Jason Carr

Hello all, the performance issues have all been addressed in the latest beta. If you were having performance issues, please download the beta and let me know if you're still seeing any issues. There have been some major improvements in betas 1 and 2, and I think we should be all set in that area. Now that I'm moving on from performance, I've gone through this thread and compiled a list of everything left to tackle. Keep in mind that this does not include anything that is not in regular LaunchBox; if you have a feature request in this thread that is not in regular LaunchBox, that feature request will need to go elsewhere as this thread is strictly for missing features in LaunchBox.Next. After going through the thread, this is what I still have left on my plate: Show version Custom spacing options (with # of text lines too) Controller support Music playback List view resorting on edit and repop Sidebar resizing randomly Box customization options (colors, placement, visibility, etc.) Randomize color theme on startup Playlist sorting not working Mouse cursor popup options Jump to new game after game is added Adding to playlist requiring a restart? Occasional multi-select issues (games are not unselected on rare occasions) Defaulting to system language in some cases/places? Fix default background settings (fixed for beta 3, to be out later today) Reset to default background when changing to a new platform/filter (fixed for beta 3, to be out later today) Clear logo backgrounds (added for beta 3, to be out later today) Fix exiting issues (fixed for beta 3, to be out later today) Thanks all for all the great feedback; I'll keep pumping on these items and hopefully we can knock many of them out this week.

@jetbootjack Nothing has changed with the sound engine or the sound code so I'm betting it's a coincidence of some sort or related to something else.

This is fixed for the next beta.

Nope, custom spacing code has not been added yet.

@MancVandal Custom spacing actually still hasn't been implemented yet for LaunchBox.Next.

Thank you all; all noted. Beta 2 is out now with some more significant performance improvements, especially for during the initial caching. That was definitely something I was aware of and still planned to tackle. I'm hoping this version proves to be much better. I'm headed back from camp tomorrow morning so my availability will be back to normal again very soon.

Hello all, the first 8.4 beta is out. I'm at family camp this week, but I've been working in the mornings. However unfortunately I have zero reception out here so once I head back to camp in a few minutes, so I won't be able to check up on anything until tomorrow morning. If you're skiddish about betas, you might want to hold off on this one just because I won't be available for a day. Anyways, the focus for this beta so far has been to attempt to improve performance with the box images and the caching for .Next. The app will automatically cache images in the background for the active view (the currently displayed games). In addition, there's a small progress bar that shows at the top while images are being cached in the background. If you want to precache all images, just go to All Games, set the image group you want, and wait for the progress bar to complete. It's still a work in progress, and I haven't been able to test anywhere but on this laptop, but I'm hoping it's a significant improvement.

Custom spacing has not yet been implemented in LaunchBox.Next, but it is coming.

I appreciate the offer @Lahma but these days I make it a point to pay for all development that goes into LaunchBox, for quite a few reasons. Feel free to send me your resume though if you're interested in a position for the future.

@Lahma All makes sense. I'm not likely to revamp the entire plugin system any time soon, but I should be able to add what you need for your plugin at least. It may take me a bit though because I need to focus on finishing up .Next here for a bit.

Yes, as I add more of the missing features, more RAM is going to end up being used. Half of the application was basically missing in the 8.2 release lol.

The LaunchBox Games Database is designed very differently than the Hyperspin XMLs, for example, as there is no guarantee that the LaunchBox Games Database has every single game for a particular platform. It's more flexible than that, and allows for game hacks, etc. It's not meant to be a de facto standard for what games are available for a particular platform, so such functionality would be moot.

Per the thumbnails, I will see what I can do to improve it. But it's not a battle that I'm going to win, because on the one hand I will get complaints that the "CPU is spiking every few seconds" if I cache stuff in the background, and on the other hand I'll get complaints that they're not popping in fast enough. There will have to be a tradeoff. In .Next, the tradeoff is leaning more towards less CPU usage currently. @Rod That CPU must be pretty low-powered for it to spike to 14%. I know what's causing it; it's the controller automation and the controller input processing shell. That's unavoidable unless you want to turn that stuff off.

I see. Currently the LaunchBox Games Database doesn't support country-specific release dates. So it just grabs whatever release date is listed there. Unfortunately there's not currently any way to change that.

In most cases where possible, I believe LaunchBox will prioritize the media that matches the ROM file automatically, though it will still download everything first. It just prioritizes it when it displays it on your games.

Trying to figure out what's going on there, but I'm coming up empty. Where are you selecting the image group? In the top right menu or from the hamburger icon? Are the items disabled or are they just not able to be checked? Everything seems to be working on my end and I'm not seeing this reported elsewhere so I'm confused. Unfortunately there's no way to hide the title text at current, though we'll probably provide an option at some point in the future. The publisher names will be displayed instead if you arrange by publishers; however, there's currently no way to set a different default.

This is already possible, and should happen by default when you switch between various platforms and switch image types in LaunchBox or LaunchBox.Next.

Thanks all for the feedback so far. We've definitely identified some stuff that I wouldn't have been able to find on my own.

Gotcha, noted. This is a known issue and I don't think it has anything to do with .Next. It happens because the original bat/exe/etc. file closes before the game actually closes. All LaunchBox does is wait for that original process to close. I see, makes sense. Yeah, those menus in the top right are not traditional menus, so they won't necessarily behave in the same way. Unfortunately I think getting that functionality to be exactly the same is more trouble than it's worth. That looks to be an error with the Ao.BigBox plugin.

I will be looking to possibly improve this at some point, but what you are referring to is WPF's optimization to not use too many hardware resources, and to load and dispose images as needed. This has nothing to do with the cache. .Next uses much less resources and is much quicker to navigate than the previous version, and there are and will be some tradeoffs to that, no matter what we do. I will look to speed all that stuff up, but there may still end up being split-second image pop-in as you scroll. I'm guessing you guys are interpreting the shadows that are around the text in the upper right as blurry. It's a challenge to make that text visible against any backgrounds, light or dark, hence the shadows. There's not really much of a better solution there. I assume this is in .Next? It's working for the majority of people so it's apparently machine or collection specific. Have you checked your image priority settings?

Spacing settings are still on the to-do list (see the first post of this topic). Wasn't aware about manual playlist sorting though; I'll take a look.

I actually purposefully didn't implement clear logo backgrounds this time around because I just don't think they look all that great so small behind all the boxes. I can look into adding it in though; I didn't figure many people were using it. I'm not fully following here; can you explain? Are you comparing LaunchBox.Next to the original LaunchBox version (8.2)? Gotcha, I'll look into both.

This is odd. Can you PM me an image that isn't working? That way I can do some testing. It's possible that WPF just isn't handling broken/weirdly-encoded images as well, so we may or may not be able to fully fix it. We will be adding box customization options, yes (per the first post in this topic). The vertical height issue bugs me as well, so we will be addressing it here at some point, though vanilla LaunchBox has the exact same problem. We'll need to wait until .Next is feature complete before tackling things like that. I had tried to do this but I never found a good place for it that wasn't ugly (I was trying to include the icon as well). I could just make it as another menu item in the top right, without the icon.

So weird. Maybe it's related to hiding and showing the sidebar? I'm guessing these are probably EmuMovies errors that have been there all along. I know this was happening with a previous beta, but it should have been fixed, and I've looked at the code and it's the same as regular LaunchBox now. Are you sure you're on beta 16? Also, check your image priority settings for screenshots. I'm gonna go ahead with the release I think, though we'll definitely get these issues fixed soon enough.

I don't think that's likely a beta issue; I will review but probably not before tomorrow's release. That makes sense because we're repopulating the list view looking for changes. Sounds like we just need to save that setting before repopulating. I'll add it to the .Next to-do list. Glad to hear it's resolved and it's not an issue with .Next. Sounds like we'll be releasing tomorrow morning.