Jason Carr

Keep in mind, guys, that I 100% support the use of Rocket Launcher. I've asked Brad to stop arguing against it. For what it's worth, I still think Rocket Launcher is a royal pain to configure, and I'm really hoping that we can figure out a way to configure it somewhat automatically and easily in the future. We will be working to make it easier to use Rocket Launcher very soon. I agree that it should be optional (and it will remain that way), but it also provides some awesome extras for power users especially.

Yes, I think a democratic way of deciding this would be best. Though to be completely honest, the Hyperspin ways are probably *already* the democratic decisions. I am leaning heavily towards switching up the platforms to mostly match Hyperspin's, but if the community disagrees with this decision, of course I won't end up going that route. That said, going forward I am looking to take the strengths of the Hyperspin data approaches and combine them with the ease of use and openness of LaunchBox. So in time, we should have the best of both worlds.

Wow, very nice! This looks really great. I think for the most part this should be pretty easy to build with the custom themes. I'm gone on a trip with the family for a week, but if no one else implements it I might just do it myself to show off the possibilities of the theming engine. Very cool. :)

wallmachine Not sure what we can do to support non-Truetype fonts, but can you create a ticket for it? We should at least show a friendly error message instead of an error. @shinra358, this is admittedly pretty confusing, but all those items can be repositioned. When you select a game it goes into the TextGamesView in order to show the list of menu items on the left. If you customize the TextGamesView, it should work to customize the placement of things on the game details screen. Let me know if that helps, or if you have any more questions as to what to customize to change various things. Keep in mind that the TransitionPresenter controls are what are displaying the images, videos, and details. You can move those around in order to change the location of the details, video, and images. Typically, anything that is animated when changed is displayed using a TransitionPresenter in order to animate the change.

And of course, shinra, I should pay more attention. For some reason I had it in my head that you needed a game clear logo. Sigh. Hopefully I can add that platform banner in tonight or tomorrow.

Bah, replace < and > with the less than and greater than signs in the code, just at the beginning and end.

Alright, another new beta is out! I was able to replicate the bug with closing out of the options with the controller, and I have that fixed, at least on my end. Also, some great improvements for the custom views/theming. I've added decent error handling to the XAML parsing, so you should have a good idea as to what is wrong if you run into an error. A message box will pop up telling you the line number that is causing the error, and Big Box will just show the default view afterwards instead of the custom view. So no more crashing or force closing during experimentation. :) Also, per @shinra358's request, I have added several new properties to the CoverFlow controls. I've updated the Default views to demonstrate the new properties, but here is an example: &lt;coverFlow:FlowControl x:Name="FlowControl" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Grid.Column="0" CoverFactory="{Binding CoverFactory}" ImageType="ClearLogo" CurveAmount="4.5" CameraZPosition="3.0" VisibleCount="14" PageSize="6" /&gt; The new properties are: - CurveAmount - Specifies the amount of curve for the wheel; the higher the number, the greater the curve - CameraZPosition - Specifies how "zoomed in" the camera is to the wheel; the lower the number, the closer the camera, and the larger the items - VisibleCount - Specifies how many items to display in the view; you should specify enough items to wrap around and fill the view - PageSize - Specifies how many items to jump for previous and next page Then I've also added support for clear logo images anywhere in the games views, also per shinra's request. To add a clear logo image anywhere in those views (any view that ends with "GamesView.xaml"), add a line like this: &lt;Image Source="{Binding ClearLogo}" /&gt; Let me know what else anyone needs and hopefully I can add it tomorrow before my trip. :)

Thanks all. By the way, shinra, about the wheel curvature controls, what I can do is add some properties to the CoverFlow control to allow you to tweak things directly in the XAML. I'll see if I can get that added in soon as well.

Thanks shinra, that helps. I'll take another look.

New beta is out. I've fixed the issue where downloading images and metadata was downloading duplicates and ignoring your preferences not to update existing data. I'm also hoping that the issues with backing out of the Options menu are fixed as well. @shinra358, @emko, @Bedwyr, can you guys test this and let me know? :)

Ugh, I gotta stop putting my face on videos. :P Gonna hop on and see how many bugs I can squash now guys. Going through the comments.

paulmichel21, I just put out beta 3 which should fix that issue. You can download the latest beta here: http://api.launchbox-app.com/DownloadBeta.ashx?s=1ef325 Just install over top and you should be good to go.

Hi @kpop, absolutely. You can actually probably already do that by tweaking the XAML, though I need to provide a control that lets you specify specific video paths (right now it's hardcoded to the game videos). But that's definitely a direction we want to go, yes. :)

Thanks shinra, I'll take a look at that. Sounds odd. I just put out a new beta to resolve an error that some people were seeing on startup while renaming the folders.

Hi @kpop, as much as I'd love to be able to automatically use the existing themes from Hyperspin, sadly that wouldn't be possible without weeks and weeks of focused development, and nothing else would get done. So I'm not going to rule it out for the long term future, but unfortunately that isn't going to happen any time soon. It would be extremely difficult to translate the Hyperspin themes into a format that works well in Big Box. Truthfully, though, the XAML approach we have is ultimately much more powerful, and we'll be making it even more powerful once we add a proper plugin system and such. But unfortunately it does mean that new themes will have to be built. But I have no doubt that the community will come up with some awesome stuff very soon. :)

Hi shinra, what views after you customized? Does it work with the keyboard?

Hehehe...it's not Monday yet ALIE! :P Here's the quick getting started video guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkNHRvdl2jU

I do! I do! ;) @ALIE, yes should be safe to delete your images folders. They are automatically re-created as needed. We should definitely create a new post for custom themes, and perhaps even a new forum section. I'll be on that very soon. :)

Now onto custom views/themes for Big Box. There's actually much less to say on this, as it should be mostly straightforward. After starting up the latest beta, you should see a new folder in your LaunchBox folder called Themes. Inside this folder is a ReadMe.txt file and a folder named Default. To create a new theme, simply copy this Default folder and rename it to the name of the theme that you would like to create. Then you can tweak all the files inside of your new theme folder. Big Box has a new option under General called Theme. These options map up to the folder names inside of the Themes folder. Do not modify the Default theme folder as your changes will simply be overwritten on startup. I'll go through some of this in the video, but do keep in mind that this is only step 1 with the new themes/custom views. If you're a developer you can already do some crazy cool stuff (you could even build your own control for completely new functionality and put it in the XAML files). However, we will be allowing people to easily get access to controls, game data, etc. in the future with a plugin system of sorts. So that is step 2. Would love to hear feedback on the custom views/themes from anyone who is experimenting with it. It should be really interesting and awesome to see what everyone can create. Keep in mind that there is no doubt; while experimenting with the themes you *will* break Big Box. So be patient when working through things because XAML can be picky at times. You will need to know how to force close Big Box while you experiment. We'll be working to put in some better error handling for improper XAML code in the future. :)

Alright, the new beta is out! The various issues everyone was having with the new images system should be fixed, as far as I know anyways. ;) There were several issues that I did identify and fix: - Manual downloads from the LaunchBox Games Database (as in downloading images through Add/Edit) were not working properly; in many cases no images were actually being downloaded from the LaunchBox Games Database (whoops). - The import and metadata update wizards were not prompting for all image types and therefore not allowing you to download all the new image types. The wizards have now been updated to fix this. For imports and metadata updates, you should now have all images accessible to you. - When migrating the images folders over, the previous version was not picking up the old paths for videos, manuals, music, steam banners, and banners. This has been fixed. However, people who have already completed the migration with the last beta will unfortunately not automatically have their folders updated to what they were before, because the migration process has already been run. If you did create a backup of your LaunchBox folder before upgrading to the last beta, you should be able to go back to the backup and then run the update, and these folders should migrate over properly. Otherwise, the only issue is that you may have to manually specify some folders in Manage Platforms if you've customized those folders (as most of you have already observed). Now I want to clarify what *should* be happening with the image migration. Obviously we've added many new image types, so if you've previously customized all of your image folders, more customization is definitely going to be required, and unfortunately there's little we can do about that. For example, the new Box - Front image type will take the folder path that was previously used for Front, because it makes sense, and that should automatically migrate. However, for new image types such as Cart - Front, they will default to the image path inside of the LaunchBox folder because this folder did not previously exist. Whew, this is a book, I know. Lastly, I added support for Regions for the images. We're not making full use of this yet (and you can't even change it in the Add/Edit screen yet, that is coming), but for images that have region specified on the LaunchBox Games Database, you will notice that they download into a folder structure like this: LaunchBox\Images\Nintendo GameCube\Box - Front\North America\Super Mario Sunshine.jpg I've added the region subfolder inside the type folder. These subfolders will be used now whenever a region is known on the image that is downloaded. More to come on the new custom views/themes in the next post.

Indeed! So tweaking will be relatively easy. After I get this beta out I will be putting together a very quick video demonstrating how to get started with the new themes. The video should be up and ready before the weekly email goes out tomorrow.

Thanks all, I will be focusing today on cleaning up the new image organization stuff. I just wrapped up the first stage of custom themes/views so that will be coming out as well in the next beta. I want to fix some of these issues though today before putting the beta out. :)

Thanks @Riffman81. Yes, if your images folders were previously located outside of your LaunchBox folder, you'll probably have to manually select them. Unfortunately for users with customized folders I can't really guess at where all the new folders should go.

Hey guys, great to hear about the successes. @Riffman81, I remember that now. I think you sent me your XML file already, so I'll look into it. If not, can you send it to jasondavidcarr@gmail.com? Thanks! LaunchBox does now have Cart - Front, Cart - Back, and Cart - 3D image types available. They should download from EmuMovies and/or the LaunchBox Games Database if they are available on the game during the import/update metadata processes. You know what, though; I may need to update the wizards for the imports in order to make them import those. I'll add that to my list. :) @kmoney2315, it should have kept *some* of your customized folders. For example, the folder for Box - Front should be set to your previously used folder for Front box art. Let me know if that's not the case. Unfortunately there's just too many assumptions involved if I tried to reorganize the folders outside of the LaunchBox folder. Not to mention if anyone was using the same folders for various different frontends, there could be some serious issues there. Thanks all, let me know if you run into any other issues. :)

Okay, beta is out. This one would be good to test with new installations, existing installations, and everything in between. Again, please do backup your LaunchBox folder before updating to this beta. I've spent a few hours testing now but it's impossible for me to predict every scenario. :) If there's any confusion, this new beta reorganizes images into the many different types of images on the LaunchBox Games Database. Next we will add options in LaunchBox and Big Box to choose which types of images (and the priorities) to be used in the various parts of the interface. For example, switching between 3D boxes and flat boxes will be a simple option change. :)