oblivioncth

So while working on a way to easily filter between the animations and games it just occurred to me that I accidentally lied to you due to confusing myself with something I was working on with CLIFp at the same time. Currently, because LaunchBox is primarily geared as a games frontend, my important actually only imports games from Flashpoint and not animations. I feel like this approach makes sense given its purpose; however, I'm not here to enforce my practices on you and there is nothing wrong with options, so I can reasonably add a toggle for including animations in the import. The point of this tool is to make life easier so I get where you're coming from. Not sure what my overall plan will be but I'll probably start by adding a feature to import games present on playlists only, ensuring that the Favorites playlist can be imported, and go from there.

Ah yes, in terms of actually notifying it what you are trying to scrape that is the necessary step. Sorry that skipped my mind. You can actually do what you want with the image substitutions when the primary source is unavailable: Go to Tools->Options->Media->Box Front Priorities. Once there if you scroll down and check off "Screenshot - Game Title" and then make sure it is moved to a high enough priority to beat out the other checked options (which for Flashpoint there are only the two images so you just have to make sure its under "Box - Front") then it will be used when the checked items above it are unavailable. This can obviously be done for several of the other media categories as you can see under the Media section in Options; note however, that this is a premium feature.

Alright let me know what happens. Interestingly I've been unable to recreate the issue by importing the Flash platform fully and then re-doing the import with "Include Adult" option unchecked. It does remove them and I'm still able to start LaunchBox with non-corrupt entries. It is possible that I inadvertently fixed the issue between the last release and my current build but that would be quite surprising. The games are separated by platform since that is how they are handled in Flashpoint. I can in theory offer more options to customize how the games are imported and plan to do that eventually, but it is a low priority because LaunchBox already has fairly flexible organization options . If you don't already have the Web Browser platform you can create it manually with "Add" and then on each platform you can just right click on the imported platforms, go to Edit, and then under Parents you can nest them under the Web Browser platform, no images will need to be moved as the changing only affects the frontend and filter engine so it is more or less instant. It will take a short bit to do this for each platform but its rather quick compared to what you're doing. These nesting options are stored in a Platform independent XML within LaunchBox so they will stick even after running the importer again. Sure the items won't be directly in that platform category but since they're under it you can still click the Web Browser platform and it will show all of the entries under it, resulting in effectively the same thing with the added convenience of being able to specifically drill down to the individual platforms if desired. Generally better unless you really hate nested platforms. Honestly, with how dead the Web Browser platform is in the database, "Web Browser" makes more sense to me as a Platform Category that you nest all of platforms you import under, which is an even simpler way to do it as long as you mainly use the Platform Category view (which is the default and works nicely for categorizing systems into things like "PC", "Console" or the like, and what I personally do. The Web Browser platform in LaunchBox is quite weak, it only has 50ish entries so there isn't actually much to "match" database wise. The recognition process in LaunchBox has been improved significantly over the last year so even if the titles differ slightly I'd imagine you should be able to get a match and download metadata for the few games that are in the database even if the title isn't exactly the same, just like you would for any other game using "Search for Metadata" in the Edit menu. For your last question, I initially went with the setup that I have now because it was the most straightforward way to handle each title, i.e. leaving them the way they are handled within Flashpoint (if you aren't aware, Flashpoint originally used LaunchBox so there are still a lot of holdovers with how they organize things and their titles were all setup as individual applications back then so its simply the easiest to get them back into that configuration), which also avoids unforeseen issues by keeping the translation more or less one-to-one. That being said, I do agree that ultimately it would make sense to register CLIFp as an emulator since it is used for all titles, just with different parameters. The parameters can still be set on a per-game/animation basis and this will allow the file name metadata to show the actual file used (with some possible exceptions, I have to examine the Flashpoint database more to watch out for one potential caveat). I wont be able to have that change out in the next version, but I can try to shoot for the one after.

It sounds like a problem I should be able to reproduce myself since its fairly straightforward, but just in case it would be cool if you could try to do so yourself since you can be sure its the same issue caused the same way since you experienced the finer details firsthand. Screenshot is still useful obviously.

Crap, sorry about that. You'll need to remove the xmls for now obviously to start LaunchBox, and you should be able to rename the backups (.obk) to the original names to get the working copies back (though obviously they'll have the adult games). To figure out what's going on it would be helpful if I could get a few things: A screen shot of OFILb exactly how you had it setup for your last import (when you were trying to remove the adult games) before the issue occurred and a link to a zip file of the XMLs that LaunchBox says are corrupted. Finally, while it's ultimately not needed if you don't feel like it, I'd appreciate it if you submited that info as a formal bug on the tools GitHub page that you can get to from here or the Help menu within the tool itself.

Like I said I'll keep it in mind, but yea manually managing it works fine with OFLIb. I originally added that icon to the 18+ option to make it stand out more for what it was, but it does seem to have caused some confusion as to how it works. It being blue means its enabled/they're included. I think next release I'm going to remove the icon so that the checkmark shows.

I have mixed feelings with this. In LaunchBox after the import its fairly straight forward move the newly imported platforms under whatever category you want yourself (and they'll stay there even after importing again), making this a relatively minor improvement for a fair amount of work since I would then need to start parsing the XML files in the root Data folder like "Parents.xml", so it isn't something I'm dying to do. That being said it is still ultimately an improvement and would offload work from the user, even if only a little. I'll keep it in mind and considering doing it at some point in a larger patch. Still have to look into best how to handle separating the animations from games.

Yes it does import them, under the same platform the games are under, "Flash". I'll look into seeing if there's a spot to fit the metadata in LaunchBox for if the item is a game or animation (this info is present in Flashpoint obviously) to make it easy to filter them. If not I guess I can add an option to make a different platform.

Hey sorry missed this somehow. The issue you described was due to an oversight and has now been fixed in 0.1.3 which will work with 9.0 Ultimate and Infinity. I may at some point add a feature that does what you mentioned, though it wouldn't be the most useful thing as most playlists only have 5-20 games. I'm actually haven't tested to see if you add your own playlist in Flashpoint if it shows up as an import option in my tool, because I only read the playlists from the SQL database, yet there is a folder with playlists in JSON format that I always assumed was just a leftover from previous versions form before they used a database, but its possible that custom playlists are placed there and not inserted into the database. If this is the case then I'll see about getting them working. As for your reasoning with Infinity users "not having every game installed", this is actually no different than using FP Infinity by itself where you can see all of the games even though they aren't all downloaded. You can actually start a game that hasn't been downloaded in LaunchBox after you have imported a Platform, even if you've never ran it through the Flashpoint launcher and it will still be downloaded on-the-fly all the same. I do just want to clarify though: Was your main issue thinking that you couldn't play games through LB that you hadn't opened/downloaded in Flashpoint yet? Or did you want a way to import only games from a playlist regardless? I can add such a feature, it isn't too complicated but would require reworking the process a little so I just want to have a sense of its priority.

0.1.3 of the importer which works with Infinity/Ultimate 9.0 is now up. If you use it please let me know if you run into any issues so I can fix them.

I just finished downloading 9.0 (though not home at the moment) to see if functional changes need to be made, and then regardless am going to push an update for my importer so that the version check matches. I'm in the Flashpoint dev chat and I believe most of the gamezip changes were implemented in a fashion in which the games are still called from the database the same way and helper applications take care of the zips, so I think it will still work as is.

Came across this while searching for the same so I just wanted to mention there is now a way if anyone else stumbles on this

Other than an annoyance in crazy timing in that Flashpoint updated to 8.2 literally 10 minutes ago, the tool has been released! I will have to see what changes (if any) will need to be made to support the new version. I anticipate that changes will be required but that it will only be a few minor ones. You will all be testers . But in all seriousness the tool seems consistent/reliable as far as I can tell.