Jason Carr

Hi @Riffman81, sadly we still need a feature to reset play counts and stuff. It's obviously accessible directly in the XML, but I imagine it'd be a royal pain to reset them all manually. Not sure if we have a ticket for that but we should definitely add one if not.

Sadly not yet Cid. Hoping to get back to adding theming features early next week.

This looks absolutely amazing @niglurion. Your work is sooooo much appreciated.

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God. Matthew 15:8-9 (NLT) Lord, help me to recognize your direction, and ignore the direction of all others. Give me discernment to identify your will, and the strength to carry it out.

@kmoney Most likely I will need to come up with something new in order to do it properly. You could always place the video to the right of the wheel, but unfortunately I don't know if it's possible to do only in XAML. I will make it a priority to get a good solution going though, because this stuff is extremely exciting, of course.

@Riffman81 That is killer, looks great. All sounds awesome. The only thing we should probably think about is how best to handle the bezel situation. Since these will all be best used as background videos in Big Box, it might not look the best with the bezel on the left underneath the wheel, at least for the wheel views. If we record the videos without a bezel, it's easy enough to add bezels with the theming engine later, so I'm almost thinking it would be best to record them in the original aspect ratio of the game (though 1080p vertical resolution of course), without the bezel. Then with a theme we could either put a bezel on both sides, or just play the video to the right of the wheel. It would give us a lot more flexibility. Thoughts?

It will jump back out to different platforms eventually @Zombeaver. It will stay in a particular platform for a random number of games and then jump to a different random platform. I think I prefer the animated way of having it actually scroll the wheel to just having games pop in all the time. However, I do think we need to do a better job of game coverage.

Yes, sort of. It will automatically and randomly browse through your collection after a certain period of inactivity.

Ha, hence why we're trying to get away from the Windows Media Player engine. The bugs are plentiful and some of them can be really annoying. I've added it to my shortlist so hopefully I can come up with a solution soon.

Yes, we could add scanlines over top of the existing EmuMovies videos, but I'm doubtful that the quality would be anywhere near what @kmoney is producing. I'm also not sure how to add filters to VLC in Big Box at this point, but it might be worth some experimentation. That said, all of that increases the CPU time it takes to render, so I'm still thinking @kmoney's solution is the best.

Alright! Just put out 6.9-beta-2 with an awesome new Attract Mode feature for Big Box. You can turn it on in the new Attract Mode section in the Big Box options. Let's here how it's working for you guys. I'm sure we have some tweaking to do with it yet. Eventually we'll probably also add the option to actually launch games, but for now it just automatically navigates through your collection. I worked on scrolling the game details notes in the live stream yesterday as well, and worked on it some more today but it wasn't working and was pissing me off so I shelved it for now and chose to do the Attract Mode instead. The other addition for this beta is a new option to use the %romfile% variable in the emulator configuration in order to be able to place parameters after the ROM file when launching emulators. I haven't really tested this any, so let me know if anyone tries it out. Finally, higankanshi is already at work for us trying to fix the remaining VLC issues. I think things should be improved for this beta; if you guys can keep testing the VLC engine in Big Box, I'd appreciate it. I'm hoping at least the error messages are gone, but I'm not entirely sure. There are still two issues where sometimes the videos don't play (rarely but relatively easy to reproduce), as well as I've seen a couple times where the audio plays but the video doesn't. Thanks all.

@Zombeaver I won't be doing anything further with the Steam videos because @circo has graciously offered to add the Steam videos to EmuMovies, which will ultimately solve several problems, including the VLC green lines and the videos not playing out of the box with Windows Media Player. He could potentially even remove the ESRB rating delays from the beginnings of the videos. I think I'll keep the Arcade name for now, based on you guys' feedback. Eventually we can separate it out once we get around to adding a subplatform field or similar. However, we are still keeping separate platforms for Sega Model 2, Capcom Play System III, etc. in the database, which is cause for duplication, but when separate emulators are needed I think it's going to be the best way to handle it. Per the change log, this thread is typically more detailed than anything else, so reading this thread is the best option if you want to figure out what's changed before updating. I understand we could do better with that stuff, but sadly the more effort I put into change logs, the less time I have to actually develop. We worked through some of the import issues in the live stream yesterday (which I still need to upload to YouTube, sorry for that). Amiga is still problematic because it's hard to find a consistent set of names. I do have some ideas for that platform, though, so that is on my list. @billyc999 Incorrect matches like that are typically due to the LaunchBox Games Database needing more metadata for games, so issues like that should go away as more games are added to the database (specifically if Rock is added, for example). "Side" is currently not included in the disc matching algorithm but I'll add that to my list to add.

Awesome, thanks @o0bigboss0o.

Sadly, no. It's being a big pain in the rear, so I moved on to another big feature. I'll stop teasing here very shortly.

Turns out it depended on the view. I'm limiting favorites to 20; that should help to fix some performance issues.

Thanks, @ckp, will review.

Hmm, maybe I broke the limitation or something. That's more than it should be. Thanks for noting that @Zombeaver.

Not as of yet. Hopefully that will be coming. This isn't the big announcement, though, by the way.

Sadly PayPal screwed us over a long time ago, much like they screw over so many other people. See here:

Okay, that's a first. I'll check to see if there's any differences in my controller logic between LaunchBox and Big Box.

Hi @ckp, there is a setting in Big Box under Videos to change between VLC and WMP. You're saying that you're getting this crash when launching games from LaunchBox only when VLC is enabled in LaunchBox? Does this have anything to do with extracting games?

Hi @flores9, replacing all metadata should delete all images and re-download them, so that's not really recommended, but yes, it should delete all images and re-download everything. If you only update instead of replacing things, you should get any new images for any categories where you don't have existing images. However, it will not add new images if you already have an image in that category. Manually downloading images for single games will duplicate any images you already have. If you replace metadata, it will currently rename your platforms, which is a problem that I have on my plate to fix. Thanks, hopefully that answers all your questions.

Thank you all, great to see all the awesome discussion. @Blugost keep in mind that using MediaElement will force the use of Windows Media Player for the theme. Not a big deal for most people, but in the future we'll want to provide a way to do it that supports both WMP and VLC.

Hi @ckp, good to know about logging off. I'll have to take a look at that. I have considered Sqlite, but generally any time I bring up moving away from XML I get a lot of pushback. People like being able to see and modify the data.

Hi @dvdbob, unfortunately I think importing from Rocket Launcher to LaunchBox is probably broken, though you can hit the Rocket Launcher guys up on the Rocket Launcher forum. The current recommended approach would be to use LaunchBox's import process.