Jason Carr

I did some heavy work on performance in .Next today, and I have improved the performance quite a bit for very large lists (like 50,000). I improved things in a number of areas, but I learned that the WPF custom theming engine that we use (same engine we use for Big Box that I plan to open up for .Next soon) does reduce performance a bit when loading such a large number of "views" (each box/game is a separate view). I don't really have a solution to that, but I did improve the performance by quite a bit. We may have to provide an option to disable that feature for the crazy folks who want hundreds of thousands of games; we'll see. I worked on the focus/launch game bug as well, but it's causing me all kinds of problems. I'll come back to that tomorrow. Should have another beta out some time tomorrow. The line is there on purpose to show keyboard focus; however, somehow your custom spacing settings have put it in an odd place. Try adjusting your spacing settings to see what might be causing it.

Ugh. All I can figure is that a driver or Windows update occurred that somehow created a glitch in VLC. Maybe try looking to see what updates were installed recently or if anything was changed. Unfortunately there's not a lot I can do about that particular issue, since it's a VLC bug and it seems to be unique to your machine (it would take me forever to dive into VLC's codebase to try and fix it). I will look to update VLC here soon though, so that may or may not fix the issue.

Oh yeah, this one is pretty interesting. Not sure what I can do about it, but I'll add it to my list.

Okay, either there's a performance issue with 50,000-long games lists, or your hardware is showing it's age, or both. It's probably been a while since I've tested .Next with a list of games that long, in all honesty. Can you PM me your Data folder so I can test?

Okay, so confirmed that the "game launching with single click on focus" issue is still there. I'll take a look at this further. I may still proceed with the release though if all the other issues are fixed.

Beta 18 is out now, and it's the first release candidate for the next official release (finally). All known bugs and crashes are hoped to be fixed in this release: Please let me know if anyone is experiencing bugs or crashes in beta 18.

Beta 18 is out now with the following: Hopeful fix for .Next videos playing in the background while playing games Increased controller dead zone in .Next to match OG LaunchBox (loose 360 controllers were drifting) Music in .Next should now pause when clicking on a video to play it Hopeful final fix for .Next controller-related crash Hopeful fix for strange .Next "game launching with a single click on focus" issue We're finally at release candidate status with this beta. If you can comment on any of the above fixes, please do.

No problem Claudio, updated it for the next beta, which should be out later today. Planning on this one being the last beta before release.

Good to hear.

Thanks all, this bug should be fixed in LaunchBox.Next; the next version will be coming out in a few days, and .Next will be feature-complete.

Yes, it could be fixable by editing vlc.cfg. Nothing has changed on the Big Box stack at all recently with videos, so I'm guessing somehow something changed on your system. VLC is used to play music, so I'm guessing that's probably why it's still happening. Maybe see if you can find instructions on completely removing all versions of VLC from your system, including settings?

Was it the reboot or the anti-virus that fixed it?

@Mithrot Try rebooting the machine and temporarily turning off any anti-virus. Is that LaunchBox or LaunchBox.Next?

I've increased the default dead zone in order to better combat this for 360 controllers with loose sticks. In the future, we'll probably add custom dead zone options, but for now, this should do it. It's now set to the same dead zone that OG LaunchBox had. These changes will be in the next beta (8.4-beta-18), out later today or tomorrow.

Beta 17 is out now; thanks to @neil9000 we've discovered that the remaining crashes in .Next were being caused by game controllers (or the game controller code), at least for him. Still confirming with @Zombeaver and @Retro808 that their issues are the same. This beta adds some more logging related to game controllers so that we can better troubleshoot it going forward. There's also a minor controllers fix that might resolve some issues.

Are you scrolling with the mouse wheel or a game controller?

Hopefully things will be a lot smoother once the background caching completes (as noted by the progress bar at the top). Are you scrolling the whole time in the All view in that video? Or just line by line?

@ichimitch That should just about cover it, though you may be missing some DirectX libraries if you only have DirectX 11. Make sure you have every DirectX library ever (you'll need them for emulators anyways). This should include all of them: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109 Also, you'll need to make sure both Big Box and LaunchBox separately are configured to use VLC instead of Windows Media Player, as obviously Windows Media Player won't be included. Running Big Box on ancient hardware isn't going to work out very well, but I am interested to know if you successfully get everything running on WinPE.

Thank you guys; sorry if I came across a bit blunt. I'm just neck-deep in debugging this difficult to reproduce crash that Zom posted above, and I'm more interested in fixing the bug than other things that will set me back.

I may come back to this at a later date, but as for right now, I have more important things to worry about than the file count on the beta releases.

That is correct. It should be out later today.

Sure, I can add that here at some point. You should be able to disable controllers in .Next in the mean time (which is isolated from the Big Box option). What controller are you using?

Thanks for pointing this out. Added it to my list. @jabrick I can confirm that the issue is not having write permissions to the LaunchBox folder without administrative access. You'll need to enable write permissions on the LaunchBox folder, and let it propagate to all subfolders and files as well. The process will be similar to this: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/take-ownership-folder-windows-10-using-file-explorer

Thanks again all, I have the translations in for the next beta, which should come out either today or tomorrow. We're finally nearing the release, as it seems that the major bugs have been fixed.

Thank the Lord, I already have confirmation from @Retro808 that the stability issues seem to be fixed with this beta. Do let me know if anyone else is experiencing any crashes. I understand your request here, but I've already confirmed that the logging does not impact performance in any noticeable way (it does I'm sure but it's not noticeable). It's also worth noting that if performance is your focus, the betas are definitely not advised. Beta releases are just that, betas, and I don't recommend using them as your daily driver unless you're up for some occasional issues and you're not concerned with getting the best possible experience. Because you won't.