse” with the following View settings: PlatformsListView: Platform Wheel 2 GamesListView: Horizontal Wheel 1 To get a nice looking main menu I added clear logos to the playlist categories which did not receive one by the theme (see screenshot). As mentioned in my last post, I don’t like the main menu of BigBox, because it mixes the available views (or are they called “root filter lists”?) together with other unrelated stuff like «About», «Options», «Shut Down» and so on. It would make much more sense if these root filter lists were placed into a submenu or were a different menu altogether. Anyways. That’s a different topic. The reason I mention this, is because I think that the user should not have to access this rather confusing menu nor should he have to use a special hotkey to get to the GDC. Now what could be the solution? I see 2 options: Option 1: As mentioned by @Frooglemcdoo I could set the GDC as my startup view, if my whole playlist structure was accessible from within the GDC. Option 2: I could add another playlist category to the playlist root called “Game Discovery Center” if it was programmable to act as a link to the GDC. Logically option 1 would be cleaner, because as @Frooglemcdoo mentioned, the main purpose of GDC seems to be as the entry point to BigBox. The problem here though is, that the design of the GDC is totally different to the theme which I am using right now. So this would be totally confusing to the user. Another downside of this option is, that there seem to be no options to customize which subsections should be displayed in the GDC. For that reason I prefer option 2 at the moment as a temporary solution until the theme devs have incorporated the GDC in their themes and the GDC is more customizable to the user. What do you think of my ideas?

Thanks for the hint @faeran. I recognize that it might be a bit of a challange to code stuff like this and to meet all the different types of needs from all the users. But I do also agree to @JurassicJaws174. I think from a usability point of view it's confusing if one has to back up to the BigBox menu to change the root section or even more so to remember a hotkey. The problem with this menu is that the selection for this root views is mixed together with a lot of other things that are unrelated with the basic navigation within the games collection (like "About", "Options", "Shut Down" and so on). My proposal for an easy fix: You could add a simple checkbox within the Edit Playlist dialogue that says someting like "Show Game Discoery Center in BigBox".

@maikeru86 Worked for me as well. I used the version in the "recommended" section on the github-wiki page of the project.

Hi there First thanks a lot @maikeru1986 for taking the time to make this very useful plugin. It worked for me at first with the originally supplied yt-dlp.exe. But since one month ago it is not able to find any video anymore. I've tried the newest version of yt-dlp.exe and also the one supplied by @darreldearth. The error remains. Did anyone figure this out?

Hi Faeran Thanks for this great new feature of BigBox. I have a question on how to make it more accessible within BigBox. I hope this is the right place to ask this, because my question is not really theme related. I have a hierarchical LaunchBox setup. The top level consists of the platform categories "Arcade", "Computers", "Consoles", "Handhelds" and "Playlists". Each platform has the corresponding platform category set as parent. My custom playlists have the platform category "Playlists" set as parent. Now I would like to add an additional platform category which opens the Game Discovery Center. This would provide a more seamless way to access the Game Discovery Center within BigBox. How can I create a platform category like this?

Thanks for the help. I've tried this. At first it seemed to work perfectly. But then I've noticed a side effect with the 3D box models.

Thanks! Renaming the PNG (or the platforms or playlists) did the trick. It works neatly now🙂 One more thing: How do I display the 3D boxes of the games? BigBox has the Option "Images->Game Image Type" which I've set to "3D Boxes", but it doesn't change anything. Is there another way to achieve this?

@viking: Another thing: While looking for a solution for my afore mentioned problem, I've discovered some images that are missing in your theme (Media\Hardware Set): - Categories: Computers.png, Consoles.png and Handhelds.png - and the Arcade.png does not match your video (Arcade.mp4) - Platforms: NEC SuperGrafx.png and Windows 98.png Would be great if you could add these as well🙂

Thanks for the information. Of course I do understand that you won't modify your theme just for this. In theory I've figured out a way that should more ore less achieve what I am looking for. It should work like this: 1. Create a new category in LaunchBox called "Playlists" 2. Set this new category as parent in all of my favorite playlists 3. Change the following options in BigBox: Set "Default startup view" to "Platform Categories"; Enable the option "Remember seperate View for each Platform" 4. Setup hotkeys for changing view and theme in BigBox 5. Go to newly created category "Playlists" and change the theme to a theme which shows the assigned playlist video in full width But I've found out that BigBox only supports individual themes and views for platforms but NOT for platform categories. So yeah. I am kinda stuck again. I will see. maybe I will post a feature request for this? And if I find the time I can maybe modify your theme to achieve this. We will see...

Wow! Thanks so much😃! I guess "Attack of the Killervirus" and "MLB slam" are no big loss, but it's a bit of a bummer that we can't get to work "Snakes" because that one is a really good game (I know it, because I've played it on a real N-Gage). It's strange because according to the compability list it should work (https://github.com/EKA2L1/Compatibility-List/issues/151). Maybe we should make a bug report? One thing I've noticed about your last "build" version: You kicked out "System Rush". Is this on purpose because it was interfering with other games?

Thanks again for your quick answer. I am not sure if I understand you correctly. So "simple gamplay video" is the same as "video snap"? And depending on which kind of videos actually exist and which priority I've chosen in the settings, Bigbox will show a different video? So could I modify your theme to reduce this band only on certain playlists? Because I would very much like to keep it the way it is for the platforms to show your awsome platform videos. Currently I show my custom playlists (like the "Racing" example from the picture above) together with the platform-playlist in Bigbox (using the checkbox option from the playlist settings). I think it would be a smoother presentation if I could start in a top section that constis of let's say, "Computers", "Consoles", "Handhelds" and "Playlists". Then I could maybe modify your theme to only use the band for computers consoles and handhelds (so basically where there is an awsome Colorful video). The only problem is I don't know how to configure Bigbox that way. I know that you can set it to "Platform categories" and to "Playlists" but I don't know of a method to combine them.

Cool🙂. By the way, Floboarding is called "Nokia Game" in the launcher. I've managed to start it from Launchbox by renaming the linked file from "Flo" to the App-UID (0x101facfa).

Thanks so so much @swebley for sharing🤩! I've tested all the games you have installed. In my tests there were also some games that did not work. But much more did actually work than on my setup! How did you do this?! Even Flowboarding worked. Here are the games that still crash (sometimes they crash directly, sometimes they crash after the title screens): Snakes MLB SLAM High Seize ONE Glimmerati Habbo Islands Killer Virus (What kind of game is this??) Thanks again!

Thanks for the hint @viking. Well, the problem is that I don't have other good gamplay videos which I could use instead. And I like these arcade playlist videos by RetroHumanoid pretty much. So it would be nice if I could show them in full width. But I figure this is not supported by launchbox (as you said), even if you would like to implement an option like this into your theme, isn't it?