C-Beats

While efficiency is a great goal that one should always work towards unfortunately in the real world there are times it has to take a back seat to overall progress. You could spend a serious amount of time making one sub process extremely efficient, but in the end the net gain just isn't enough to justify the amount of time it takes to gain that efficiency. We do our best to make the software as efficient as we can but we also have to measure the efficiency of our time, effort, and monetary spend as well. We are for-profit business and need to make sure we are maximizing returns so we can continue to work on the products we all know and love. I'm sure you understand, though I'm as equally sure it can be irritating at times as a both an end user and fellow developer. Hope you do, always fun to see what tools the community puts together to fill each others needs. You run into any issues building a particular plugin, don't be afraid to reach out. Will do my best to answer any questions you have.

select one title, hold control and click on the other. Both should now be highlighted. Right click on either and select "Combine Games" pick which you want to the primary (the one that launches by default) and you should have what you're looking for

Because a hash system is pretty terrible for ROMs and a true rom file isn't even needed to add a game to your LaunchBox library. Heck a FILE isn't even needed. Hash would be different for any variation of the ROM in question. Also would be different depending on any archival file format used for the rom, some could be extracted to get the hash on the contents but not all could be (things like CHD) The GamesDB was built before we had a lot of the storefront integrations. We'd like to get some more things added to the database, but given that you can scrape directly from Steam for any Steam metadata and media this isn't a HUGE priority, especially since the current solution (title search) works for the majority of games (though there are occasional mistakes because of the data in the database). This would have the same issue as the issue you are running into with title searching. A good ole fashion case of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If we have bad data in the database the matches are going to be inaccurate. Currently you are experiencing issues scraping because of title/alt name discrepancies, adding those fields just means that you could then have the same error with the storefront ID information being incorrect. We also would need to add extra logic in the database to handle the same storefront ID being assigned to several games. We'd also have issues if the storefront changed the ID/association at any point as it would make all the data points in our database invalid. Our data integrity would depend on third parties not making any changes to their platform, which is not a bet I'd happily make. Also have to deal with the fact that some IDs ARE correctly tied, but not publicly visible, for example if Steam pulls a game from the store, the ID is still valid, but if you would try to navigate to it's URL you get sent to the Steam store home page. This could cause confusion for end users as well as DB moderators. The scrape process is the same both for free version and paid and we do our best to make that very clear to all so they can evaluate the product before making any purchases, specifically for cases like yours. If you are unhappy with your purchase you can contact support@unbrokensoftware.com and see what they can do to help. As stated previously, achievements are not a static data point. They change quite a bit. Achievements are added, removed, and modified through out a games life cycle and so if we DID add something like a simple boolean we would also need a cache time and regularly check the id's after the cache is over a certain age, and even then we would get complaints because the data isn't real-time as people expect it to be. Not saying all your points are without merit. I'd love to get an association system in place within the DB for things like storefront id's and third party associations but we have to weigh the development time and resources carefully between both the websites and the applications we develop. Since the dev team at the moment is two people, there isn't a ton of time to move around to make things happen though. Since the database system works right now for the majority of games it goes up against the decision is usually that our time is better spent elsewhere where there are more pressing obvious flaws and needs that demand more attention, or offer a better "bang for our buck".

Do you have a screenshot of what your seeing? Big Box by default uses some maths behind the scene to scale font appropriate to the monitor height and DPI best it can. This was done to reduce what it sounds like you're seeing. Themes CAN override that logic though and force the menus to use other font sizes.

Thanks for the explanation. I'll take a look.

I've not seen that happen before. First two things I'd look into is: 1) Make sure you don't have a firewall blocking the traffic for some reason 2) Make sure you don't have the "Nahimic" service running on your computer

Do you have another instance already running but hidden in the system tray or no? Sounds quite a bit like the second instance is trying to open while the first instance is doing its "Save on Exit" logic and because the window is disposed already we can't switch to that process. Though we SHOULD be displaying a prompt saying something to that affect. I don't think this is directly related to the beta, but I will take a look and see what we can do to help make it more clear what is going on in those circumstances.

Could be. Here is a list of names you can post in there (as well as their hex code) that is supported by WPF/XAML

I just copied the above images, put them in MS Paint and then used the eyedropper tool. It only shows RGB though so you have to convert it to hex. I'm not sure what color chart you're referring to, maybe @faeran has it somewhere.

Also make sure you don't have any hidden settings set. Settings like "Hide Games Missing Boxes..." as they may be causing your games to be hidden from you.

@MadK9 @PixelDragon Can you explain what you are doing to see this? Are we talking about opening another LaunchBox instance right after closing one, or something else?

@neil9000 Try #349EC8 for Windows and #7F1711 for ZX Spectrum

Most of the time when we see visual artifacts like this it is caused by a service called "Nahimic" running. Can you open task manager and move to the service tab and see if it is running or not? If so disable it and restart Big Box and see if that helps you.

Not sure I'm following, can you elaborate?

Also worth noting this should correct your drag/drop import issue @sundogak so if you could confirm that as well I'd appreciate it.

Should correct what you reported @MadK9 Should correct issues reported by @bundangdon @4monty @RULLUR @Madman3001 @OhBoy @Retro808 (and maybe a few others I missed) Would any or all of you be able to confirm that you are no longer seeing your reported issues in this version?

Hey all, thanks for the reports and apologies for the issues you are finding. Most of them I think we have resolved internally but are testing changes. Hope to have another beta released soon to address these issues.

TrueVert View File This is a vertical conversion of my FauxVert theme. It has a horizontal wheel view as well as text list view. Was designed to work with a 9:16 monitor but for the most part should work fairly well with other resolutions/aspect ratios. The one thing you have to be wary of is that this theme uses background images/videos that were rotated for horizontal aspect still (as did FauxVert). For example I just show 16:9 images and rotate them to fit in the 9:16 monitor. A 9:16 image/video would NOT render correctly in this theme. I don't plan on making too many improvements/changes to this theme unless I need them for my particular set up, but if there is something small I can help you with to get this working on your set up feel free to ask in the comments. Submitter C-Beats Submitted 08/09/2021 Category Big Box Custom Themes  

Playlists cannot have children. To do what you want you would set it up as follows: Genres (Platform Category) Platform/System (Playlist)

Not sure how much media this has compared to other themes but it's very possible that you don't have enough RAM to store all the images in memory that you are asking the system to display. 4GB of memory doesn't go real far and I'm curious if that may be the cause of some of the issues.

11.14 was reported as a false positive for a virus in one of our DLLs (bits of code used to make the program work). Upgrading to 11.15 should correct this.

If you are a premium user you may be able to use a custom field for that. You would have to manually enter it for each game. I personally don't import any DLC/Expac information since you can't launch them, they attach to and expand the base game which I DO have imported.

Get far more traction with any requests by navigating to the top of the web page, pressing "Help & Support" and then "Request a Feature".