Jason Carr

I updated the post, but the poll is now live: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WPVG975 Vote away!

It's honestly not that I'm bored...this came from the numerous requests that I get asking for LaunchBox on Linux. Every weekend I typically take a break from normal development to attempt something crazy, and sometimes those crazy things turn into something, and sometimes they don't.

Here's the video, btw, for anyone interested: I expect to do a poll coming up soon.

Hi @Domarius, sorry I've been tough to reach. Looks pretty neat; I'm sure there's a number of people who would appreciate the simplified, CRT-focused interface. I do also appreciate that you're willing to check that the end user has a license, because I know that you wouldn't have to do that. Feel free to PM me here and we can discuss any necessary logistics.

This sounds like some sort of controller conflict issue, though it's not one that I've ever seen or heard of before. Are you using LaunchBox or Big Box? What happens if you disable controllers in LaunchBox completely? We haven't changed the controller stack in LaunchBox in ages, so I'm guessing this is more likely related to updated controller drivers or something of that nature than a change in LaunchBox.

Hi there @OGControllersOrBust. The best thing you can do for non-matching titles is to arrange by the LaunchBox DB ID, which will sort the games out that are not connected to the database. Oh, ha, you said that already. Currently, there's no way to look for titles that are in the games database but missing from your local collection. That would be incredibly messy anyways since the games database is not guaranteed to be complete, and it contains extra games like hacks and such as well.

Good to know @mdreffet. I'll add that to my shortlist.

This is not currently possible, though it makes sense for us to eventually add support for multiple languages to the games database. It will probably be a while before we get there though.

Another quick update, just fixed a bug where alternate titles without regions were not showing up on the game details pages. All the data and everything was being uploaded and moderated without any issues, but they just weren't showing up. So you'll probably see a bunch more alternate titles show up on the game details pages now.

@Robin55 They look great! Yes, they should be accepted in the database. Just make sure to categorize them correctly with the correct region and category. Unfortunately I still don't have a way to upload them in batch, though.

Hey there @GoodOldGames, one way around this is to use additional apps instead for the remaining documents. I plan to add support for using the built-in PDF reader for additional apps that are PDFs.

We could certainly add that as an option, but it still won't solve the invisible text problem with changing backgrounds.

Moderation performance should be much improved now. I'm not necessarily done working on performance there, but I did make some good progress today.

Hey all, quick update. I've been working on the database website a bit the last couple of days. I put some significant time into the moderation performance; my goal is to get moderation to stop slowing down over time (instead of just archiving records every once in a while). I did make some big performance gains, so hopefully performance stays half-way decent.

Makes sense. Though if you look closely, the surrounding outlines are actually not pixel-perfect to the text (due to some unfortunate issues with Windows rendering and ClearType text), so that would require going back to the drawing board somewhat. That said, makes sense. I'll try and gauge how popular this request is based on how many times I've heard it requested. Is there a BitBucket ticket for it?

I see. Yeah, as far as I know, there's no way for us to fix this ourselves. It has to do with how the emulator is coded; they apparently never bothered to integrate the retro achievements stuff when loading a ROM via the command line, only via the emulator's interface. So yes, we would have to go back to the retroachievements.org community to get this fixed.

Yeah, I am working on the moderation performance issues as we speak. I fixed a number of errors yesterday and I'm working on performance today. I know that performance is the biggest reason why we've been having trouble getting things moderated, and the problem is that previous performance fixes we've done were only temporary. I'm not really sold on reducing moderation requirements for long-term contributors, but I will give that some thought. Per the badges, that is something I would love to do but it requires some significant work integrating the forums and the games database sites (which currently use two separate accounts), so it's a royal pain to implement. But hopefully I can get that in eventually.

Responded in the thread. Isn't that a list of pretty much every useful feature included in Rocket Launcher? I'm not saying that we'll never tackle those features, because many of them I would love to have myself, but it's important to note that Rocket Launcher is no small project and it's made even more complicated by needing separate code for all those things for each individual emulator. If you throw in the fact that it's very bug-prone due to constantly changing versions of Windows and updates, constantly changing emulators, and forcing Windows to do things it really wasn't meant to do, it becomes a pretty big mess to implement, and an even bigger mess to maintain. So as much I as I'd love if this stuff could be implemented well and just work, it's pretty unlikely to happen any time soon, which is why I'm very glad the project exists.

Unfortunately I think this is an issue with the standalone emulators themselves, at least that's my guess. @neil9000 What do you mean by needing the game ID as a "second shot"? Is there a different command-line we can use? Unfortunately the only option we would have to fix the issue from within LaunchBox itself would be through command-line parameters. Otherwise, we'll have to report the issue to the retroachievements.org community.

Are you certain this is a new behavior with the 8.0 betas? I'm lost as to what would have caused it. Yeah, I noticed that recently. That is correct. Yup.

This error seems to come from the AddToGamesDB plugin.

We may add this later but I probably won't group it in with this release because it doesn't seem like it would be a popular request. This would be cool, but I don't think it would be possible using the Chromium Embedded Framework engine. We'd have to implement something more low-level. It would probably work, but it would be extremely resource-intensive and finicky. I honestly didn't watch the video (sorry ) but I'm guessing maybe it's from a plugin?

The white text won't be visible against a light-colored fanart background if we remove the black outline. So if we added an option to remove the outline, we'd need a different solution...

It is notable that performance is significantly better on Windows 10 than Windows 7, but certainly it should still work fine.

This is all correct. The .NET 4.7 framework is required, or LaunchBox won't work at all. We upgraded primarily for performance reasons, as version 4.7 of the framework has some significant performance improvements. The latest Windows 10 feature updates are required in order to install the 4.7 framework if you're running Windows 10. Unfortunately that's just how Microsoft has done it.