Jason Carr

wallmachine I missed your middle paragraph there. The folders should be automatically created whenever media is added to them by LaunchBox. Is that not working for you? Or are you just trying to add media manually immediately after adding a new platform?

wallmachine said @Jason and @Sentaibrad This is what I mean't so when selecting a new option in the Options menu in LaunchBox it would minimize the entire LaunchBox then re-open it, this is the same case for BigBox when first opening it or when pressing the Windows key. The following images below is what happens... I'd like to provide a video but can't. On a side note when I go to Tools -> Manage Emulators -> Then select the emulator and pressing Edit is the only way to create the necessary folders inside the "Images", "Videos" and "Platforms" folder unless I create them manually. (I didn't tick any of the boxes to download from emumovies, because I already have the files so I'm assuming it would of automatically created them if I downloaded the files through the parse.) Also when clicking on a game in LaunchBox it takes a while to load the video, maybe 7 seconds? then after that they all load so I'm assuming its caching? The window needs to be refreshed after changing the options for various reasons. Having the window minimize, restore, and refresh/repaint is by design. However, if it's getting stuck without finishing painting itself then we might have an issue. That isn't typical behavior, though, so I'm more inclined to believe it's a glitch with video drivers or something of that nature. It also could be that it only happens on Windows 7; the Windows graphics engines have come a long way since Windows 7 so it could be that we're hitting a glitch that got fixed in a later OS. Does it eventually finish painting itself? Or do you have to close and reopen? Per the delay when loading a video in LaunchBox, it's the same deal as in Big Box. The VLC engine has to be loaded before any videos can be displayed. I assume you are using the VLC engine. The Windows Media Player engine will likely load much quicker, if that is an option for you. I can "trick" the user into thinking that the VLC engine is loading quicker by preloading it on startup or doing it in the background, but beyond that there's nothing I can do to make the VLC engine load up any quicker.

With the new VLC implementation, it does indeed take a few seconds the first time you load up a video for the VLC engine to load up. It also sort of freezes the interface while it loads, so I do have some work to do to somehow make that more performant. That is on my list to tackle before the official. Per LaunchBox (not Big Box) resizing to only a small portion of the screen, this is an unfortunate side effect of screen resolution changes. When a game or an emulator changes the screen resolution, Windows unfortunately does a poor job of resizing windows properly to match. I have struggled with this in the past, but I haven't given up on a solution yet. Not sure if there's a Bitbucket ticket in there for that yet, but we should add one if not.

Alright, I'll go through all the comments above in a few guys. New beta is up. I'm hoping it fixes the remaining issues with the new Big Box VLC implementation. So far it seems that the videos playing in the background issue is fixed, and I'm hoping that the libgcc crash that some users were seeing is fixed as well. Please let me know if anyone runs into any further issues with the new VLC implementation. Also new in this beta is the games list wheel that we started working on in the development live stream yesterday. I wouldn't say it's perfect (yet) but seems to be working well enough for a beta. ;) I also made games without any images to use for the background default to using the platform's backgrounds if they exist. Thanks guys, let me know what issues you run into. Other than bug fixes, tomorrow it's onto the next view with CoverFlow and details.

Just emailed you @gizmo.

Hi @gizmo, it sounds like your email provider must have stripped the attachment. I'll see if I can send it to you another way. Thanks for the purchase. :)

Hi @Expello, this should be coming soon.

Alright, new beta is out that should hopefully address the VLC issues, or at least the ones I could reproduce. @Justified, let me know if this solves your DLL error. The various other errors should be fixed as well. @CADScott, I'm seeing that now as well in LaunchBox. I set up a 32-bit virtual machine (finally) to test it all in a 32-bit environment. Big Box does indeed seem to be working fine, but LaunchBox is still not working properly with the VLC engine on 32-bit Windows. This is a strange one so I'll have to revisit it. Pretty sure it's always been the case, though. @wallmachine Not exactly sure what you mean, but assuming you're talking about the sidebar not remembering its size, that's just an unrelated bug that I need to fix. Thanks all; I'll be back at it tomorrow morning in a live session on Twitch. Probably going to start with the games wheel. https://www.twitch.tv/jasondavidcarr

And I'm blind...sorry @Justified. I can read, I promise. :P

Thanks guys, I'll have a new beta out tonight that hopefully addresses these issues. @Justified, what version of Windows are you using? Is it 32-bit or 64-bit? Thanks!

Woot. :)

In order to test the stability of this new VLC stuff, if everyone can switch to using the VLC video playback engine I'd appreciate it. Need as many people field-testing it as possible. :)

Alright, new beta is up. Basically, I replaced the VLC interop library with higankanshi's Meta.Vlc - https://github.com/higankanshi/Meta.Vlc It's a much better library and is better suited to Big Box. This is one reason why the live development sessions are productive. spektor56 just chimed in in the YouTube comments with a solution that he knew about that I didn't...and it ended up making a huge difference. Woot.

Wow, big win guys. spektor56 on YouTube mentioned something that has really helped the VLC implementation in Big Box. I jumped on it and it fixed a lot of the VLC issues (performance, black bars, lack of transitions). We'll need to test this for stability (I have no idea what might come up now unfortunately), but the VLC implementation is a whole lot better than it was. Also, I haven't tested this in a 32-bit Windows environment so if anyone has one up and running and can test it, that'd be great. The new beta should be up shortly.

FistyDollars, the LaunchBox Games Database website should already display the reconstructed box as the main image if available. But yes, eventually this will be configurable in LaunchBox as well so that you can choose the priority of the various image types.

Thanks Steve-O. :)

Alright, I added Box - Front - Reconstructed and Box - Back - Reconstructed. Let's change the existing images to those (if they've been reconstructed with fonts and stuff) and then we can add new ones for the Box - Front category. :)

For now, let's do this. Let's not replace the images that are there, but feel free to add new ones. I'll add a new image type for the reconstructed images so you can change that as well. That way we can have both.

Yeah, I got you Steve-O. My personal preference would be to still keep the reconstructed images with slightly incorrect fonts, but I do recognize the issues with that. I think we probably need a new image type call Box - Front - Reconstructed, or something like that. Then once we make the changes in LaunchBox for images users will be able to choose whether they want reconstructed, or 100% accurate images.

Hey all, to be honest, I am hesitant to replace good, clear images with iffy ones in the name of "it's been photoshopped so it's not real". Ultimately, we want accuracy, but we're also looking to make people's collections look good. I think generally people will be more satisfied with an image that's been doctored to be impossibly good than one that has blemishes. As far as I'm concerned, if every element on the image is true to the original image, I would prefer to have doctored images that look clear and crisp, regardless of how much they've been doctored. So long as the image is 100% true to the box art, I would strongly argue that we should not replace the doctored images with imperfect, 100% real scans.

Hey all, per the issues with the new games not downloading images because of the missing database ID, I believe I have it resolved, but you'll need to wait until a new metadata database is downloaded in LaunchBox before they'll start working. They should work after the next download. :)

Oh, in LaunchBox you mean! Lol. Sorry for that, I was thinking you meant Big Box. That makes sense. I'll take a look at that. :)

Soundtrackgeek, the sorting should work in the list view. It's displayed as "The Astyanax" but sorted as "Astyanax".

Hi @Soundtrackgeek, thanks. That's different than I'm seeing; the list view is sorted correctly for me in my tests, so if you can put up some pictures that would be helpful. Thanks. :) One thing to note is that if you have manually specified values for the Sort Title field for your games, then that will override the defaults. Also, in the list views, the titles will show up as "The Astyanax"; we don't move "the" to the end. However, the sort should work as expected.

Okay, wow, sorry for all the trouble guys. There's a new beta out now; I've fixed the issues with the repeated update prompting in Big Box. @wallmachine, the error you're seeing there is what happens if you cancel the UAC prompt to install DirectX, or if you let it time out without allowing it. @FistyDollars, I think I know what's going on there. Working on that. Thanks all.