Jason Carr

Beta 15 is out now guys. Unless we run into any glaring issues, this will be the last beta before we release the official version tomorrow. I spent some serious time this morning attempting to resolve the remaining issues with prioritizing music over video audio, specifically pertaining to the game details view and going back and forth. There's a million things to catch, but I believe (I hope) I've caught them all. Let me know if anyone sees any further issues there. We'll probably run with this code for the official release regardless, unless I introduced some bugs or something serious. Any testing you guys can do would be appreciated; we're trying to avoid duplicate audio (video and music) and incorrect audio (video vs. music). Furthermore, I believe I've finally fixed the rotten black startup video issue. I was finally able to reproduce it consistently by pegging my CPU to 100% via other apps (lol). And then, figuring out the fix was relatively easy once I was able to reproduce it consistently. So let's hope that issue is solved once and for all. Hooray! Thanks all, here's to a smooth last beta and release.

Unfortunately there's not really any good way to do that right now. I can understand it being bothersome though. Since games are of course still the priority, I can't see us focusing on stuff like that any time soon, but it is noted. I'll see if anyone else requests anything similar. You could also create a Bitbucket ticket to see if it gains any traction.

@Ammonox Tools > Options > Search > Retro Achievements in LaunchBox.

@BlackPixel The arcade divisions are really just playlists, so you can add a playlist and then add the specific games into it.

There could be an issue with duplicate games, but if you close LaunchBox, and then put your images in the right folders and name them correctly, then they should show up for that game the next time you run the app without issues. We know that works properly because if it didn't we'd have everyone all up in arms. You may need to go to Tools > Refresh Images in order to get them to show up if you add them into the folders manually.

Thanks @AVissie. This is a known issue, but is actually caused by the way VLC interprets album art. If all your music files are in a single folder, and there's a folder.jpg in that folder (or something similar), then VLC assumes that that is the album art for all of the music files in that folder. So it's a tricky problem to solve and I haven't looked into it any deeper at this point.

Good to know. All makes sense.

Still, I'm super impressed how quickly you picked it up. The theme is definitely worth some tinkering. Sweet up. @JamesBaker probably knows how to help you get started. I know Adobe Premiere is a fairly important part of it, but it is expensive.

It's possible, but the first thing I would try is disabling LEDBlinky in the LaunchBox settings. It's in LaunchBox under Tools > Options > General > LED Blinky.

@Cood Currently playlists are the only way to save filters, though I can see that being useful. I had planned on coming back to filters at some point to do something of that nature. For now, the hide games method would probably get you the closest to what you're looking for.

@keops Not sure if I'm fully following #1, but you can already batch edit games. Just select all the games to change, and right-click Edit. If you want to change a particular publisher's name, just filter by publisher, select all the games, and batch edit the publisher on them. #2 I'm pretty sure custom fields are already in Big Box in the game details, with an option to turn them on or off. Multiple values are also recognized in custom fields just by adding the field twice when editing them (instead of using a semi-colon). #3 Makes sense. It would probably be good to create a Bitbucket ticket for it using "Help & Support > Request a Feature" in the header.

We have actually seen this elsewhere recently. Do you happen to be using LED Blinky? Apparently Windows Defender just decided out of the blue to have a problem with LED Blinky, and it was causing performance issues in Big Box for some odd reason. It's hard to believe we actually got this one figured out elsewhere lol. Let me know if that seems to be the problem for you as well @Arcade1993. You should be able to just exclude the LED Blinky folder from Windows Defender, I believe.

Hi Martin, there's a setting called "Skip the Game Details View" in Big Box which will allow you to directly play the games without having to go into the details menu, using the same select button. Unfortunately, though, there's currently no option to prevent you from going to the menu with the Back button.

You can indeed add them, but they will be ignored by 7.14. However, I'm expecting to put out 7.15 either tomorrow or Wednesday so it won't be long. Thanks, btw. Loving the theme. If you're up for it I would love to see if we can get some transitions in there for the various elements. I can help with that here soon.

...and beta 14 is out. Had to put out yet another beta because I introduced a bug in saving the themes per platform/playlist.

Sweet. Thank you so much.

Gotcha, all sounds good. Thank you sir. If you're up for it, I'd love to work with you to either get this stuff integrated into Big Box or get the plugin all fixed up. We can tag-team the code if you'd be willing to share it.

Thank you @eatkinola. I will do some more testing tomorrow to confirm these details. Hopefully everyone else can follow up as well. Is the version you gave @CriticalCid public? It could be a non-issue if theme developers just need to update to the latest version.

Welp, beta 13 is out now. I just can't seem to stop working today, for whatever reason. So I was playing with @PhillsDoodles amazing new Retrorama theme, and I ran into the issue where things didn't look quite right because of my 16x10 monitor (most themes are built for 16x9). So, of course I set out to fix it. There are now two more settings in the ThemeSettings.xml file: <Force16X9AspectRatio>true</Force16X9AspectRatio> <Force4X3AspectRatio>false</Force4X3AspectRatio> These settings will allow you to force a theme to be displayed either in 16x9 or 4x3 aspect ratio. In theory, then on monitors that are not that exact aspect ratio, they will maintain that aspect ratio instead of awkwardly filling the screen. Obviously it's better if a theme can support all aspect ratios instead of letterboxing everything, but in the case of a theme like Retrorama where everything is heavily image-based, that's not really a possibility. There are probably many other themes that can benefit from this as well. All the theme developers will probably now want to murder me for waiting this long to implement it, considering I got it done in a couple hours. @CriticalCid @eatkinola @y2guru @Hexxxer @keltoigael @NJDave71 @Omen @Cookz718 @Grila @viking @Rincewind @SNAK3ATER @shro2016 @nosh @ea4492 @Maddoc1007 @vsilvalopes @faeran @walter10h @Scottad @Sithel @Akezhar @Thanos Reigns @niglurion @kerszr Wow we have a ton of amazing theme developers! Didn't expect the list to be that long.

Gotcha. That was not a specific use case that I set out to fix, but I see that now. I'll see if I can get that in before release.

Hehehe. I'm surprised it hadn't been mentioned yet. I just did it because it was bothering me when I did it myself.

They can actually be anything, because of community ratings, which are an average of all of the community's ratings for that game. So it can be anywhere between 0.0 and 5.0.

Alright guys, beta 12 is out with the following: - Improvement: The end of the Download Metadata and Media process in LaunchBox has been optimized to be multi-threaded so that the interface does not appear to be locked up when finishing up the process - Improvement: When switching the global theme in the Big Box options, platform-specific and playlist-specific themes are now reset in order to reduce confusion - Fixed: After closing the Options window, the LaunchBox main window border was corrupted on some systems - Fixed: "Prioritize Music over Video Audio" in Big Box was not working on rare occasions and the video audio and music would both play at the same time - Fixed: On Big Box games text list views, the selection bar was sometimes missing when first loading up the view - Fixed: When switching themes per platform or playlist in Big Box, sometimes it was confusing and/or the theme was not saving due to invalid views for certain themes. The view is now reset to the default when switching themes for a particular platform or playlist. I believe that was everything on my immediate list to fix before the release, so hopefully this will be our release candidate for 7.15. Depending on how things go, we may release either tomorrow or Wednesday. Any testing you guys can do would be very much appreciated.

I hear you guys. As a developer I'm not happy with putting out false or confusing information like this, such as showing one value in one spot of the app and another value in another. That said, we can work with theme developers going forward (and get something in the default theme as well) to present the star ratings properly.