Jason Carr

Yes, it's true that LaunchBox and Big Box require faster hardware because they're using newer technologies. But exactly, development would take twice as long for literally everything (or longer) had we chose to go more old school (and would also require a complete rewrite to go back to that). I am a firm believer, especially at this point, that it would be unwise to build this stuff in C++ this day and age. Microsoft uses .NET even for operating system stuff these days.

Amazing! Awesome to see you making a cool plugin already @superfurry

@cammelspit @ninjagaidenguy Great to hear guys, thanks. @emko We used to skip the DirectX install, but depending on what version you're coming from it is needed, and we've run into so many issues in the past with LaunchBox not working because of missing DirectX DLLs. So unfortunately we have to keep it in there.

Alright beta 5 is available for download now, which should fix it. Sorry for that folks. If needed, you can download beta 5 directly here and just install it on top of your existing folder: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nzdxq8aa8m4gik9/LaunchBox-7.10-beta-5-Setup.exe?dl=0 That file in the Dropbox link is still uploading but should be ready momentarily.

No worries; I know what the problem is guys. Sorry for that. Uploading a fixed setup now.

Okay guys, on it. Gimme a few.

Beta 4 is finally out guys, and the plugin features are available. I'm still working on fleshing out the documentation, but as a reminder, it is available here: http://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com I will of course be adding many more plugin types and such here soon, but if you're a developer and want to develop something and need a new hook, please just PM here. Here are the current plugin types available already: IBigBoxThemeElementPlugin - Add an element/control to a Big Box theme, access the data, and accept user input. IGameMenuItemPlugin - Add a game-specific menu item to the right-click menu in LaunchBox and/or the game details menu in Big Box. The former will basically let you build a control to do whatever you want in Big Box. The latter will let you add a menu item in LaunchBox so you can do whatever that way. Hit me up if you run into any issues guys.

@ninja2bceen, I messaged you but I'll respond here as well. Agreed that it would be pretty cool, we just would need the community to maintain the data. We should put that on the next poll. @dovella Collection syncing via Dropbox, etc. is already possible just by putting the LaunchBox folder inside of the Dropbox folder. @Lmagnus87 I will be providing some demo plugins myself, but we'll be mostly relying on the community to build plugins going forward (I'll just keep developing stuff into LaunchBox and Big Box directly). @spektor56 That should be possible for someone to build soon enough.

Thank you my friend; it's great to hear that it hasn't been a nightmare to dive into. It's been a long time since I've been anywhere near burnout, but I did take a week vacation a month ago and I was aching to get back into development, so I'm still loving it.

Great to hear, @Grila. I can't wait to see what you'll come up with next. FYI, I changed the URL to the plugin API documentation just now.

Sorry for the lack of new betas, guys; I'm slaving away over here but the plugin engine makes it difficult to release new betas mid-development. Speaking of the plugin engine, development is going very well. I'm hoping to have a beta out by end of day tomorrow with plugin support. For the development-inclined, here's a teaser: http://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com That's MSDN-style documentation for the future plugin system. It's not complete yet (I have a lot more to add to it), but you can get an idea of how everything will work. @Grila @Nielk1

Thanks Cheeze, good to know. I wasn't aware of that.

Region priorities should basically handle this already, but there are currently no fine-grained controls to skip images from certain regions (though they can be easily deleted by just removing the folder).

Welcome @Sub-Zero! I love your work and I'm so glad you're here. Let me know if you run into any road blocks and I can help (I'm the developer).

LOL.

@deliyuerek85 I believe I have that bug fixed for the next beta, which should be out later today. @Kriven Of course I can't seem to replicate that, but I have added something that I hope will help. We'll have to see when the beta comes out later today. @Maddoc1007 Okay, I'll be working on the theme video placement issues shortly.

@Pacman56 Might it have something to do with using network paths? I haven't been able to replicate any issues as of yet. @cammelspit I've added some debug code to help troubleshoot that error if it happens again, because I can't pinpoint it just yet. But thanks. @The_Keeper86 Thanks; I believe I have that fixed for the next beta.

Thanks @Pacman56; does that image get deleted when running the Clean Up Images process?

Yes, it was on the poll, and it didn't get a ton of votes, but it got enough that we will be covering it. Just not as a top priority.

Unfortunately it's not that simple. There are a million different DirectX DLLs, and you have to check for each individual one. I'm also not aware of an official MS way of doing it outside of running the installer (other than a hack).

That is odd; it's possible that there's something unique about your collection that is affected by the changes we made. If you can, reboot your machine to see if there isn't something else weird that's going on. If you're still seeing the same results, PM me your Data folder if you can and I can test.

Thanks @JamesBond@ge, yes, that is by design and is not a bug, but I understand how it can be confusing. I believe there is some overlap between the LaunchBox and Big Box caches, which is partially why it behaves like it does. The other thing is, if you change images for a game in LaunchBox, naturally, it will need to recache the images for both.

Beta 3 is out now guys with some serious performance improvements from the live stream this morning: - Improvement: Massive startup performance increases for both LaunchBox and Big Box; in some cases it is now well over twice as fast; used multi-threading and other strategies - Improvement: Significant performance increases when selecting platform categories in Big Box Hopefully that helps quite a bit.

This is still on my plate. Alternative titles have not yet been integrated into LaunchBox.

No bugs were fixed, per se, but I'm convinced this was never a bug, but rather a confusing design decision on our part. Previously, if you didn't replace images, no new images were downloaded for categories that already had images. That, in particular, is no longer the case. Any new images will be downloaded now.