Jason Carr

Beta 7 is out now guys; it fixes a number of bugs from the previous betas. Specifically: - Renaming platforms was causing duplicate platforms and other weirdness - "All" games for platform categories wasn't showing any games - Platform category behavior in the sidebar wasn't showing the right games I'm sure there's more but those are the major fixes. Going forward I'm going to continue to focus on bug fixes, as well as implement the following for playlists: - Auto playlists custom fields - Auto playlists support AND or OR for multi-text fields; possibly come up with new comparison types - Adding games to playlists from within Big Box - A new tab in the playlist add/edit window to display the games in a grid for custom sorting - Custom ordering for playlist items - Auto-populating of certain playlists on imports (such as Capcom Classics, Namco Classics, etc. for the Arcade platform) - Download platform videos support for playlists I'm not sure if all of the above will make the cut, but those are the current plans.

Okay, yeah; I think what happened is that a beta was used to combine before the Spanish translation was completed, so it used the English text, and now, it thinks they're different entries. Unfortunately I don't have a good solution to fix it.

Not for the next official version; we'll have to revisit to figure out how popular of a request that is. Same goes for top level applications.

Hmm, did you change your language setting? This also could have been caused by using the beta before the translations had been completed; not something I had thought about.

Thanks @Norfair; just fixed this for the next beta.

I wish it was that easy to reproduce. Unfortunately that still doesn't reproduce it on my system.

The best way to use the sort title field is to just pretend that you're naming the platform that way. Putting just a number in the field isn't the best way to handle it. What I do for my Nintendo platforms is I use these for the sort titles: Nintendo 1983 (for the NES) Nintendo 1996 (for N64) Etc. That way all Nintendo platforms are under "Nintendo" and are in the order of release date. That way you can leave all the other platforms without a sort title, and they'll still be sorted mostly correctly.

Just fixed this for the next beta, btw.

Something like that. We could tweak the comparison type names for multiple select fields to make them more obvious, too.

Good point Cid! Hopefully I can get custom fields support in there soon.

You can manage playlists using the sidebar. Just choose Playlists at the top and you can view, add, edit, or delete with right-click.

I'm still planning on adding some sort of custom sorting solution for playlists, but I'm not quite sure what it will look like just yet.

It's not likely caused by the .NET framework upgrade since we've been occasionally hearing about this for a while, a few versions back even. It's weird because it seems to pop up every few versions and then disappears, and I have never been able to replicate it. It seems to affect only a very small handful of people, so any ideas you might have about how your system might be different than other people's would be worth considering.

That's not a bad idea. Unfortunately it's very difficult to get that check box list drop down control into the grid (and it was also cause for some of the performance issues in the previous custom filters implementation), so I was trying to avoid using that control. That said, what we could do is support the user entering semi-colon-separated values like they are displayed elsewhere, for the multi-select fields. It'd be more ideal if it was more obvious how to do it, but I'm thinking that might be a decent compromise?

That's interesting; I would not have expected it to work that way lol. That is an interesting use case, but we'll probably have to come back to it at a later date.

There won't be a tool to migrate already-imported collections to playlists, but what we can do to get around that is to just share the playlists after they've been generated for folks with existing arcade collections. Part of the point of the playlists is that they're easily shared, so I can imagine having a new Downloads section for people to share their custom-tailored playlists, and including all the stuff like "Capcom Classics". It'll just be a matter of downloading one and dropping it in your LaunchBox\Data\Playlists folder.

That's a good point on ensuring Adventure AND Action works; I'm not sure what would be best for that, but I'm up for taking ideas. However, the "(1 AND 2) OR (3 AND 4)" logic is more complicated than I intend for the feature to support. I just don't see that as being a common need, and I'd rather keep it easy to use.

Unfortunately that's more complicated for end users than I think is wise to implement for LaunchBox. That interface would cause a whole lot more confusion which I want to avoid. The combination of same-field OR and cross-field AND should cover the vast majority of situations, and I'm doubtful that users are going to run into significant problems with it. Let me know if you have a use case though where that custom operator logic is necessary.

When using the same field twice in the list, it's an "Or". That way you can specify to include two different developers, for example. Otherwise, it's an "And". So you can stuff like this: "Show me games for the NES where the developer is Capcom or the developer is Namco." Adding a line for Platform equals NES, Developer equals Capcom, and developer equals Namco should result in the above.

Thanks for the discussion guys. To clarify, this auto-populate feature is separate from the one that will create playlists for arcade, like Capcom Classics. That feature is still planned, and will not use this auto-populate stuff. We're simply going to include metadata as to what goes in what playlist, and create them on importing Arcade. We have found a number of bugs in the latest beta that I'm currently working on, including issues with displaying platform categories in LaunchBox and no games listed under All (among other things). Working on the bugs; I should have a beta out later today.

@Izegod Something similar was actually on the latest poll: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/launchboxfeatures I was surprised though because it didn't get as many votes as most of the others; maybe I just didn't phrase it the best. Something like the above is what I had in mind. We'll probably come back to it again in a future poll after we get the top items done from this last poll.

Alright guys, beta 6 is out, with the auto-populate functionality for playlists. It's a whole lot more flexible than the custom filters were, and it doesn't have the performance issues either, so we should be in good shape with it. It does need some beating on though, so test away. Tomorrow I'll be headed back to fixing bugs, and I'll start with the bugs listed here in this thread. @Norfair, you may be onto something with the Scrape As possibly causing the sorting issues, so thanks, that could be a big win. Can anyone else confirm that it's happening for Scrape As platforms?

Lol. Been there and done that. Actually, I done worse. Formatted the whole thing and did stuff my own way more than once.

Absolutely, I would love to add something like this guys. I have been thinking along the same lines as well, ever since I first saw New Retro Arcade Neon. That said, it's a huge undertaking, even with using something like Unity, so it's probably not something we can focus on soon (though I would say it should be a longer-term priority). Good to know though that you can help with the 3D stuff @supneo.

@eatkinola Wow, that's brilliant indeed! I've never seen that myself. Woot!