Jason Carr

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.

Hi @FistyDollars, how newly added are they? What games are giving you trouble?

New beta is up. I had forgotten about the restructuring we had done with the LaunchBox Games Database as far as images and such go, so the more testing you guys can do with imports and searches, etc., the better. I think I covered everything but I did push this out quickly because of the broken beta. Thanks all, let me know if you run into anything.

Uploading a new beta now. We had two issues...the first of which was that I was relying on the Windows file system to give me accurate file system dates. I should've learned my lesson on that the last time I ran into that issue; that was causing the multiple downloads issues. Then the images were because we changed all the image type names on the games database. Doh. New beta will be up in a few.

Thanks all, looking into the metadata updating issues now.

shinra358 said fullscreen platform backgrounds like game backgrounds and dimming option for the bg platform names on the wheel. Thanks, shinra. By fullscreen platform backgrounds, what do you mean? I believe you already can add fanart images to platforms and use them as backgrounds. Oh, do you mean using the same background for all games of that platform? I remember that now...think I answered my own question. ;)

wallmachine Per the performance issue with the wheel, that baffles me a bit. I haven't been able to reproduce it. You're saying that it works fine for three cycles and then lags...can you describe it a bit more? Is it three pages of items or just three items? It could be possible that it's lagging because there's only two items in the list, I suppose. Per VLC, unfortunately there's almost nothing further I can do to fix any performance issues. I've done everything I can. The only thing I can suggest there is to use the Windows Media Player video playback engine. We may need to add another engine at some point that has better performance, but for now I've done all the tweaking I can do before the 6.0 release. Per the menus, I know they're overly simple. We can go back and revamp them a bit eventually, but truthfully they're much less important than the rest of the functionality. They're simple and easy enough to use so I would imagine people would rather me work on views for Big Box than improving the settings.

Hopefully soon we're going to add all these images to the LaunchBox Games Database and then of course add functionality to download them as needed in LaunchBox. So that's where we're headed, but it will be a bit before we get all that implemented.