Jason Carr

I can certainly understand that, Cid. It's a frustrating situation to say the least. It is possible that I may be able to tag-team the code with @eatkinola to figure it out and get it fixed once and for all. Whether we end up dropping the plugin and integrating it into Big Box, or keeping the plugin and figuring out how to fix it, I will work with @eatkinola so that his work will not go to waste. He's obviously got good code in that plugin that we'd be foolish to throw away. I just would rather not have the stability issues in the mean time is all. Though it seems like we've just discovered the issue, I have noted it as a recurring issue quite a few times in the past few months. It is surprising how few people actually report issues lol, but it has come up from time to time. The biggest challenge in this case is getting enough details from users who are experiencing lockups to identify that the theme or the plugin is the problem. Per star ratings, certainly go ahead and test, but I'm 99% certain that the issue will have nothing to do with any changes we've made in the 7.15 betas. I'm with you though if you still just want to put up a warning and wait on putting out an update. We'll get a proper solution going soon enough anyways.

Wonderful; thank you @NJDave71.

Thank you @keltoigael; I do want to get those features integrated, especially multiple video playback. I'll look into that for the next version.

Thanks @Charco. This is a known issue and comes from some performance optimizations I made a while back. At the time I chose to just deal with this as a performance trade/off. But yes, we do need a solution.

Merry Christmas @decimal.

@CriticalCid and @keltoigael, it's certainly up to you guys, but it would be my preference if we could put out a new version of both sets of themes (CriticalZone and CityHunter) without the plugin. I just don't like there being stability issues with the latest versions of the most popular themes. That, and I'd love to be able to use the updated themes myself but I can't with the stability issues. I do want to clarify and thank @eatkinola for the awesome plugin; I just think that perhaps the video stuff would be better done internally in Big Box code rather than in a plugin, due to the annoyingly complicated code required for videos. Certainly none of this has ever been @eatkinola's fault. If you guys remember, we went through hell getting the video playback to be stable when we initially developed it all. Going forward, after the 7.15 release, I am hoping to come back to this and integrate at least some of those video features into Big Box directly.

@kmoney Ah, indeed it is why. That's a good point. Not quite sure how we'll resolve that, but good to know.

I am the primary developer. The vast majority of it all has been coded by myself, but @Vlansix has contributed some code as well. I started in Java first myself, though if and when we look to hire we will be looking for an expert C# developer.

Ah, I just tested and I see that the "Switch Image Type" button isn't working for switching the image types on the platforms view for playlists. That GameImageType setting controls what type of images are displayed for that playlist. And yes, it can definitely be confusing. Generally, it's recommended to get all your image types configured in LaunchBox first, and then Big Box will use them as well. Good point though; we can definitely improve that sooner or later. I'll add the Switch Image Type issue to my list. The fix may or may not make it into 7.15, but I'll do my best.

I believe it should look for any emulator marked as default for that platform. So if you don't have an emulator marked as default, then one won't be set. Can you confirm if you have a default emulator set for that platform? No, the community star ratings will be updated even when you select "don't update existing fields". The user can't change the community star ratings values, of course, so there's no harm in always overwriting them. You can bind pretty much anything these days using the SelectedGame.[Field] property. I believe the same works for SelectedPlatform.[Field]. Playlists do affect how long startup takes, but I don't think they'll make a significant difference once Big Box is loaded. In my testing, the latest betas have not shown any performance differences on my handful of machines, so I would guess that there's some kind of outside factor there, though it could be related to different data or media. Most recently there have been some major updates coming down the pike from MS, so it could be somehow related to that as well. It's always worth attempting a reboot to see if that helps too, of course. Thank you so much @UnderwoodNC. Honestly, I really don't know how you survive 80-100 hour weeks! When I still had my full time job and I was doing LaunchBox as well, I'd sometimes get to 80 hours, but I was going back and forth between real work and fun stuff. And even then, it was killing me lol.

@NJDave71 For 7.14 I went through every single image loading process across the entire app (Big Box) and made 100% sure that all images were loading in a background process, so I can confirm that background images are indeed loading multi-threaded.

@jmwilkes76 I'm not exactly following. When you say "add it manually", what do you mean? Do you mean just putting the file in the folder, or adding it via the add/edit window?

@shinra358 Thanks for the reminder. Just tested it all and figured out the issue. Should be fixed for the next beta later today.

Retroarch netplay is a planned feature for soon for LaunchBox. Not sure if Dolphin will be included in that, though.

Congrats on your new job, Cid. Yeah, when I added partial star ratings, there was no way to use star text characters to display partial ratings, so I had to settle for the numeric values. We'd have to use custom theming to show proper stars with partial values.

Hi @decimal, we are not hiring for the time being, but I'll keep you in mind going forward. Also, our language of choice is C#, so that would be a requirement.

Good to know @dovella. Probably won't get that in before the release, but maybe we can put it on the poll.

I'll do some testing with those themes myself. I've been running the original CityHunter in Attract Mode for weeks with no freeze-ups and no issues. I haven't tested the latest version of CriticalZone 2 or CityHunter 2 overnight, but I did run into some stability issues with the previous versions. I'll do some further testing. Since it's been so difficult to get @eatkinola's plugin running stable (and I know why that is, it's because of the difficulties of working with the VLC videos), perhaps I should just build the functionality into Big Box itself.

@pasteko This will be on the upcoming poll, and we will see how much of a priority it truly is. It's entirely possible that it really is what the community wants the most, but it's also entirely possible that it's only desired by a handful of very vocal power users. We'll find out, and if it turns out to be a priority, I'm more than happy to implement it. Per retro achievements and community ratings, I can guarantee you there is more excitement in the community surrounding those two features (at least for retro achievements) than this particular feature. One man's necessity is another man's wasted effort.

@teeedubb Per the above, you'll need to wait until tomorrow and then re-run the Download Metadata and Media wizard to get the proper star rating values. Going forward it shouldn't be an issue. I suspect that the star ratings in Big Box just aren't working because of the weird values, so that should be fixed as well.

And beta 11 is out guys. I updated the version of 7-Zip and fixed @alnyden's issues above.

@alnyden I believe I figured out the performance issue. There was an issue with the background caching happening unnecessarily when a game was selected *if* you override the sort type for a playlist. I'll have a new beta out shortly. Glad we got this one figured out.

I am actually seeing some performance issues there on my system as well, but only when using your data. So that's good that I'm able to replicate it. It seems to be related to playlists (having a bunch of games and a bunch of playlists). I'll look into it; I may or may not be able to improve the performance before the official release, but I'll give it a shot. I don't want to change *too much* stuff before the release at this point. Per the other weird community star rating value issue, I'm really glad you reported that lol. We apparently had some ratings coming in from people with different culture settings that were insanely high, and that was skewing the ratings. I've put several safeguards in place now to fix it, so we should be good to go. However, you will have to download new metadata using the wizard in order to fully fix it. The catch is that you'll also need to grab new metadata from the LaunchBox Games Database, and LaunchBox will only do this once a day, so you may have to wait until tomorrow. Whew.

@tbm I've played with this a bit and haven't been able to replicate it, but I'm wondering if maybe it's because the platform is set to a different theme? I don't have all your themes in my test, so that could be it. Try setting the platform to a specific theme, and then set it to a specific view and see if that solves the issue. There's some complications there because certain views are unsupported in certain themes, and so that can make it a tricky process. It's also possible that I have a glitch related to non-existent views in various themes, but I think this should fix the issue regardless (hopefully).

Good to know, guys. I've updated it for the next beta.