Jason Carr

It uses the exact same themeing engine as everything else. XAML is about as easy to understand as HTML, especially if all you want to do is move things around.

Are you using LaunchBox version 9.1?

I did want to update you all as well. Progress is going very well, though I do still have a fairly long list of things to complete. If we're lucky, I'll have a beta out with the initial startup screen functionality by the end of the week. Keep in mind that the startup screens are completely themeable, so the above is just a placeholder that's in progress for the default theme. Big Box fades into the startup screen and then jumps to the fullscreen game when it's ready.

Just to clarify this, we may end up collaborating here at some point, but as of right now we're developing them separately. However, @eatkinola is doing proper fades I believe, while I'm currently focusing on getting startup screens working with exclusive full screen support (I'll be tackling an option for fading into games later).

The video used depends on what you've downloaded for your collection. Those recorded videos of Hyperspin themes come from EmuMovies. There's also straight gameplay videos available from them. There are plenty of themes that just play the video fullscreen; I believe there's also a view in this theme that does the same. Just map a key or a button to "Switch View" in the Big Box options, and use it to cycle between the views.

Awesome! Those ghost characters can be an absolute nightmare. I guess the forums must add some garbage to the code; sorry for that. Great to hear that everything is working well now.

@RetroHumanoid Can you send me the XAML files? That error suggests there's just a syntax error in the XAML somewhere. Even though it references line 80, there doesn't appear to be even 153 characters in that line, so I don't think the line and position are accurate, but the quotes issue should be correct. Maybe there's a syntax error before that line?

@ethoronath Very nice; that theme is looking really great. It looks like you'll need a way to specifically retrieve "Screenshot - Game Title" and "Screenshot - Gameplay" images from the XAML, which I don't think exists yet, sadly. It could certainly be done with a plugin, but otherwise it looks like I'll have to code something in for it. The existing "ScreenshotImagePath" property just returns a random screenshot from the game, and doesn't restrict the type of screenshot. I can add something in, but then it won't be widely available until the next release. Do you still want me to tackle that?

One last note as to the prioritized file names listed above. You may choose to switch them up depending on what you're looking for, but the way it will work currently is this: Uses the FilterTitle property just like the original theme did. If you're on a platform, you'll get the platform name. If you're on a playlist, you'll get the full playlist name, such as "Nintendo Entertainment System Action". So it will be easy for folks to create platform/genre-specific sets for only some of them, and use them as they're created. Subsequently, if the above isn't found, it will use the new KnownPlatformOrPlaylistTitle property, which will return the arcade playlist name for those known arcade playlists, or the parent platform name for the non-arcade stuff. This ensures that it always reverts to the parent platform's images so that nothing is blank. It uses the "_Default.png" or "_Default.jpg" file name, depending on the extension, if nothing else exists. One more thought I just had is that we may want to add something for the Arcade playlist nested names vs. the full names, since arcade playlists can be named "Arcade Capcom Classics" or just "Capcom Classics". We can probably just bind to Platform.NestedName and add another priority line for that. Edit: Unified Redux is out with the changes (including the above), so you can check this out there if needed. Sorry for hijacking this thread.

One more thing to note; I'll be updating the Unified Redux theme with all the changes shortly, so that may make it easier to update stuff once I have that theme out.

@RetroHumanoid @CriticalCid I think I finally have a good and proper solution for the paths issues via a new plugin, which is attached. It allows you to prioritize up to 5 different file names, checks to see if they exist, and then outputs the first one that actually exists. This should allow us much more flexibility for the Unified themes when loading up images. To use it, just drop the DLL file in the theme's plugin folder, of course, then add the following line to the top section of the XAML, with all the other references: xmlns:PathSelector="clr-namespace:Unbroken.LaunchBox.Plugins.PrioritizedPathSelector;assembly=Unbroken.LaunchBox.Plugins.PrioritizedPathSelector" Then you can replace the existing TextBlock/Image binding solution with something like this: <!-- LOGO --> <PathSelector:PrioritizedPathSelector x:Name="LogoFileName" FolderPath="Themes\Unified Redux\Images\Theme\Logo" FileExtension=".png" Priority1FileName="{Binding FilterTitle}" Priority2FileName="{Binding KnownPlatformOrPlaylistTitle}" Priority3FileName="_Default" /> <Image x:Name="LogoImage" Grid.ColumnSpan="7" Grid.RowSpan="8" Source="{Binding PrioritizedFilePath, ElementName=LogoFileName, FallbackValue='pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/Unified Redux/Images/Theme/Logo/_Default.png'}" Opacity="100" Panel.ZIndex="3" Stretch="Fill" RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="HighQuality" /> Basically, you create the PrioritizedPathSelector element (which replaces the previous TextBlock element), specify the FolderPath and FileExtension properties, and then add properties for the Priority1FileName, Priority2FileName, etc. The resulting PrioritizedFilePath property, which is bound in the Image element, will return the first full path that exists. Let me know if you guys have any questions or run into any issues. I will admit I haven't exactly tested it to the moon and back, so don't bang your head against it too hard if something isn't working. Just let me know and I'll take a look and get it fixed. Unbroken.LaunchBox.Plugins.PrioritizedPathSelector.zip

Ah, yeah. I see that now. It doesn't look like there's a good solution for that particular query currently. I'll add that to my to-do list.

This is by design, though I know it can be confusing. Try using "Has None of the Values" instead of "Is Not Equal To".

Please see my response here:

Sure, it may very well be GPU related. Regardless, it is an issue only on systems that happen to be struggling to keep up. I do plan to revisit soon, but as I don't know how large of an undertaking it will be, I don't currently have a timeline.

Responded to this here:

The issue indeed does have to do with hard drive/CPU/etc. speeds. It has to do with the hardware not being able to keep up with the video, and thus the artifacting happens. That said, I do recognize that the issue has been fixed in later versions of VLC. However, the issue does not exist at all currently if your hardware can keep up. I have upgrading VLC on the radar, but as there were such significant changes for the 3.x release, I have a lot of work to do to get it integrated (unfortunately things completely break currently when I try to upgrade to the 3.x series). So the upgrade is coming, but it may be a bit yet, unfortunately.

That all makes a lot more sense. I'd say that's a good workaround for now, but I think we can do better once I tackle it properly. I'll get that done next week.

Not currently. I would like to change it up so that you can update the theme and the selected image type for a platform including all child playlists at once, but allowing a different theme for each child category is not on the immediate radar.

I see; that makes sense per the separate themes. The issue we have right now though is that if you wanted to do it all in the same theme, you'd have no way to do it. And I guess you're seeing something similar with the arcade classics. I still don't understand what's going on with the genre thing, but meh, doesn't much matter since I'm gonna have to figure something else out anyways.

What I don't understand is how the Genre field would ever have "Arcade" in it. Do the genres on your games include the word "Arcade"? I feel like I'm really missing something here because none of this is making sense to me lol. I'm not fully following here either, but wouldn't changing the favorites theme from "Nintendo Entertainment System Favorites" to "Nintendo Entertainment System" cause it to display the favorites theme for straight up NES?

Interesting. If you change the above, though, it's likely to change the games that are listed in the playlist. It also won't solve the other issue with all non-arcade playlists.

Come to think of it, a plugin is probably the best solution we're going to find, and wouldn't really be very hard to build. I'm neck-deep in startup screen development for the moment, but I'll look to tackle that some time next week.

Alright, so I am able to fix that property to solve the first problem above, where the deeply nested arcade playlists aren't showing the custom resources. Howevever, it's not so easy to fix what I think @angelobodetti is saying. @RetroHumanoid What the KnownPlatformOrPlaylistTitle property does currently is this: If you're on one of the known arcade playlists, it will return the nested name of the playlist Otherwise, it will look for the parent platform and return the parent platform name and NOT the current playlist name The issue here is supporting both the old and the new, as we don't want blank screens to show up if there's nothing available for a particular playlist. Ideally, we'd want to allow some of this logic to happen in the XAML or at least in the theme, so that it can check if the file exists and then revert it to something else if not (since Big Box is not currently aware of the theme-specific images and structure in the Unified themes). The issue is, though, I really don't know if there's any good way to do that functionality. I suppose a plugin would work for that if nothing else. Maybe @CriticalCid has an idea on this though. But if you're creating console-specific playlist screens (such as NES favorites), it won't currently work with that KnownPlatformOrPlaylistTitle property, as it will just always return straight NES. The FilterTitle property that we were using before has not been changed, though; that will still always return the full name of whatever you're on. The issue with using that in the Unified themes is that if anything doesn't exist (such as an NES developer playlist, for example), everything will just be blank or it will revert to the main default instead of showing the defaults for the current console. Basically, we're mainly just hitting the limits of the original image structure used by the Unified themes.

Okay, I will test.