Jason Carr

Great to see this discussion guys; thanks bd and Brad for helping out. For various reasons (described in the Library Brainstorming topic), I dropped the plan to split up LaunchBox into many different XML files/libraries. However, I'm pretty sure we can tackle the performance issues without that being too much of a problem. The biggest issue right now is that all the images are in RAM, which obviously becomes a major issue with 30,000+ games. I have plans to work on the caching to limit the number of images in the cache, though I can't tackle it right away.

Okay, thanks. That's odd. So either there's an issue with LaunchBox not picking up some release dates, or maybe an issue with the search engine for TheGamesDB. I'll look into it and confirm. Thanks for detailing it all out for me.

Conehead, can you explain? I'm not exactly sure what you mean.

Yes, occasionally they do seem to go down, but it shouldn't last long.

Sure, I like the banner idea. Added to my list. I'll add another item too to see if I can get it to remember folders.

Wow, nice job bd. Thanks for that. That'll prove helpful for the future indeed. nmc, all good points, yes. I can always use the help advertising on the various sites because I'm currently putting most of my time towards development and forum discussions. I agree on the database as well. An API of sorts would definitely be a good thing. It's a ways off, but I am thinking along those lines.

Very nice collection, sla.ro. Thanks for the post. Any chance you want to help beta test?

Ah, good to know. Thanks.

Hey guys, good thoughts. I will be enabling URLs in the application path soon (probably for the next version). Full screen support would be easy enough, but it would probably be better to be able to configure it (specify which browser to run and whether to run full screen, etc.). I'll add that to my list, but as less of a priority as some of the more pressing things. I'll add an item for customizable controller mapping as well (to possibly replace Xpadder). The Wikipedia API is planned, but I have some other things to work on first before I can tackle it.

Thanks, bd for helping Vinicius. Vinicius, I'm excited to see the video. The 128x128 image is actually the largest I have anyways. Brad, great ideas, as usual. I definitely do need to work on making emulation much easier, including possibly even including some emulators with LaunchBox. For that I'll need some help identifying what emulators to possibly include (identifying the emulators that are the best for their platform and have licenses that would allow them to be included). I'll probably keep this in the free version though because anything that makes things easier to use I'm thinking would be better off free. bd, I definitely like the concept of getting users to advertise/share LaunchBox, for sure. That's huge. Great idea. We'll take that approach going forward.

New in version 3.3 is support for swapping discs in DOSBox. Some games require that multiple discs be switched out within the same drive, either while playing the game or during the game's installation process. DOSBox supports mounting more than one disc at once, and allows you to switch between discs by pressing Ctrl + F4. Previously, however, LaunchBox did not support mounting multiple discs to a single drive. The Mounts tab of the Add/Edit dialog now allows you to assign multiple mounts to the same drive letter. Therefore, if your game happens to have three discs, you would add all three images or folders to the Mounts grid and assign them all to be the same drive letter, for example drive D. Then during the game or installation process, you could switch between discs as needed by pressing Ctrl + F4. Feel free to comment here if anyone needs help or finds something not working properly with this feature. Thanks, Jason

Conehead said i too agree on this. but you must know that "the community decision " from here will be the view of just 10/20 people so for getting feedback on this from all the LB users you should use some other methods like a one time poll when the users open LB. also, not all are capable of donating even thought they would like using LB so i suggest that before releasing a premium version you should release an equivalent free version which would be stable like the Premium one but would have less features like Themes ,blocked Popup etc. and you could also release updates for the free version just like the Premium but with less features. Thanks, Conehead. Yes, I can see the advantage of polling the entire community, but my current thoughts are that I'm more interested in the feedback of people who are well-informed, vocal, and involved in the project more than those who really don't know what's going on. Obviously, users who don't understand the issues with not going premium or haven't had the experience to appreciate the ongoing development of LaunchBox are likely to all vote "no, I do not want a premium version" without much thought at all. Therefore, I'd rather work on getting users more involved so they can make more informed decisions from that front instead of just randomly throwing it out there. And yes, we'll certainly keep updating both versions, regardless. The intent will certainly not be "upgrade to premium to keep up to date". It will be "update to premium for these advanced features".

bd00 said Yeah your right, not being able to disable it would be too much, forget I suggested that. I hate ads in apps too, but I do understand why devs need to do it. What we are talking about here, I don't really consider it as an ad but more of a notice. Seeing notices in free apps saying "If you like this app, please donate..." never bothers me like true ads do. I also think you should start encouraging your users to start spreading the word about LaunchBox, but that's just my opinion. I also think anyone who helps you in beta testing, should get a license too. Good point about encouraging users to spread the word. I have zero marketing experience. Anyone have any ideas as to how best to encourage people to spread the word? Agreed about the licenses for beta testers; yes, that was the plan but obviously I do have to draw the line at some point. Everyone on this thread currently will get a license but I'd rather not hand out licenses to everyone who puts in a minimal amount of effort beta testing (otherwise we'll have people just hopping on to do the least amount of effort to grab a license). Significant contributors like all of you obviously are a different story.

Thank you jtrain for donating! Vinicius, I know how that is, and even after going premium I'm likely to just hand it out to people who want it but have legitimate reasons why they really couldn't pay. Thanks for sharing your input, and I'll make sure that people who have major issues paying for things on the Internet (or flat out can't afford much at all) will still be able to ask for and probably receive a copy. To be clear, I am envisioning that anyone who pays would get a lifetime license to the premium version. I'm not looking to nickel and dime folks, that's for sure. bd, you're right, I haven't done any in-app advertising asking for donations. In fact, I've wanted to completely avoid it, because I know how irritating it is. That said, obviously it will need to happen at some point. Maybe for the next version we can advertise on the welcome dialog at least. What I want to avoid entirely though is spamming people with advertisements who've already donated or already purchased the premium version. I dislike forcing that welcome dialog too, because I know it would piss me off. Anyways, thanks everyone for your feedback. It does sound like we will probably look to create a premium version eventually, though it will probably be at least a couple versions before it happens.

I've been thinking a bit. This is a pretty controversial topic I realize...but sooner or later, I'm gonna hit a wall with the project financially and probably eventually time-wise too. There's a million things to do yet with the project beyond what we already have, and I think it has HUGE potential. The issue is, the bigger it gets, the more money it will cost to maintain (web hosting, etc.) and the more time it will take to maintain and improve. I'm currently considering a freeware/premium model of sorts, where all of the current functionality is available for free, but you have the option to upgrade to an improved version with special features (like theming, more advanced customization options, etc.). I'm considering this mostly because I want this to be a long-term project, and I don't want to have to limit its features or not make it as good as it could be because I'm scrounging for funds. I also have to admit I would *love* for this project to be a full time focus (as opposed to the side project that it is currently). To be clear, anyone who's donated already would have the upgraded version free for life. I also hate DRM, so that would absolutely *NOT* be included, and the cost of the upgrade would be extremely inexpensive (probably $5 or $10 or similar). If everyone hates this idea, I won't go through with it. Straight up. I want this to be at least somewhat a community decision, as obviously it affects us all. So, to those of us on this thread, let me ask you a few questions: - Would you find it offensive or would it leave a bad taste in your mouth if LaunchBox went to this free/premium model? - Assuming you hadn't already donated, would you pay to upgrade to the better version with advanced features? - Specifically, what would you want to avoid doing if we did move to a free/premium model? Thanks everyone; please do speak up as we need as many people's feedback on this as possible. Obviously this isn't an easy decision to make (and trust me, it's not one that I had planned on making). Let me know. Thanks, Jason

bd, you did send me an extremely generous donation already, and I will put it towards that for sure. Thank you indeed. I hear you Brad. Been there, done that, no worries. We can't use that feature without the license. The license is not restrictive and would not be an issue in any situation outside of adding more developers. And yes, I am planning on restructuring the games view, but not the general window/controls stuff, which this applies to. So, it does still make sense. Might just have to save up for a while before we can make it happen.

Ah, great idea geckogirl, and welcome to the forums. I'll add an item to my list to enable web addresses in the application path so you don't have to use shortcuts.

Thanks a ton for everyone's input here. It sounds like most of us are in agreement that bd's mockups of the OpenEmu-style interface would be the best approach. Many thanks to bd for all that work, and to everyone else for this discussion. I did some further research on theming LaunchBox with a nice dark theme like that tonight, and had some pretty great success, but had to use a product called VisualStyler from SkinSoft: http://www.skin-soft.co.uk/Purchase/Default.aspx It's actually a really great product from what I can tell, and it allows you to apply any .msstyles theme (that works on Windows XP on up) to the application. So we could easily provide the option to choose between a nice dark theme and the Windows defaults, or the user could specify any .msstyles Windows theme. That'd be pretty awesome (it already is from what I've tested): To be clear, that's just one possible theme; just a basic dark theme with zero tweaking or effort on my part. There's a ton of other .msstyles themes available on the web to play with (check out http://customize.org/xpthemes for instance). But here's the catch. A license to the library is $250, which I can't afford for the moment. I hate to ask, but anyone care to help out? I can significantly contribute, just couldn't drop all of $250.

Hey folks, bd's done some great work on some mockups for the nesting interface. If you can, hit it up and vote for the approach that you like the most. https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/features/library-brainstorming

Wow, bd, thanks for all that good work. All those mockups will really help to make decisions I think. What are your thoughts? What would be the preferred approach at this point in your mind? I think I'm favoring the OpenEmu approach, especially with the mockups you created with the charms bar and the tabs (combining the filters, etc.). I think that'd be really great. Thoughts? And I agree about the dark theme, I've thought that from the beginning but would have to figure out a way to re-theme the default Windows controls (as they don't support theming by default). But that will probably be necessary for this. I do like the concept of OpenEmu collections as well, though that might have to be another subproject. Anyways, thanks again, gonna go hit up the Beta Testing thread to tell people to check this and out get their 2 cents.

Yeah, definitely. I'll pin this post for the heck of it. My Steam name is deepest_seed.

Oh, just thought of something. If I remember correctly there might be a delay from when you update information in TheGamesDB to when you can download the updated data. So if you had just updated the release date, for instance, it might just be a few minutes before the import would download it. Could that be the issue?

Hey again conehead; what version of Windows are you running? I can't seem to replicate the issue. Does it happen every time for certain games? Does it populate at all for any games? It's possible that it has something to do with your custom theme, believe it or not. But we should fix it either way. Thanks, Jason

Hi Conehead, thanks for those suggestions. As far as the game completed star, I'd be afraid that it would be too confusing with favorites and star ratings. I agree on the shortcuts though; I've added that to my list.

Thanks for the thread. I've been doing some more thinking, and really, the concept of "libraries", as in multiple XML files, really solves a nonexistent problem. The original reason why I was thinking of doing separate libraries/XML files was for performance/RAM usage reasons. Since then, the performance is great, even with humongous collections. So really, the only issue we have left is RAM usage, and that's only because of the images, and I think there are better ways to solve that problem than separate collections, after thinking about it. So we definitely still need to talk about how to design the nesting interface, but I think the multiple libraries idea would just be unnecessary development. Sorry for leading you and everyone else down the wrong path there. The issue with the RAM usage will go away when I switch the games list backend to use web technologies, which I plan to do before 4.0. Basically, I want to switch the list of game boxes over to a web page type of backend (using the Chromium Embedded Framework most likely). This shouldn't change the appearance or behavior much, but will allow much easier flexibilty as far as animations and customizations inside the games list (especially since it'll all be controlled by simple HTML and CSS). At least that's my current idea. Anyways, so we're back to either nesting or OpenEmu-style. With either approach, I want the presentation to change based on the current Arrange By setting. For instance, if you're currently arranged by developers, then the new navigation would show a list of developers. If by platforms, the it'd show a list of platforms. Thoughts?