oblivioncth

Flashpoint Importer for Launchers View File FIL (Flashpoint Importer for Launchers) FIL is an importer tool for several launchers/frontends that allows one to add platforms and playlists from BlueMaxima's Flashpoint project to their collection. It is fully automated and only requires the user to provide the paths to their launcher and Flashpoint installs, choose which Platforms/Playlists they wish to import, and select between a few import mode options. Once the import is started the current progress is displayed and any errors that occur are shown to the user, with resolvable errors including a prompt for what the user would like to do. After the process has completed, the specified launcher can be started and the games from Flashpoint can be played like those from any other Platform. For Platforms, the importer is capable of importing each game/animation along with any additional apps, images, and most of the metadata fields (i.e. Title, Description, etc, see below). Function This utility makes use of its sister project CLIFp (Command-line Interface for Flashpoint) to allow launchers to actually start and exit the games correctly. It is automatically deployed into your Flashpoint installation (updated if necessary) at the end of a successful import and the latest version of CLIFp will be included in each release of this utility so it is not generally something the end-user needs to concern themselves with. Before making any changes to your collection, any datafiles that will be altered are automatically backed up (only one backup is maintained at once so any previous backup will be overwritten) and if any unrecoverable errors occur during the import any partial changes are reverted and the backups are restored; however, it is strongly suggested that you consider making a manual backup of your launcher's configuration to be safe. No responsibility is held for the loss of data due to use of this tool. FIL can safely be used multiple times on the same collection to update the selected Platforms and Playlists if that have already been imported previously. The method with which to handle existing entries is selected within the program before each import. The import time will vary, correlated with how many Platforms/Playlists you have selected, but more significantly the image mode you choose, which is expanded on later. Importing the entire collection usually takes 5-10 minutes with the recommended settings but can take longer with a more basic PC. The vast majority of the processing time is due to the plethora of images that have to be copied/symlinked when games processed so the speed of your storage device is the most significant factor. Running the importer for updates should be significantly faster it first checks to see if the source image from the new import source is actually different than your current one before copying/linking it. You will still be able to use the standard Flashpoint launcher as normal after completing an import. Compatability Flashpoint Infinity/Flashpoint Ultimate This tool was made with the express purpose of using it with Flashpoint Ultimate (i.e. all games/animations pre-downloaded), but since the 0.2 rewrite of CLIFp it should work with Infinity as well. Just note that use with Infinity is not tested as rigorously. General While testing for 100% compatibility is infeasible given the size of Flashpoint, OFILb was designed with full compatibility in mind. The ":message:" feature of Flashpoint, commonly used to automatically show usage instructions for some games before they are started, is supported. The entries that use it are added as additional-apps to their respective games as they once were when Flashpoint came packaged with LaunchBox. All messages are displayed in a pop-up dialog via CLIFp. Viewing extras (which are simply a folder) is also supported and the corresponding additional apps that open these folders will be added when importing a platform. Since Flashpoint originally used LaunchBox as its launcher, most fields within Flashpoint have a one-to-one equivalent (or close enough equivalent) LaunchBox field. That being said there are a few fields that are unique to Flashpoint that do not have matching field and so they are simply excluded during the import, resulting in a relatively minor loss of information for each game in your collection. Version Matching Supported Launchers LaunchBox AttractMode Flashpoint While testing for 100% compatibility is infeasible given the size of Flashpoint, FIL was designed with full compatibility in mind. The ":message:" feature of Flashpoint, commonly used to automatically show usage instructions for some games before they are started, is supported. The entries that use it are added as additional-apps to their respective games as they once were when Flashpoint came packaged with LaunchBox. All messages are displayed in a pop-up dialog via CLIFp. Viewing extras (which are simply a folder) is also supported and the corresponding additional apps that open these folders will be added when importing a platform. Each metadata field (i.e. Title, Author, etc.) is matched to the closest equivalent of a given launcher, or a custom field if there is no near equivalent and the launcher supports them; otherwise, the field will be omitted. Both Flashpoint Ultimate and Flashpoint Infinity are supported. Version Matching Each release of this application targets a specific version series of BlueMaxima's Flashpoint, which are composed of a major and minor version number, and are designed to work with all Flashpoint updates within that series. For example, a FIL release that targets Flashpoint 10.1 is intended to be used with any version of flashpoint that fits the scheme 10.1.x.x, such as 10.1, 10.1.0.3, 10.1.2, etc, but not 10.2. Using a version of FIL that does not target the version of Flashpoint you wish to use it with is highly discouraged as some features may not work correctly or at all and in some cases the utility may fail to function entirely or even damage the Flashpoint install it is used with. Please see the project's releases page on GitHub to check which tool version targets which Flashpoint version. Metadata Fields Currently the following fields in LaunchBox will be populated for each game, which is limited by what is available within Flashpoint: Title Series Developer Publisher Platform Sort Title Date Added Date Modified Broken Flag Play Mode Status Notes Source Release Date Version Library Language (as a Custom Field) Usage Please check the usage section for the tool on its GitHub page. It's easier to keep the instructions up to date when they are in one location. If you have a bug or feature request I ask that you submit an issue on the GitHub page for this tool, but if you just want to ask a question, discuss the tool in general, or are having issues getting it working for reasons you don't think are due to a bug then please just make a post here. Since sometimes the line between the two can be blurry don't feel afraid to use the wrong system, it isn't a huge deal. GitHub FIL: https://github.com/oblivioncth/OFILb CLIFp: https://github.com/oblivioncth/CLIFp Submitter oblivioncth Submitted 08/27/2020 Category Third-party Apps and Plugins  

Sorry, been away from the machine. I did see you have to install .NET Core for 11.3 so that probably is related. I will check a few things and if I don't get anywhere I'll give you a copy of my data folder.

Just wanted to update this if anyone was looking: The tool is in the final testing and UI polish phases. It's a little rough around the edges internally and I won't be able to make 100% sure that all games are playable so it will very much be a beta that will probably take some time working with to get compatibility to/close to 100%. That being said I designed the process to be as hands off for the end-user as possible and so that the code base itself should be fairly easy to update and maintain going forward, which I very much plan on doing for as long as possible. It will most likely need to be modified every time a non-minor Flashpoint update is release, though most changes to LaunchBox shouldn't affect it. Hopefully overtime as the FP team figures out more optimal solutions to their software for running some of the more finicky games they'll need to make less and less changes to the apps core functionality when it comes to starting child processes, which would result in proportionally fewer changes required to keep this tool working. Ideally it would be nice if one version of this tool could work for several releases of Flashpoint. Can't give an exact time, but hopefully it will be out soon.

I do this all the time with my collection using ShadowPlay, but it would be nice to use OBS due to the new integration and grouping by game. The only issue is that as you mentioned I haven't found anyone who's spoke of a way to have the recording loop run 100% automatically in the background like Shadow Play and the Windows gamebar recordings can. In theory OBS with the flag you mentioned could be added as an additional app with "AutoRunBefore" set to 1, but that would be a massive pain and clunky. Hopefully in the future theres an option under the OBS integration to have it startup beforehand globally.

I haven't tested it with anything other than Retroarch, but strangely enough I'm able to open Retroarch through LB by right clicking on any game that uses it and using the corresponding option. The prompt only appears when I try to actually launch a game, additional apps included. It makes me wonder if the rom files are the issue but I believe LB has the same exact permissions with those as well.

Trying to launch any game on 11.3 Beta 10 (not sure about earlier betas) results in the "This operation requires elevation privileges" message that can occur if you run LB as an admin and then try going back to running it at the user level, even though this is not the case for my current install (User owns all files/folders within the LB directory and has permissions set to full control). Reverting to 11.2 stable avoids the issues without any changes to LB files. Not sure what 11.3 Beta 10 is trying to do or what files it is trying to access that needs admin privileges and I'm guessing it isn't intentional.

Interesting. I'm at a complete lost on what could of happened because it changed so suddenly and I only picked up on it soon after getting 11.2 beta to work and don't remember changing anything with my system. Strange.

@Jason Carr Also just meant to let you know that starting with 11.1 beta 1 (it may have been 11.0 beta 1) the speed of any filtering (i.e. searches, changing platforms, changing views) became painfully slow, often taking up to 20 seconds for the scroll view to refresh, but now at 11.2 official the speed is the fastest its ever been, with searches for example often being returned after just 1-2 seconds or so. This is with a collection of 60,000+ titles. So if this isn't a coincidence and you did make changes in the backend related to populating the games view, note that for me at least the current implementation is stellar.

Ok after reverting to 11.1 stable and then enabling debug logs, I reinstalled 11.2 stable and started LB again while watching for the Logs folder to be populated. As you guessed previously, the initial entry that was last in the log while the it was stuck initializing was "Libraries Initialization: Extracting ThirdParty folder...". Deleting the folders as you suggested doesn't seem to allow it to get any further. Not sure exactly what the hold up was (I did mess with the ScummVM folder previously, though I thought I had reverted all my changes), but I then tried deleting every folder under the ThirdParty folder except for 7-Zip, and that ultimately allowed it to start.

I don't have the machine at the moment. I will ask the friend who does to leave the process go for like 30 minutes to see if anything happens. As I said previously I let it go for a few under 10. If nothing happens I'll get a debug log.

Nope. Just D:\LaunchBox on an NVMe drive.

No. Windows 10 Pro if it matters.

Unfortunately this didn't change anything. After doing this I watched as the program re-deleted and re-re-created those two folders upon startup as they should. This did make it so the 7-zip process was no longer present but LB still hung at "Initializing" on the splash screen. When the 7-zip process is running it does do some work for a few moments before becoming inactive. The installer for 11.2 final seems to have just gone up (just one beta?) and that too results in a stuck startup for me. Using the 11.1 installer to revert to that non-beta version has allowed me to start it again. Not sure what the issue is, but both my Logs folder and error.log are empty (I'm assuming these are only populated if an actual error occurs and there is no verbose logging) so I'm not sure how I can provide much more information other than anything you'd request specifically.

Could be something particular with my install but after updating to 11.2 beta 1 LB never gets past the Initializing splash. I've let it go for about 10 minutes; however, I suspect that no amount of time will result in anything as the process shows no CPU or disk utilization, with the only noteworthy detail being that it has a 7-zip console as a child process that also shows no activity.

So I just read over the Flashpoint update post that I missed from back in May and unfortunately it mentions that on the next update of their launcher (which may or may not be the next update itself) they will be moving to using an sqlite database instead of the Launchbox based XMLs. This doesn't make importing the collection impossible, but does make it more complex (the degree of which will depend on how their new database is set up) as I will have to parse the database file and create new Platform XMLs from scratch for Launchbox instead of being able to just modify the existing ones. Luckily some aspects of the import tool, like its UI, and the command-line helper application are still fixed in function and will not need to be modified due to this particular change in FP, so I will continue working on those aspects; however, if this new launcher version is not released by the time I have everything else finished, I may pause and hold off on creating the FP data interpreter portion of the conversion tool until it is released since they are likely to keep using that format for some time and it makes no sense for me to setup everything with the current XML scheme only to have to completely throw it all out as soon as FP is updated, which for all I know could happen a few days after I'd release this tool. The command-line utility is basically done at this point other than some more extensive testing to cover all use cases. I get held up for a while because of a bizarre error with a library I'm using that made no sense because it turned out the compiler was incorrectly not display a warning that specified the exact issue as it should have been and so all that I was seeing was a secondary error caused by the first issue that seemed completely unrelated. It also didn't help that a particular piece of documentation for the library didn't explicit mention why you couldn't do what I was trying to do and only vaguely implied it in another location. I'm about to start on the import tool and like I said I'll focus on the general UI and initialization/clean-up of the import process first and leave the core conversion procedure for when FP updates. I plan on making it so that you can use the tool to do a fresh import or update your collection within LB to match the latest FP version, allow you to select exactly which Platforms/Playlists you want imported, and other than those selections and some path input have the entire process be automated. Exactly what they do with their new database format is a bit of a whammy here but I'm still fairly confident this should all work out in the end.

The C++ program that acts as a command line interface for Flashpoint is nearly done. Then I just have to convert my MATLAB scripts into another application that takes care of the conversion/import process. So maybe a bit less than half way? Sorry it's taking so long but like I said before I can only work on it a small amount of the time.

Just wanted to give an update: Due to various situations that are too involved to explain, I only have access to my machine with LB and Flashpoint for some days and not others. Currently I've been away from it for some time, but I am still continuing to work on an importer and will resume doing so every time I'm back where the machine is. I've gotten a lot more games in using the start of an automatic process and they all seem fine. I last finished getting the necessary binaries on the machine to start writing the C++/Qt based replacement launcher (that will be used in-place of Flashpoint.exe), as it will ultimately be easier to do it on the machine itself instead of on my laptop. Can't exactly say how long it will take but so far I have seen no reason that this can't be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time and result in a process that's fairly streamlined for the user. Once things seem to be working for the most part I'll upload a beta release (I'm sure there will be bugs) and will fix any issues that people report that I personally don't run into. There are quite likely to be a few given how many games are in the Flashpoint collection that use various combinations of different software tools to make them work.

Yea, it would be unfortunate, though since in it's current state at least it doesn't seem it will take too much effort, I'm going to see what I can do. One annoyance is that FP names its media files by Game ID (which I actually like better; its straightforward and deterministic), whereas LB uses the game's title. While this is fine for simple games, ones with certain symbols or characters from other languages are handled differently and it may be a pain to make sure all cases are covered. Won't know for sure until I run my first attempt at having the conversion performed pragmatically and then see how many games are missing their images due to unexpected naming convention differences. First impressions are good. I was able to alter a random flash game a bit and use some simple batch files to start/end Flashpoint's supportive programs, like its redirector, to get it into Launchbox with its main picture and so that it can successfully be started by just clicking on the game in LB (instead of having to also have the Flashpoint.exe running first or something, like previous methods other forum users have used). I will probably end up using a C++ application to handle these tasks instead of a batch file in the final product to keep things silent and clean. The batch files run automatically on upon starting and closing the game and do not launch the game itself. This way the LB/BB pause functionality should still work correctly. There may be some unexpected difficulty in getting the other Platforms (i.e. web Unity) to work, but for no I see no reason to believe so.

I didn't know that such a hotkey existed, that can definitely be useful, thanks. I also forgot there was a seperate Views ection under BB options as I was used to changing them within the page for the theme itself. So yes, the options are still there, the only downside is that there is no preview for them now because the Views option screen is only text and no images, but I guess it isn't a huge deal if you just use the hotkey method to change them in real time to get instant feedback.

Perhaps it was unintentional, but there definitely is a bit less customization in 0.9 vs 0.7 (at least in the Dark Theme). I know you split the themes up, which isn't an issue, but to clarify, here is what I'm talking about: In the above for 0.7 (regardless of dark or light), you could choose things like say, if you wanted your Platform List to use a Text List view, or a Wheel View (options 1 and 2 respectively in the screenshot) which would result in the following two different ways to browse your platforms. Text List: Wheel: But now in 0.9 there is no View selection so you're stuck with the defaults: Such as a Wheel for the Platform View and Text List for Games View. At the moment I happen to like of the default Views in 0.9, but may find I'd prefer something else for one of them. Just figured I'd point this out so that the different view options that already existed in the combined 0.7 theme could be re-added to the View options in the separate dark/light themes in the next version, before you worried about creating entirely new ones.

Thanks for coming through with this despite everything. I'm glad that there is a 100% dark theme now and this version is much snappier with my large collection (60.000 plus) than 0.7. 0.9 seems to have a much more bare-bones options screen in the BB theme manager and there are no longer multiple Views to pick from compared to 0.7. While I actually prefer the list view for the games list over the clear logo "one at a time" list that 0.7, I'm just curious as to whether or not you took out the options because you're working on new/revised ones? Or if you feel that the current default/only views in 0.9 are the best of the bunch and are only keeping those moving forward?

I took a glance at the data files and they are still mostly the same as the xml files that LB uses. This does make me a little worried that they will still change them significantly in the future, but perhaps there will still be a significant amount of time before this. Luckily this means that ultimately all that should need to be done is some mild processing of the Flashpoint xmls to remove any fields that LB doesn't use (or potentially rename them to the closest thing LB has) and add anything missing that LB needs and hopefully they can just be added directly to LB the same way that eXoDOS is. I will definitely start playing with that when I can get around to it.

Definitely convenient for people who are starting fresh, and yea this seems like the way to go. I don't know of any other way to import such things without drag and drop other. I don't really know how exactly the built-in version handles things but I had no idea that its targets were hardcoded. This is definitely an issue since like we said the names are not at all guaranteed to be the same between systems. No clue if Jason will ever have the time or care to get to it, but a built-in import option that reads the INI directly and more or less does what we did through scripting would ultimately be ideal.

Ah sorry, since there was a bit of ambiguity as to what you were referring to given the poorly defined ScummVM terms due to the lack of documentation, I figured I'd just explain everything I did to be safe. Wasn't aware the entries were referred to as Targets. Good to know. I wasn't aware of that issue that LB would have while splitting games. Since each game ultimately has its own ID there would be no issue with keeping the folder derived name on both. I guess after splitting there will be some manual adjustments needed anyway, during which you can fix the name, but that is definitely still annoying. I agree with you in that I think whoever made the Retroarch docs for ScummVM is conflating gameid and short names. I am also surprised about the lack of documentation concerning many games that ScummVM definitely supports. It is a shame that so much processing is require to get the games in correctly but I suppose it's still better than having to add them all one-by-one.