Jason Carr

I've been testing on an 8-year-old Core 2 Quad with 8 gigs of RAM, and it seems to do fine with my collection of ~15,000 games. I've tested it with City Hunter and the default theme and it does fine with no slow down over time. Certainly lower hardware can be used but I think if you go much lower than that you'll need to start turning off effects and videos and such. These days you can literally get a machine similar to my base test unit for around $100, so you can't really go wrong there. For the lower-end I'm more concerned with mobile devices like the GPD Win, which still can be a smooth experience with a bit of the effects turned off.

@FistyDollars Maybe it's collection-specific then. Can you try PMing me your data folder? I'll need to know what games are causing the issue as well. I updated the Vlc.DotNet library to the latest version so it's probably related to that, though the previous version had other issues so I don't really want to downgrade. It hasn't been a very reliable library which is the reason for the VLC-related stability issues in LaunchBox itself, but ripping it out at this point would take some serious time.

That does make sense. Startup speed is definitely affected by the size of your collection. As will in-app performance, but much less so. Huge libraries are not a problem anymore, but you will find that things do get slightly slower as you add more stuff. That's mostly unavoidable, just the nature of software and data. Of course hardware matters a lot too.

This is still planned but it's quite a nightmare unfortunately. I looked into all this stuff in the past and spent several days on it but none of it works exactly as you'd expect.

Odd. I figured this would be easy to replicate but .webm videos are working fine with 7.14 on my end. Are you guys running Windows 7?

Odd. I figured this would be easy to replicate, but of course all my .webm videos are working fine with VLC in LaunchBox. Are you guys running Windows 7?

Platforms can be hidden by hiding all of the games in that platform. It should be that simple.

@mcfilmmakers Responded in your other thread. Unfortunately there's no good way to do it right now without using a plugin, but a plugin should give you what you need if you can tackle it.

Yeah, the real challenge here is the integration with the games/emulators. Everything is possible of course but it would take me forever to get into the emulator code enough to hook into it, and we'd probably have to use modified emulators, etc. Still, I'd love that myself too; it'd be a ton of fun. The retro achievements integration that is coming is a step in the right direction though.

@ZedSpot Sorry I missed this. There truly isn't any particular order to the way the games are stored in the XML. When the order doesn't matter, it's always faster just to write them out in random order. The good news is that if you're looking to generate XML, you don't have to worry about the order. @mcfilmmakers Unfortunately that may require a plugin for the moment. There's a method that you can use called SelectedGame.GetAllCustomFields() which returns an array of ICustomField, but I don't think there's a good way to get at the data in XAML without using a plugin currently.

Are you guys still seeing this with the 7.14 official release?

Just put out another official release to fix another issue importing games. Saving the checkbox items apparently gave me some trouble lol. We should be good to go now though so we can focus on new stuff.

Exactly. It's behaving exactly as it should if a key was pressed.

Yeah, I get that. That makes sense. It's going straight into Big Box immediately when it's ready, no matter how long the video is, because it thinks a key has been pressed. Or at least that's my theory.

Sure, that unfortunately doesn't really prove that it's caused by a stray input device either way. So I'm still curious there.

If the images are platform screen images, you would think that it would work to reset them after changing themes, since the platforms screens always use the global theme. The issue is of course caused by using different themes for different platforms. I guess if a platform image is loaded up and cached from a different theme, that would cause the discrepancies. I'll have to see what we can do about that.

@keltoigael That makes sense since Big Box does not have a separate cache of images for each theme. That's gonna be a tricky one to solve; in order to do it properly we would need a separate cache for each theme, which would result in a bunch more images in the cache. So idk. That might just have to be a known issue for a while.

Wow. That's most likely the issue then, but if I'm ever going to be able to troubleshoot it, I'm going to need to know. Skipping the video doesn't stop the video when you press a key, it stops it when it's done loading. So that only makes sense.

Just put out a new beta guys that resolves yet another import error that some folks are getting; I expect that this will at least improve things @ckp and @massatomic. We'll probably have to rush out another official release to resolve this one as well.

Definitely puzzling. My guess is that somehow it's just not waiting for the video to end like it should, and is loading Big Box immediately when it's ready, per @neil9000 below. I may have to put some debugging information into a beta here to help resolve it. Hmm, I can't help but wonder if maybe there's a stray controller or some sort of an input device that could be registering input to "skip" the video? Can you guys try unplugging any non-standard input devices you have and then try it (anything other than the mouse and keyboard)? It's also easy to accidentally press a key of course, so that could always explain things too. It's definitely odd that it's happening to @damageinc86 every time though.

Huh? @ckp That's pretty much impossible to troubleshoot, sadly, at least without being able to replicate it. I went ahead and put out the 7.13 release. Hopefully nothing blows up.

@ckp I assume that error is happening when you exit? Edit: I believe I've fixed that error in the latest beta anyways.

Yes, 3D boxes are cached separately than regular boxes. This is the first time this has been requested, I believe. It makes sense that it's an issue on flash drives, but I'm guessing that's just not an overly common scenario these days. We'll get it in there eventually I'm sure, though admittedly it may not be the highest priority.

I haven't looked into this yet, @shinra358. Can you send me a screenshot of exactly what you're referring to? @damageinc86 I am still completely puzzled by this. I haven't heard of it happening anywhere else and I have no idea what I would do to replicate it. I'm really sorry you're having that issue though. What startup videos are giving you the problem? Have you tried multiple videos? @bundangdon Thanks for your data; I PM'd you back because I need some more information. Please let me know folks how testing is going in Big Box with the navigation. I'm keen to put out the 7.13 release on Halloween, because candy.

Just put out the first 7.13 beta guys. We will be putting out a 7.13 release very soon to fix a number of errors that weren't caught before the release. However, I need to figure out how to fix @bundangdon's issue above first. Here's the changelog: - Improvement: More intelligent input processing in Big Box helps prevent accidentally bringing up the alphabetic indexes during regular navigation - Improvement: ZeBobo5's Vlc.DotNet library (the library used to interface with VLC in LaunchBox only) has been updated to the latest version - Fixed: Various errors related to saving and loading import settings This weekend I got annoyed by accidentally bringing up the alphanumeric indexes with my arcade joystick, and so I spent some time brainstorming a solution for that. I ended up just making the triggers for bringing them up a lot less sensitive, which seems to have made a big difference there, and it doesn't seem to happen by accident anymore, so that's a big win in my book. Do let me know if anyone runs into any related issues there, however.