Jason Carr

@wallmachine Please create a new topic for that...

Alright, we all know that the Rocket Launcher interface is confusing for a lot of people. Enough talk about that. Any more is simply unnecessary. Topic over please.

@Lordmonkus I'm not saying I don't (mostly) agree with you, but let's try and keep a positive attitude about it around here. The last thing I want is to anger the Rocket Launcher team over something like that. There's really no point in arguing with them about whether Rocket Launcher is easy to use or not. No matter what we do, that will go nowhere. We're attempting to make everything easier to use; that's the whole point of all of this.

Based on the feedback that I receive all the time, a whole lot of people are in that exact same boat. Even I was for a while, though I did figure it out after watching some YouTube tutorials.

I'm really excited to read the response! Unfortunately the Rocket Launcher website is down for me currently so I can't even see it lol.

I think that's more than a little bit over-zealous. I've already addressed a number of the above items earlier in the thread, so I won't be addressing all the individual points, but the difference between LaunchBox and Big Box was indeed "clearly indicated in the poll." I'm coming to learn that people don't read, not even bold text at the top of the poll. For the future, @dillabon, it would be wiser not to claim that other people don't think clearly, as that immediately disengages them from your post. Lol. That's not a bad idea @alfredolvera, but that doesn't do anything to clean up the emulator loading process. Depending on the emulator, lots of artifacts will still show up while the emulator loads, which is part of what Rocket Launcher tries to get rid of. Gotcha, that makes sense. I'll give it a shot.

Hey all, I will have a beta out to fix this issue today.

@Mozza Ha, well that's very interesting! I'm not sure if simply turning the screen off and on would really be good enough for most people, but that is certainly neat. Do you use that script as the emulator, or do you put it in the AutoHotkey fields?

Welp, here goes: http://www.rlauncher.com/forum/showthread.php?5303-LaunchBox-Rocket-Launcher-Further-Integration&p=39686

Archive unpacking already exists in LaunchBox. Fade in really is that challenging, yes, as it has to be implemented separately for every single emulator, and the only solutions available for it on Windows are hacks. Even just showing an image while an emulator loads is tricky and would require emulator-specific code.

Rocket Launcher takes a per-system/emulator approach for most features, which is what I was referring to with my above post. Not going game-specific does almost nothing to reduce the problems involved, sadly.

On the Rocket Launcher discussion, the dilemma we have is that implementing Rocket Launcher features is a royal pain in the rear and it would severely hurt development time elsewhere in order to implement them, largely because the requirements are always changing with new Windows and emulator versions, and the only ways to implement most of the features are hacks. Frankly, it's a miracle that Rocket Launcher works as well as it does. I'm not convinced that we would be able to implement the actual features any better than Rocket Launcher already does. That said, I understand how Rocket Launcher's management interface itself leaves a lot to be desired. I know this has come up before, but what if we tried to better integrate Rocket Launcher into LaunchBox? We could hopefully make it so that very little configuration would be required, and the configuration that is required could be done entirely in LaunchBox. Thoughts? Of course this would require permission from the Rocket Launcher team in order to do so. I haven't really had an extensive conversation with them on that yet.

It is indeed an easy fix, but the problem is that I'm not planning on putting out an official release for a while yet. Sigh.

Oh how nice. It appears that Valve/Steam killed our API key without giving us any heads up. I don't even know why they killed it. I'll attempt to grab a different one for the next beta release.

This has actually come up a couple times before. I would guess that depending on how the Steam game is built, it may or may not work. I'd have to do some further testing though to see if there was anyway to improve making the Exit command wait properly for all Steam games. The main issue there is that Steam games are not at all similar in how they're built; every game is built differently, sometimes with several different EXEs.

Yeah, but I gamble it all away in Vegas at every opportunity. My family is starving.

Yes. The only way I would ever do a Kickstarter is for a new/branch-off project. I feel like doing a Kickstarter for more Big Box features would be basically money begging and trying to say that the money that everyone spent on their LaunchBox Premium licenses wasn't enough. Truth is, it's plenty of money for me to continue focusing on Windows development.

Based on the fact that the words "Big Box is not feasible" was pasted in bold at the top of the poll, I very much doubt that the majority of people were confused on that aspect of the poll. I'm sure some people were, but I don't think that that alone should disqualify the poll results, as I do believe that most people can actually read. That said, I am fully aware that a large number of people are for a Linux version largely because they would like it to run on the Pi. My only regret so far is that we didn't specifically ask that question on the poll. However, running LaunchBox on the Pi is certainly feasible. Before jumping on anything I would certainly do some testing from that front, because I am aware that it's probably going to be a fairly popular request. My excitement has toned down a bit on the Linux side since yesterday, but my perspective has been changed for the future. It is very clear that a good chunk of our user base wants a Linux version. So the next question is whether or not it's feasible from a business perspective, and I am currently researching that. As a business, it's important for us not to have all of our eggs in one basket. I'm slowly thinking everything through too see what is feasible going forward.

This probably depends on the emulator guys; what emulator are you testing with? The issue is that some emulators have multiple EXEs and the initial EXE will close out (at least that's my hunch). LaunchBox just waits for the EXE to close down before running the exit command.

Good sleuthing guys; all sounds correct. The only thing LaunchBox does with Dolphin is load up the game via the command-line, so there's no delay-loading or anything of that nature.

That's still a question. Eventually, yes, since the Pi does support Mono. My only concern is performance.

Sure, I don't think it would work out to do a Kickstarter for Windows since users have already paid for it. Currently, we're making plenty of money for me to continue focusing heavily on LaunchBox and Big Box for Windows, and that's not going away. What becomes more difficult is if we introduce Linux (another platform). Unless we hire another developer for some significant time, of course it would significantly cut into Windows development, which I would like to avoid. I'm still thinking through things, but my current thought is to run a Kickstarter (with a relatively lofty goal) in order to hire another developer so that Windows development doesn't slow down.

Currently I'm trying to figure out the discrepancy between what I'm reading here on the forums and what we're seeing in the poll. What I may end up doing is creating a Kickstarter with a fairly lofty goal, and we'll see what happens. Money does speak louder than words.

It's displayed prominently in bold at the top of the poll... Though, good to know that some users might not be catching that.

At this point I am heavily considering hiring another developer. So there's that. According to the poll results so far, more than 40% of active LaunchBox users are hoping for a Linux version (they marked "I was hoping for this" or "I MUST HAVE IT NOW"). Beyond that, another 24% on top of the 40% are at least "slightly interested" in a Linux version. Honestly these results are very surprising to me; I would have guessed that most people would still want me to focus only on Windows. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. So 64% of active LaunchBox users who took the poll are interested. Those numbers are fairly telling, and much higher than I ever would have expected. Even more surprising are the results of the "How important is Linux development vs. Windows development for LaunchBox?" question. 39% of active LaunchBox users think that Linux and Windows development should be equally prioritized, while 46.29% think that Windows should be the priority (my personal stance on it as well). The surprising thing, though, is that only 14% think that Linux development is a waste of time and that nothing should take away from Windows development. That's quite a shocker to me. I still hate the concept of Kickstarter (I much prefer to sell people something that I've already built rather than take people's money and make risky promises for the future), but it's also surprising that 37% of active LaunchBox users claim that they would support and contribute to a Kickstarter for Linux. I'm on the fence as to whether I would actually want to go through with a Kickstarter, but that is also very surprising. Keep in mind that in all these results, I've filtered out the people who are not actively using LaunchBox, as I wanted to get accurate numbers from our actual user base. All the numbers go up even farther if we include the die-hard Linux community (of course).