Jason Carr

Good to know. Thanks, @Bil. More performance improvements there would probably be ideal.

The LaunchBox site itself gets plenty of traffic, so yeah, I agree, it would be best to do it directly on the LB site itself. I am travelling today; I'll see if I can find a good wiki solution. I'm sure WordPress must have a good one. I know we looked a while back, but there wasn't enough interest to really continue it. Though now, I think it's probably about time. So I'll try and get the frame for it started, and leave it to you guys to populate it.

Oh man, back when I originally implemented controller support, I tried for days to make that happen. Apparently that darn guide button is some kind of trade secret or something. I think they make it difficult to do on purpose. I eventually found a way to do it, but would have had to create a separate app in C++ just to make it happen. I didn't try AutoHotkey at the time, though. Let me know if anyone figures it out, I'll integrate it into LaunchBox in a heartbeat. I want that for my own personal use. The other thing that would be nice, is being able to use that as the "hold button" for other AutoHotkey functions.

Oh, does it?

Glad to have you back @bd00.

Indeed. I definitely have plans for that. :)

Oh no, don't do it. You'll ruin my masterplan.

Lolololololol...am I not moving quick enough @bd00? ;)

Seriously. Listening, Namco? Unfortunately they're probably the only ones who could legally do it, without making it a terrible ripoff.

Good idea, Bil. That's a new one, but I can see it being useful. Can't promise it any time soon, but it is added to the list. :)

bd000 said Yeah that's what I meant, no hdd activity, but cpu activity. It's OK now, it miraculously started working again and completed the last bit in no time. It definitely stopped for a while though. Cheers Glad it worked. It can take a very long time. There's actually more CPU usage needed than you think in the process. I might see if there's anything I can do to speed it up. Rest assured that it should never be "stuck".

Bil said With the images now reorganized and spit by platform folder (thank you btw)... it has made my rather large collection much more manageable in adding or changing images. Do you have any plans to split the LaunchBox.xml to help with performance, for the upcoming version 5 of LB? I just wanted to ask and hope Unfortunately not for 5.0, but hopefully shortly after. However, I have not proven that splitting the XML file would do anything to improve performance (it could possibly make it worse), so that's only one possibility of many.

Awesome guys. Would love for a wiki to be put together. I can put it directly on the site if it works well.

Hi Martin, that already exists via the AutoHotkey features.

...weird. Can you send me your LaunchBox.xml file?

Maddoc1007 said As you can see LaunchBox uses more cpu when minimized than when not active. Oh now that is just odd. Is it like that every time? Can anyone else test for that?

The game's awesome so far, Brad. As I told you in IM, I don't deserve the special thanks, but my life is now complete. I MADE IT INTO GAME CREDITS! I MADE IT INTO GAME CREDITS! Seriously, that's been a dream of mine since I was 12. Play the game, guys. It's still fairly short but great, gonna enjoy the final release for sure. Brad, I think you should wait to put out the rest of it until it's all the way done. :)

They have always been there, but were previously hidden as system files. I figured it was better to throw them in a folder instead and just let people know they're there. They are basically the disk image cache, which is important for quick LaunchBox navigation. They're used whether or not the RAM cache is enabled. When you "refresh all images", the cache files are deleted and come back as needed. They're named using the internal unique ID of the game.

It would be useful to know everyone's specific CPU model, for comparison. I can't believe that it would only be an issue with slow CPUs, but numbers are useless without knowing the CPU. Unfortunately there's so many generations of CPUs too that "4 core" or 3.6 GHz doesn't really mean much at all, so the more specific, the better.

Okay, doesn't seem to be OS-specific then. Significant CPU usage while minimized or not active is obviously the most concerning. On my machines it's always less than 1% when LaunchBox isn't active, but clearly that's not the case for everyone. I'll do some more digging, see if there's anything I can find.

garbanzo said Thanks for cleaning up the images folder, it makes it much easier to batch-resize cover images to the same aspect ratio for a consistent look inside the app :) Glad to hear it @garbanzo.

Nathan DiYorio said Sounds like the easiest solution would be to set up a controller-to-key program (like JoyToKey) which can close windows with a controller input. The difficult solution would be for Jason to build a file browser into Big Box. Edit: I'm testing the new build right now, and I love the cleaner image hierarchy... but do you think you could improve the image-import functionality of LaunchBox? Right now you can only add one image at a time (unless you properly rename all the images and import them to the folder manually). Could you make it possible to import multiple fanarts at once (and also maybe add the option to move and rename files instead of copying them?) Oh, here's something which could be a problem: when you change the Platform for a game (for instance, from "PC" to "Steam") the images are not automatically moved/copied to the proper new locations. Big Box is also still incredibly slow with custom platforms (though they at least work). It takes about two whole seconds to browse over the "Mobile" portion of my library (this is currently the only custom position in my library). I don't know if this is because of the game images not moving when I reassigned my mobile games or if it's because I don't have any platform images or metadata to go with "Mobile". Yeah, Nathan's right, you can close windows with a controller using LaunchBox's built-in AutoHotkey solution as well. So in the off case that you accidentally pop up a window, you can close it with the controller. Adding multiple images makes sense; I'll add that to my list. Per the images moving/copying when changing the platform, they *should* be moved/copied over. I tested that specifically and it was working for me, so I guess if you can, do some more testing and let me know what you find. Specific examples would be best. Per custom platforms, I'll revisit this. It baffled me when I last looked at it, but obviously that's a problem that needs fixed. Can anyone else confirm that they're seeing the same thing?

Game Lounger said Hi Jason, Been lurking these forums for over a month and been playing around with LB for that time too. I think its a great piece of software and am so grateful for u making it. I was very excited when I heard about BigBox and you have made so much progress in such a short period of time. Its amazing. It is exactly what I was looking for. Anyway I don't usually make accounts or post on forums, but since you're getting ready to launch I feel I need to say something about a couple of issues that either I am not seeing an option for or have not been addressed previously. You see I'm planning on using BigBox as the primary interface for multiple gaming PCs. As such my goal is to eliminate the need for a keyboard and mouse entirely. I'm going as far as replacing explorer as the Windows shell with BigBox. As of today with the release of your latest beta I feel it is very close to what i'm trying to achieve. However, there a couple of the options when going inside the game details that I feel should either (A) be eliminated or (B) give us the option to turn them off. These are the "Open Folder", "Open Images Folder", and "Open EMULATORNAME" .... These commands cause the need for a keyboard and mouse and take away from a pure couch experience since they launch an explorer window and cannot be closed with a controller. I'm sure theyll be times when I will need to use the KB and Mouse when theres a problem or something but it would be nice to avoid it as much as possible. I'm planning on using your software on six Alienware Alphas. I'll actually be installing later today. I've been trying to decide whether to even use the default Alienware UI / KODI. I guess it would be nice to have an addon that launches BigBox or I can use Advanced Launcher to launch it but I think I'm gonna go ahead and make it the shell instead. For my purposes going straight into it at boot up would make it more console like and use less RAM. Thanks you so much again. You've saved me so much time by making this software. I will continue to support this project and wish you the best. Hi @GameLounger, that's awesome. Would love to see a video or pictures or something after you get the project up and running. I actually do plan on adding options for showing and hiding most everything, so I'll be sure to add options for those three things as well before release. Thanks!

scree said Hi Jason. First off, the update to beta 16 worked flawlessly. All images migrated ok. BigBox mode is working fine for me. No hanging, freezing or delays found. Everything runs like clockwork. So on to a few requests/suggestions for BigBox mode. These may be too late for the imminent official version 5 release, but might be considered down the line. There are some Additional Apps that could be described as background apps, in that they are intended to work with the game. For example apps that run a game profile or mount a disc before the game starts, and close the profiler or unmount after the game is quit. An option (tick box) would be nice to hide an Additional App from showing up in the LaunchBox right-click and BigBox mode game menus if it is not intended for running outside of it's main (game) app. The Notes information shown in BigBox mode could do with a scroll-bar to allow big entries to be viewed. Also the ability of the LaunchBox games details/right sidebar Notes section to show screenshots and fanart images might be extended to the Notes display in BigBox mode. And now to the nit picking. The order in which the Additional Apps are listed in BigBox mode is based on the order in which the apps were created. LaunchBox desktop mode lists them alphabetically - nicer. The Released On data is in Month Date Year format. An option to show it in European Date Month Year format would be nice. And here is a screen capture to help with what I'm talking about regarding the Additional Apps listing and Notes cutoff in BigBox mode. Great to hear, thanks @scree. Those are also great ideas; some of which really should go into the release, particularly the two from your last paragraph. I'll get those in.

CliveBarker said Hi Jason. I am here to report that the scrolling speed through my games, in both, LaunchBox and Bigbox is slower compared to the previous version, it kinda freezes for less than a second when scrolling from one game to another one I am watching my CPU usage when selecting a game, it jumps from 1% when idle to 44% when selecting a game, then it drops to 1%, these performance spikes only occur when selecting a game. Hi Clive, unfortunately the logic is slightly more complicated with the new image parsing system, so it makes sense that performance could be affected. However, I didn't see any performance hits myself, but it might be more prevalent on slower systems. I'll see if there are any optimizations I can make to improve the performance before release. Thanks for hitting me up.