Jason Carr

Thanks @wallmachine. Looking pretty good to me.

@wallmachine Keep in mind that the fewer games there are in the current list, the more likely the random selector will end up picking the same game, so it's expected for small lists of games. So even though sometimes "random" picks aren't what you would want, I think the only way to improve on the current system would be to make it not random, or force not landing on a previously selected game.

Have you guys tested the latest beta? I believe it should solve any prior issues.

@Xpendable That's basically what we do already... Not exactly, but the end result would be the same.

To be honest, that sounds confusing and I don't think that's a good idea at all. We could add a random feature a lot easier if we just jumped to a random game, but that's not really what this discussion was about.

@angelobodetti I'm not sure why the betas would've created that issue. Can you try the latest beta to see if it works? I ask because we need to figure it out if we have a real issue.

That would not be a good way to proceed, because the wheel would likely spin for far too long if you had too many games in the wheel.

Beta 12 is out now with the following: Minor improvements to the box image caching/loading in LaunchBox Improvements to attract mode to hopefully reduce duplicate landings Fixes for plugin loading so that plugin issues should no longer prevent LaunchBox or Big Box from running Added Date Added, Date Modified, and Last Played to audits

I can review the specific instance in that thread.

Yeah, completely unrelated.

Those import issues almost always just come down to games being identified as duplicates.

The way the EmuMovies search works is that it's only one search for all types of media, so there's no way to speed it up in this regard. Responded in the thread. Unfortunately my hunch is no, because I doubt that Steam provides that information. Feel free to create a ticket for it though and hopefully at some point we can look into it further.

@C-Beats and I dove into this. For some reason, the MAME metadata for "invaders" does not have any region attached to it, whereas "cosmicmo" has North America, so that is why it's being prioritized over the original Space Invaders. From what I can tell, this is a pretty rare issue across the data, but I do see the problem here. The question is whether we can change that logic without screwing up other things. We don't control or manage the MAME metadata (of course), so we have to use and follow what we have. The only idea I have is to ignore the region prioritization specifically when a clone's parent does not have a region, but unfortunately I suspect that that is likely to mess up some other currently properly prioritized games.

I've improved this in a few ways for the next beta. Made it less likely to move backwards in the wheel, changed out the random number generator for one that's supposedly improved (just in case that is actually the issue), and tweaked some of the chances. Let me know how it fares for you guys after the beta 12 release.

I think that most likely the issues are coming more from the nature of how the wheels spin, rather than a bug in the random number generator. It is true that RNGs are never perfect, and are often not so great at being random, but the issue here is that the wheel doesn't often get all that far past the beginning of the alphabet, because it goes both forwards and backwards. I do have a couple of ideas that might help though: Randomize where in the list the wheel starts when changing between platforms Change the wheel to never (or more rarely) go backwards The wheel is randomized by how many games are jumped through for each move, not by selecting a particular game, so that probably has an effect on the results as well.

Appears to be a plugin error of some kind @The_Keeper86. Maybe a theme plugin error?

This is a plugin issue of some sort. What plugins do you have installed for LaunchBox? We're not able to replicate this, so we're at a loss here currently. .NET Core probably requires different permissions somehow than previous .NET did, but unfortunately that kind of stuff is mostly out of our control. Can you zip up and PM me your data folder to see if we can't figure out what might be going on?

Beta 11 is out now with the following: Fixed various window scaling issues (please let us know if anyone sees any further issues with any windows) Fixed LaunchBox list view and audit date sorting incorrect for some cultures Fixed the %launchboxorbigboxexepath% game launching variable to work as it did previously (full path to LaunchBox.exe or BigBox.exe in the root) Fixed folder links being deleted and not existing properly when launching Big Box from LaunchBox or LaunchBox from Big Box (this was causing the theme issues in that case) Thanks again all for the reports. I do think we're nearing the end.

Beta 10 is out now with a fix for the crashes and some minor fixes for image loading delays.

Has it been fixed in 3.1.6?

Yes, threading should be much improved in beta 9. However, we do have some further minor improvements coming for beta 10 that might still help. It sounds like you have multiple issues here; I expect that beta 10 (should be out shortly) will solve the LaunchBox crashing issues, though those issues should not exist in 11.2 at all, so I suspect that there are several different issues going on. Per Big Box, the issue is likely either an app conflict with some sort of security software, or an issue with a controller, or something of that nature. It also could be a data issue. If you can zip up and PM me your LaunchBox\Data folder, I can look to see if it's a data issue or not. @wallmachine It may fix it, but it also may not. I still don't know what is causing that issue for you, unfortunately. Would certainly be nice if it did fix it, though. Unfortunately that log isn't telling me much of anything.

Hey all, I finally figured out the issue with the crashes. Should have a new beta out with a fix here soon.

Okay, I have added some code for the next beta that will remove those folder symbolic links on exit, which should solve the file syncing problem, as of course you shouldn't be syncing while LaunchBox or Big Box is running anyways. The only issue then would come up if you forcefully kill all the LaunchBox and Big Box processes with Task Manager. Even if LaunchBox or Big Box crashes, it should recover properly and delete those links. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Yes, it will work exactly like it does currently.

What are you referring to? No, we are not losing portability.

Hi Wally, keep in mind that a lot of what you're referring to comes down to the syncing tool. What file syncing tool are you using? Any good syncing tool will provide the option to follow symbolic links or not. For example, I use FreeFileSync (which I highly recommend), and by default, it does not follow symbolic links (but it does have the option to turn it on). Regardless, the decision to use folder symbolic links was not made lightly. In fact, I worked for 2 days to try and make it so that they were not required, but unfortunately, in order to maintain backwards compatibility with existing themes and plugins, we don't have much of a choice. The only other option that we have in that regard is to throw the entire Core folder into the root LaunchBox folder, which would clutter up the root LaunchBox directory something awful, and cause lots of other confusion. I do not agree that the .NET Core thing "broke portability", but I understand where you're coming from, and I can see how it was annoying in your case. It would be good to know what file syncing tool you are using. Hi Wanderer, that is a possibility. We've worked hard to reproduce those crashes, and unfortunately haven't been able to, so most likely it does come down to something unique on your system. Generally, we do not recommend putting media specifically over the network, because it's pretty much guaranteed to cause performance issues at least. Games themselves can be huge, and I often do put those over the network without any real issues, but for media, it's definitely not recommended. For my relatively large collection, the media is still less than 200 gigs, so keeping the media local isn't too much of an issue. The games themselves (which end up being multiple terabytes) I do keep over the network without issues, so I wouldn't bother moving the games (only the media).