Jason Carr

SentaiBrad said The Metadata and Images function in the Tools menu is broken. Jason knows about it and is trying to fix it. Lol...I'm confused. This isn't broken as far as I know.

New beta is out guys with the fabled "Scrape As" functionality. I also fixed the empty background image priorities bugs and added @Opaklopper's new German translation. :)

We're working on making that discount available. :) Thanks @CriticalCid for staying one step ahead of the game on all that stuff. You really are very much appreciated in this community, myself included. I appreciate you not getting discouraged from all the red tape. It may take me a while to get everything set up, but yes, I can certainly host theme videos for us if that's the best solution. Hopefully we can get this all worked out with Hyperspin though, first off.

Oh @Opaklopper, if you do test and find some things to fix, be sure to download the new German package from the link in the first post of this thread before making any changes. I had to rename the files so you'll need to grab the new package first. :)

Many thanks to @Opaklopper for the incredibly fast work! I'm putting out a new beta now with the new German translation. Also, @CliveBarker, I fixed the issue with the EmuMovies login controls not being translated. There are new items in the Strings file for those texts. :)

Sigh. I'll talk to Circo about what we can do here.

sagaopc, are you on the latest beta? Please keep in mind that the betas are just that, beta releases. Things will happen from time to time and they should not be relied on without backups. I'll need more details in order to get things fixed. What AutoHotkey script are you using for Demul? Can you elaborate on what is happening with the images? We do move some folders around in the latest betas but no one else has reported issues where the wrong images are being moved.

Yeah, I'll be working on the games database site this coming week to clean up some of the final pieces, so I'll make sure I add some controls for reporting images and such. I'm very much in talks with both Circo from EmuMovies and the Hyperspin community, so hopefully that will continue to go smoothly. Circo is great to work with, but of course it's much harder to work with an entire community. We shall see how it goes. I know the Hyperspin guys would like us to implement their new API (which requires a paid donation/subscription), but I don't think that's a good solution since all the images are already freely available to download on the Hyperspin forums, and I don't think very many people would pay for access to the API when you can just go download and extract the zips. I have offered to make donations, though, so I'm hoping something like that ends up working out. We shall see. :)

Dropbox runs in the background and automatically syncs everything to the cloud. So all you'd have to do is install Dropbox on the computer and everything would sync back to your new drive.

Hi @Drybonz, Snap is now "Screenshot - Gameplay" and Title is now "Screenshot - Game Title". Yes, I removed the tiny little delete and add buttons on the add/edit images because I had to make room for the longer names for the image types. So now of course you just have to get to them via right-click. I made the tool tips more prominent in add/edit to make this more obvious.

Wow, very nice Matticus. That looks amazing. I'm gonna tweet this video out. :)

Hi @mazjohn, if you can back up the entire LaunchBox folder, that's the best solution. Assuming you haven't customized your folders to move images and other media items elsewhere, that's the best approach. The LaunchBox configuration consists of the LaunchBox.xml file in the root of the LaunchBox folder as well as all the images and media, basically. A better approach, though, typically is to sync your entire folder with Dropbox (or a similar tool like OneDrive or Google Drive). This way it's always backed up and syncs between all your machines. :)

This brings up an important discussion point. One thing I'm sort of worried about currently is contributions from within LaunchBox, which is likely to happen very soon. At that point it will be very easy for users to download images from any source (including the Hyperspin forums) and batch upload the missing ones to the LaunchBox Games Database. This is meant to be extremely easy on purpose, as obviously it's the best approach to filling in the database. And I truly believe with this approach that we can quickly become the most populated database out there. But of course, that said, I'm worried about the implications of stealing other people's images. To be completely honest, I agree with Derek that these images are really *only* owned by the original artists that created them for the games themselves. That said, I do recognize the significant work that goes into creating the images (especially clear logo images), so I understand why some people might get upset. So from that front, we are sort of between a rock and a hard place. Once we open up easy community contributions from within LaunchBox, there won't be any good way to determine where an image comes from, so there's no way to identify if an image has been stolen or where it came from. Not to mention that the majority of the images originally came from TheGamesDB.net, which in itself has images stolen from all over the place (including Hyperspin, EmuMovies, and many other places). So this is a pretty hairy issue that we need to somehow come up with a solution for, and/or take a stance on. Any thoughts?

Wow, gotta say, that entire video is gorgeous. You've managed really tweak things well, I'm impressed. That video's probably better for a public demo than even the official demo videos lol! :P Somehow those polaroid images help to really add some great character. One of the (many) things I have on my shortlist is image packs, so people can easily download and use them. Obviously this would be an awesome image pack. Thanks again, @Frakatchoo.

Good to know about the mouse issue, @shinra358, thanks. @Drybonz I'm still planning on adding that "scrape as" option, thanks for the reminder. I'll see if I can sneak that in this coming week.

That view looks really awesome @Lmagnus87. It will probably be a while before we start adding more visual features to LaunchBox itself again, but that'll be a great path to take when we get there. If someone can add that as a ticket to Bitbucket that'd be great. Per that error on updating, it's unfortunately not an easy one to solve. We run the setup EXE from the LaunchBox/Big Box EXEs and then immediately shut them down, but of course sometimes it just takes too long to shut down, and that error message happens. Ideally we would have a way to shut down the app, then run the upgrade setup, but unfortunately with a portable application I don't know of a way to do that. I'm sure there's a solution for this out there somewhere, but it's not an easy problem to solve.

Hey all, new beta is out that allows for on-the-fly image switching (with hotkeys) in Big Box now as well as in LaunchBox. I also fixed a number of bugs. I have not fixed the background bug yet mentioned by @prolecat, but that is on the top of my list.

I'm gonna home-page that image, @Zombeaver.

Awesome to hear! Thanks Cid. I would expect and hope that most of the content creators just want their work to get out to as many people as possible, since they're providing it for free. My guess would be that the people who would be butthurt about it are the non-contributors (there are of course many more of those people than contributors). It will be a while before we look at possibly adding the videos to the games database, but hopefully we can get there soon. First off I need to add proper support for different types of videos (platform videos and theme videos like this at least). Thanks again for stepping up with all this; I really appreciate it. :)

Oic, thanks @prolecat and @Drybonz. Will review. Another new beta is out in the mean time to fix the two issues with the platform backgrounds and the non-customized box art for the wheel view.

@DOS76 It starts at 9:30 AM PST actually. :) @Drybonz No changes were made to the folders, can you explain what is missing/what happened? @imdavid555 Apologies, it took a little bit longer to go live than I expected. @kmoney2315 That's great to know, thanks. I apparently also screwed up the platform background defaults for games in Big Box by putting random game background images in instead of the actual platform backgrounds lol. I'll have a fix for those soon.

Alright, new beta is out that fixes at least some of the issues. I'm still working on things but this should be an improvement. I did add back in default platform backgrounds for Big Box which I had messed up in the last beta (platform backgrounds were not showing for games that did not have their own backgrounds). The other things I fixed were mostly surrounding random error messages and stability. Let me know what you guys are still seeing in this beta. There is some confusion in this thread surrounding how all the new image stuff works. In LaunchBox you have the new Image Type drop downs in the menus and in the toolbar on top; they are all customizable using the image priorities settings inside of the Options menu. In other words, if you want to be silly and change it up to make 3D Boxes do something completely different, like show backgrounds, you can, just by tweaking the priorities in the settings. This should provide some pretty awesome flexibility. The image priorities settings *are* used in Big Box. However, the Image Type dropdown that you see in LaunchBox has not yet been implemented in Big Box. Eventually you'll be able to press a hotkey to switch between all the image types that are available in the drop down in LaunchBox for the main images, which is what people are missing I think. That's it for now; thanks all. I have a relatively significant surprise to announce tomorrow morning in the development live stream (I know that's not really fair for people who can't attend but it will go up on YouTube soon after). :)

Hi @spektor56, sadly I'd have an angry community if I switched to SQLite or any other database for the moment. Too many people are making use of the LaunchBox.xml file externally. Otherwise I would probably consider it at this point. I will be going back soon to try and figure out how people's XML files getting corrupted on occasion. It shouldn't be happening in a crash because I only overwrite the LaunchBox.xml file once the file is successfully saved to a temp folder...so there must be something else going on.

Hi @gizmo, you'll definitely want to restore a backup from the Backups folder per what @DOS76 said. It's not recommended to manually tweak the XML per @adu because you never know what could be missing.

Hey everybody, post your XAML tips and tricks to share with other theme creators here. For starters, here's how to add an image with a relative path: <Image Source="pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/CleanHardware/img/white-corner.png" RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="HighQuality" /> Note that the "pack://siteoforigin:,,," is basically replaced with the LaunchBox folder path. Also note the forward slashes instead of backslashes. :)