Jason Carr

Yeah, that's definitely super strange. Good job sleuthing that one out though. That does seem to suggest that it's likely a driver issue or something, I would guess. I would first make sure Windows is all the way up to date, and then look for driver updates, especially video drivers to see if that makes any kind of a difference.

Sorry guys for the surprise there. At this point I can confirm that sales have not dwindled at all by what I can tell, so that confirms that it was the right decision for the company. It was a very difficult decision to make, but I have to make decisions that are best for the company, especially now that it's not just me and my own family that rely on the income, but two other families as well. The good news is that the company is growing, which only further serves to cement the future of LaunchBox, but it does mean that we will occasionally have to deal with growing pains like this.

Yeah, that looks all stock to me. All I can figure is that there's some kind of a weird issue with drivers or something, but I know that doesn't help. Are your MAME settings stock? Do you have the same issue when you run MAME from LaunchBox?

Hmm, yeah, it's like there's something force focusing Big Box and not allowing MAME to be focused. Are you using any scripts to launch MAME? What are your MAME emulator settings?

Not sure where you're coming from here @wallmachine...but that's not constructive, and won't be tolerated going forward. @CalmGamer If you've turned off the startup and pause screens, I'm really surprised that would be happening. You might try turning on just the startup screens to see if it helps. Windows can be finicky at times with focus, and sadly it could be caused by any number of things. See if turning only the startup screens on helps. If that doesn't help, then try exiting out of any and all applications that might be running in the background to see if anything is conflicting with focus. Also, what version of Windows are you running?

Yes, we have explored this. We would have to support both XML and a database if we did, because the community would be pretty upset if we just changed it all up. Regardless, some of the loading times could probably be improved with a database, but none of the stuff that we're discussing in this thread would improve at all by changing out the data backend.

There is indeed plenty of room for performance improvements in Big Box, yes. The intent for LaunchBox and Big Box has always been rapid development, tons of features, and ease of use, which we do tend to focus on. We have put a lot of work towards performance optimizations over the years, but we've built LaunchBox and Big Box on technologies that enable us to develop quickly and pump out new features, which means using more modern technologies and higher level languages than bare metal C++, and also provides us with things like the XAML theming engine that aren't available elsewhere. All to say that yes, we know Big Box is more hardware intensive than it could be, but we would sacrifice many features if we spun our wheels trying to make it as low level and close to the hardware as possible. With hardware improving all the time, it makes much more sense for us to take advantage of rapid development and be able to pump out plenty of features than to double our development time to make things more lightweight. Like I said, I haven't tested things in your specific VM environment (I've done some testing on VMware, but I doubt you're using VMware), so you're probably right: there probably is something weird going on that is specific to the VM environment. If we can find it and fix it that would be great, but honestly you may be the only one in the entire community who's using Big Box this way, so it's difficult for us to devote too much time to it. I do think a video might help, though. We can look to see if anything shows up that would be a clue as to what's going on.

We actually used to use thegamesdb.net way back in the day, but they had so much down time that it was cause for major issues (there were times where the site was down for long periods of time). Our talks with them basically led to them telling us to take all the data and use it ourselves, which was in their license agreement and resulted in us creating the LaunchBox Games Database. So we based our initial data and images around their's, years ago. So we have quite a history with them. At this point I think the LaunchBox Games Database probably has better games coverage anyways.

Hmm, this is the first I've heard of or seen this. I really have no idea what could be causing this. I'm doubtful that it's really caused by LaunchBox, but anything is possible. I suppose it could be some kind of weird hardware conflict with a controller or something, idk. I guess the first thing I would try is disabling controller support completely, to see if the problem goes away. I would also check your keyboard automation settings, and try disabling keyboard automation to see if that helps. Let me know if disabling all that stuff makes the issue go away.

Yes, but if you're not even getting the Big Box loading screen, then it's likely an early .NET crash. See if you can find any details in the Windows event log, under Application. You can just start it up and let it crash, and then check the event log for recent errors.

@lokaz Yes, it would be worth trying the above to see if it helps anything. However, I don't feel like your experiences are normal, so there may be something weird going on like a driver issue or a background app interfering somehow. Can you try closing anything you happen to have running in the background to see if there might be a conflict with something?

Interestingly, there's a similar ticket here that just came to my attention: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5148/bigbox-crashes-when-shortcut-is-added-to I have no idea why scripting would cause crashes for Big Box. Unfortunately I'm inclined to suspect that it might be an MS bug, but we should at least figure out exactly what the error is that is causing the crash. Per the ticket above, it appears to be caused by controller code somehow. What do you have in your Windows application event log when it crashes?

Hmm, hard to say what's going on there. Is that the Big Box main view, the pause screen, or the startup screen stuck like that?

Yikes, I'm honestly unfamiliar with Unraid's ability to create performant virtual machines, but that could very well be the cause of serious performance issues. To be honest, it would definitely be worth testing things on the bare hardware to see how much of a difference it makes. I know virtualization technologies have come a very long way, but I also know that only Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware have what I would call performant solutions for virtualization, and I doubt that Unraid is using either of them. And even with the better solutions, there is always performance loss with virtualization. It's also possible that WPF is not well optimized under virtualization, I've done very little testing from that front. Per videos loading, I don't see that issue on any of my machines, but I also don't run 5400 RPM drives on any of them. So I'm not really sure if that would be theme-specific or not. But running a 5400 RPM drive these days seems kind of silly, considering that you can pick up a huge 7200 RPM drive for less than fifty bucks.

Just a couple more final notes: I am seeing better performance with the white theme, so I do think it's definitely worth keeping those performance improvements. Also, it looks like the performance killing combination is 4K resolutions and 4K videos with integrated graphics or low-end video cards. I do get better performance out of the WMP video playback engine, but then you might run into stability issues due to MS's bugs. But simply using the 1080p videos on my XPS 15 does make a big difference in performance, as would changing the resolution to 1080p. I think performance expectations are perfectly fine, especially with the improvements you introduced.

@viking I've tested on my lowest-end PC, and performance was great for both views, though I think it was probably very slightly faster with the white view. However, that PC is using a 1080p monitor and of course the 1080p videos. With 1080p videos and resolutions on low-end machines, performance is perfectly fine in my book; it was butter smooth for me for both views, really. I've learned though that the video card definitely matters, so it might be more of an issue for integrated graphics (I do have dedicated video cards in my older machines). Next, I tested the theme on my DELL XPS 15, which of course uses integrated graphics and a 4K resolution, which can be a performance killer. Performance is definitely less on that machine, and it appears to be bottlenecked by the video card, but even with 4K videos and a 4K resolution, things were certainly smooth enough. I'd be curious to know people's hardware configurations that are struggling with the theme, as I really don't have any machines that are seeing any real performance issues with either views. I wish I could test on my GPD Win 2, but sadly the dumb thing is apparently broken now and refuses to turn on (that's lovely). All this to say, for me, I see no real performance issues at all on any of my machines, for either view. All I can figure is that machines that are struggling are either ancient, or are using old-ish integrated graphics. One more thing: all my testing was done with VLC as the video playback engine, since WMP is no longer recommended for use at all due to the unfortunate WMP stability issues that MS has introduced with the past few Windows 10 updates.

Hello all, I had not seen this thread, so thanks for point it out @dbinott. Sorry to hear about the trouble guys. I'm not sure if we have several different issues here, or if there's a common theme. We'll probably have to tackle each issue case-by-case. @rumple987 Are you still having an issue? @Marcopolo7 Are you still on 10.9? Can you try manually updating to see if that works? @dbinott I haven't found any useful information on that error, but my first hunch would be either a corrupted .NET install or a corrupted Windows installation, but I can't say for sure. It would be interesting to know if everyone in this thread has the same error. @edgecrusher462 It sounds like you've got a separate issue there than other folks in this thread, but it's hard to know what it is without the exact error messages. What error messages are you getting exactly?

Possibly in the debug log, yes, though not sure if it would be helpful or not. @lokaz Can you explain the details on the slow downs that you're experiencing?

That RAM usage isn't exactly normal, no, though I'm sure there are situations where it would get up that high. It's possible that there's something going wrong, but we'll need more details before we can help with anything.

I don't know what are in the other platforms. But yeah, one game should not be causing slowdowns. But whether a platform has one game or many, it still has to filter down to just that platform, so that may or may not be relevant. It's not just caching images when updating the game list.

But what do you mean by great unexplained slowness?

So the issue is that it uses CPU usage for a few seconds after selecting a new section of games to populate? That is to be expected. Of course, on my system, it takes less than a second to populate a new section of games, but yes, LaunchBox will use CPU usage when you switch between platforms. And the fact that it's showing 100% on the CPU is a good thing; it means that the application is properly multi-threaded, and using all of your PC's resources to load things up as quickly as possible. Of course, no app should be using 100% CPU usage all the time, but when you tell it to do something, it has to use CPU to do it.

Thank you Kondorito. With the amount of work you've put in for us translating, though, I can't have you paying for a license upgrade! Hit me up via PM with your full name and email and I'll send you a forever license.

Hey all, I wanted to inform everyone about an upcoming price increase for LaunchBox Premium. On Friday, January 24, 2020 (in a couple of days), we will be increasing the price of LaunchBox Premium to the following: Regular Licenses - $30 USD Forever Licenses - $75 USD This will not affect any existing customers at all, as we will be grandfathering them in at previous prices for upgrades and renewals. Anyone who has already purchased LaunchBox Premium, or who purchases before Friday, will be able to upgrade or renew at existing prices, forever. The price change will only take affect for new customers. For new customers, here are the new prices for upgrades and renewals going forward: Forever License Upgrade - $45 USD Regular License Renewal - $15 USD Thanks to everyone for all your support so far. The LaunchBox team is growing, as is the software, and we're very excited for what's to come.

@viking It's hard to say which would be faster. We'd have to test both on some lower-end systems to see if it makes a significant difference. If you want to send me a couple different versions of the theme for testing, I can test them on some of my slower systems.