Jason Carr

@GiantTitan Wanted to ask to confirm; do we have permission to use these as the default images for the platform categories in LaunchBox and include them with the app?

Sure, thanks. I can say that it isn't the cache or anything related to the cache, because rendered text for the details and descriptions is not cached in Big Box. So it has to be something weirder; most likely there's some kind of WPF bug on your system related to .NET, DirectX, or drivers, which isn't going to be easy to figure out and resolve, unfortunately.

Alright, best I can tell @MajKSA is that this must be some kind of weird bug with Zeta Resource Editor. When I edit the values in Visual Studio, it saves them correctly in the right order. So I can go through and manually fix them, but sadly we'd have to do it one by one. Actually, when I dive in deeper I can tell that .NET somehow has weird problems combining character sets like that. It's like it can't type both properly into the same box. Certainly a weird issue. It does look like I can correct it though on a one-by-one basis. Weird.

@MajKSA Hmm, that is really odd. Is Arabic a right-to-left language? Could that be the cause? I can't seem to figure out why on earth that would be happening and would be outputting different values than what's in the translation strings. I'll keep researching.

@GWOZDZilla Sorry if this has already been covered, but what video playback engine are you using? VLC or Windows Media Player. If you're using WMP, it may be that it's not installed on your system.

Glad to hear it. Thanks @lordmonkus and @cliffyb73.

The only setting that should matter for this is "Use Random Game Videos for Missing Platform Videos" under Options > Videos. That indeed does not seem to be working for me for platform categories or playlists, though, so thanks @Kriven. I'm not sure if I'll get a fix for that into 7.9 or not (because it might cause some performance issues), but I'll do my best.

This is honestly very strange, and I haven't seen it before, @pipes78. It does seem like some kind of a driver or operating system issue, though I know that doesn't really help you out. What version of Windows are you running? Can you try reinstalling the latest version of the .NET framework and also DirectX?

Let's be careful here; not even I can promise anyone that anything isn't broken. There can always be hidden bugs. So just because your experience is a positive one, does not mean that there's nothing wrong.

I'm actually not sure that it does do this. Does it play random videos in the playlist if there is no video for it currently? It may have been a performance issue which is why it isn't already there (if it isn't, honestly I don't remember).

Does this only happen for games in playlists?

I'm sorry @Maddoc1007; I did not at all mean to imply that any of the amazing themes we have here are crappy. Honestly I was actually thinking of different frontends in my head, but yes, I should be more careful with my words.

Multiple level nested filters, maybe at some point but unfortunately this next release won't support that, though you *can* keep filtering down deeper without issues by pulling up the nested filters multiple times. Shutdown is already possible via the system menu; random intro videos are planned and will make it onto the next community poll; volume hotkeys are already there; instruction cards are possible with images, but support could probably be improved. The high scores thing would certainly be cool; we could have someone here head that up on the forums even.

Unfortunately there's no way to do that currently, though it does make sense. As always, if you can put in a ticket for it, I'd appreciate it.

@GiantTitan These are amazing. THANK YOU.

FYI guys...what I've been doing since yesterday:

Alright guys, beta 3 is out. The most notable new thing is that you can now download theme videos for the platform categories. Also, this beta includes a new Arabic translation from @MajKSA. Other than bug fixes and performance improvements, the last thing I need to do before the release is add a way to manage the platform categories much like managing platforms and playlists. I think I'm going to put this off until Wednesday morning's live stream though and focus on fixes and improvements in the mean time.

Sorry for the delay here @MajKSA. I'm in the process of uploading a new beta now that contains the Arabic translation. Because Arabic uses a completely different character set than what I'm used to, I'm not going to be very helpful finding problems in the interface, so I'll need your help to point out any spacing issues. I can go through and fix those up; I imagine we will need to do that in order to get everything ready to go. Also, the translation package has been updated with your latest changes as well, so make sure to grab the latest one from the beginning of this thread before making any updates. Thanks!

Yeah, that would definitely be nice. I think we're a ways off from that, but downloading themes directly from within Big Box would be awesome.

Yeah, we could have an option to automatically create a playlist; that is one thought that I had as well.

Yeah, I'm hoping to provide an easy way to save sets of filters from right within that dialog, and also load them up quickly. I'm not sure if it's going to make it into the 7.9 release though.

You are able to sort platforms by manufacturer, but not multiple levels deep. You can customize the platform categories however you want, but unfortunately we won't be doing multiple levels deep for 7.9.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo!!!!!!

This is because I still need to add platform category management to the 7.9 betas guys. I should have that in later this week.

Yeah, this actually really disappointed me guys. I found it to be in extremely poor taste. It was bad for them, bad for their users, and practically gave me a heart attack. If the US government ever gets so corrupt that they start going after developers for writing legitimate software that *can* be misused for piracy, then we're all screwed. It's really not a laughing matter, and you'd think they'd be smart enough to realize that the best way to keep themselves out of legal trouble is certainly not to misrepresent the US government and put a big old target on themselves in the process.