Jason Carr

Unfortunately I can't make any promises as we do have a lot on our plate and there are also a lot of highly voted tickets. But hopefully in the next couple of months, though I can't say for sure.

Thanks @Freestate.

@ThePolish Unfortunately I did not get to tackling those issues today, but they are still on my shortlist.

I did just put out another new beta guys, mostly with obscure bugfixes from Bitbucket tickets. The one notable thing I did change was to change the temp folder. LaunchBox was using the Windows temp folder for some things which flies in the face of our policy to keep everything inside of the LaunchBox folder. From here on out, LaunchBox\Metadata\Temp should be being used for all temporary files, and should be deleted on exit. Hopefully we don't run into any bugs due to those changes.

That is indeed correct, @ALIE. This isn't the complete "image pack" solution that I expect to add in later on, but it can certainly be used that way if you're so inclined. @Zombeaver, it could be used for image packages but I wouldn't recommend it until we build an actual image pack solution. This is more for custom themes to be able to tweak the images that are displayed directly. Per the platform naming issues, we'll probably never have a 100% perfect solution for that, to be honest. But when I implement the image packs I can use the platform alternate names to try and match them up. But it's still not likely to be perfect.

Wow, that video looks amazing!!! Very, very cool @niglurion. I somehow missed it before. Woot! Woot! Woot! I did add those two new tutorials as well, though to be honest you probably won't need them, @niglurion.

A new beta is out guys, but the only change for this beta is for the Big Box custom themes. The themes can now include platform images that will override what the user has in their collection. I'm hoping to record some more Big Box custom theme tutorial videos this afternoon as well.

Thanks guys. @ThePolish I'm hoping to look at some of those issues this afternoon. @shinra358, we just added something to help with that, though it's probably not what you're expecting. At the end of the wizards you can sort by file extension and then easily remove any files that shouldn't be imported by selecting them all and pressing the Delete key.

Alright, new beta is out that adds new platform image folders for the themes; take a look at the Default theme when you can @niglurion. Basically, the way this works, is if you include platform images in the right folders inside the theme, they will always override whatever images the user has set up in their collections for as long as that theme is used in Big Box. Of course the user will be able to customize these images themselves as well, so I don't see that as much of an issue as far as flexibility. This should allow theme creators to include images automatically with their themes for the various platforms. Let me know @niglurion if anything isn't obvious or if something isn't working. To update the theme it would probably be best to re-copy the Default theme and then just replace any XAML files you had changed for the previous version of the theme. It's also important to note, of course, that these changes won't work for anyone without a beta release at this point, but I'm hoping to put out an official release relatively soon. Also going to try and record some more custom theme tutorial videos this afternoon.

Glad it's working @niglurion. I did some further tests with the background images and yes, it is possible to use the same approach. However, it's not ideal because the transition animations aren't working properly when we take that approach. So what I think I'm going to do for that is just to allow you to add some images to the theme folder that are named by the platform name, and change the code to automatically pick those up if they exist. So once that is completed, distributing the backgrounds or other platform images with a theme will be easy as pie.

Then Jesus said, "Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light." Matthew 11:28-30 I am weary and do carry heavy burdens; I receive my rest from the Lord. My relationship with Jesus turns meaningless, wearisome toil into productivity and purpose. Life has not been made easy for me, but rather I have been given a great sense of accomplishment and desire to continue to work for the Lord.

Looking awesome @nosh. If you could upload this theme to the Downloads section, that'd be awesome. The downloads can be replaced with newer versions as you improve it, so no need to worry about waiting until the theme is all done. I do really like the glow on the boxes. It's neat to see new stuff like that done.

I see, thanks David. I see similar results on machines without decent video cards (though the frame rates are much better than that). It seems like somehow video acceleration is turned off in Big Box, or something of that nature. I think it's possible to turn it off for the Windows OS interfaces, which would probably also affect WPF and Big Box. Any chance that could be turned off? Or maybe is there a video driver update available?

Got it @Domarius. It was my fault, I somehow let it slip through the cracks. My apologies for that. Reading.

Thank you all. Good conversation and all makes sense. The Atari ST platform seems to be unique in needing both ROMs separately in the command line to launch the game, so that will be a pain in the rear to fix. But good to know about that for sure. The rest of the platforms should be fixable just by pulling in the relevant data from the Hyperspin XMLs and expanding on the existing solution for MAME. This is indeed pretty high up on the priority list. I would appreciate if someone could compile a list or a package of the Hyperspin XMLs that we do need to integrate to fix the imports. @Styphelus I had an issue on the previous forums where I kept forgetting about the PMs and wasn't getting emails for them. It was my stupid, sorry for that. Going forward I get an email for every PM, so that should work to reach me. I'm also trying to do a better job responding to people now that I have Kirsten's help and such. My tendency is to hide in the code so I'm making an active effort to come out of my cave more often. That said, I am somewhat swamped, as usual, so please bear with me if I take a few days to respond.

Welcome, @onebadveggie! Sorry it's not under better terms but glad we got it fixed. Let me know guys if you see any more issues with the latest beta; it is out now. Thanks!

My apologies @Domarius, but I actually didn't get the email! I'm not sure why. I assumed you had decided not to and moved on.

Good to know, @Sepulchre. I have a feeling that the performance issue is most likely due to the Coverflow controls. How quick does it work for you for the other views?

Lolololol. Dangit, how'd you guys know?

Thanks guys. It is very easy to add additional things to search for so I will go ahead and add square brackets to the mix. Do keep in mind that you still need the latest beta release (not just the latest official release) in order to take advantage of this feature.

Great to hear, @niglurion. Thanks as always.

Yes, this is a highly requested feature and should be coming soon.

Gotcha. That really helps to clear it up. Thanks, David. Performance-wise we do still seem to have an issue though that needs resolved. If you could record that video, I think that would help. Let me know how testing goes with the latest beta that I just put out though. Thanks again.

Gotcha @Freestate. Do we have a ticket for that in the LaunchBox Games Database BitBucket?

Good thoughts @nosh, appreciate. And thank you @Zombeaver for clearing that up. Yes, we will be adding region support and separation to platforms so you'll be able to identify which system(s) a game came out on.