Jason Carr

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.

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.