Freestate

I'm not saying that. I'm not generally speaking, it's about lq media elaborated in a rush from many many years ago. It's not about personal preferences, it's about overall and objetive quality, good resolution, better sources, cleaning, no artifacts etc. Nobody is gonna be satisfied with a 200x150 resolution false usa 3d box with a bad cut of the japanese box when it's available the only real and released box for the japanese release perfectly clear and arranged due to some usa tagging in it as it was a real usa release. Everybody without a short fuse knows what i'm saying, there were a lot of media like that years ago and it was erased because wasn't good enough. It's not about rejecting art for personal preferences or some crazy megalomaniatic ideas, it's about a workaround till we have fan tag for 3d boxes, fan tag for clear logos, and other missing issues in the database, to avoid mixing. As you can see English isn't my native language and sometimes is difficult to explain some topics.

The database improvements to avoid this issues was demanded a lot of times for many years, but the devs aren't interested or is not their cup of tea after the left of viansix, that worked in that part. Untagging regionally 3d box fanart or clear logo fanart is less harmful in batch media downloads than having mixed sources (legit releases. fancreations) . Fan creations are still there but the people don't found them overlaped or taking priority of real restorations due to region priorities. It's was an accepted workaround by many moderators. I'm not only a moderator but a heavy creator and contributor to have an eye candy and comprehensive sources in database (mainly focused in snes, almost completed with thousands of my restorations of boxes, cards, fanart etc) and many others. And it piss me off a lot to destinate many hours, months and years to provide a bulk download with only legit and real art, with the best posible quality to see this effort destroyed with some creepy creations mixed with heavy work (we don't have an standard for fanart and many creations are fast, just shabby cuts of the original japanese boxes and with poor resolutions or care. I'm promoting this criteria thinking on the best outcome for new users or people who don't want to spend a lot of time arranging their collections and having to manually clean their media downloads to erase LQ art or inconsistencies. One of the best quirk of launchbox is not having to add media by hand, and the database, and the tons of work of many contributors to upload clean and HQ quality art. Not everybody has time to arrange their collections, and priorityze released art over fan workarounds is a way to demostrate love and respect for the kind of experience launchbox can provide. To download unadressed scans there's a lot of places in the internet, and heavy manual arrangement is mandatory in other frontends and there's a lot of media packs out of the database. I think that working hard to make a difference isn't a bad thing.

AH Ok, maybe they are previous to region tags, and sometimes that games where stuffed in the first place only with usa box art, the european and japanese where added after. This issue is common to see it as USA cover not regionalized and japanese and european with correct tagging or japanese exclusives without region.

You're totally missing about the issue, is more important to tag diferently legit art and fan created art, due to the explained lacks in database that's not posible in 3d boxes or clear logos and triggers mixed downloads. It's preferable to lower the need of arrange things manually after. And no, not all art is mandatory to tag it regionally, backgrounds as an extra decoration is not mandatory (common sense), fanart is an extra (to complete missing media or personal appeals) i thing that keeping it as i explain regionally untagged to avoid mixed downloads is common sense.

@Jason Carr Database needs more love to reward all the tons of work of the contributors and moderators. We suffer a lot of misanderstandings due to the lack of some tags and options. No fanart for 3D boxes, it triggers mixing between fan creations and real box 3d adaptations. People want to know exactly what are downloading, legit boxes or fancreations. We are regionally untagging the fan creations but is a workaround and some people tag them again as legit regional 3d boxes. No fan tag for clear logos, same issue, some people upload westernized titles as regional ones and you end with a bunch of non real logos due to region prioritys. No reconstructed tag for carts. A big problem because usable carts and eye candy are always reconstructed using standarized templates due to the curves of many cartridges, we tried ago to clasify reconstructed ones just as cards keeping the fancarts as something optional but some users instist on preservate dirty borrowed cards from diferent sources, without cleaning, lots of shadows, light dots, etc, we moved to fan tag but it also triggers the issue mentioned before, miixing bewteen real reconstructions and fan creations. And adding game languages and translations was asked YEARS ago... and still unadressed. I know that coding databases could be a pain in the ass and maybe not your cup of tea, but think a little in all the hours expended correcting things manually or managing contribution work to provide the cleanest media batch without adressing it manually and the frustration that moderators and contributors are dealing with for years. Please, i beg you, focus on the database for a few weeks or months.

If they are FAN CREATIONS, not created using real box releases, they must remain without region tag. We don't have fan tag for 3d boxes, many people only want fan creations as a workaround when nothing else is available (digital only games, homebrew, etc), if you regionally tag 3d fanboxes they overlap due to region priority when you download data. Is disgusting to see a lot of westernized fanboxes instead the real japanese ones for example. Until we have fan tag for 3d boxes or clear logos, any non official media must remain regionally untagged to be available as an option but not taking priority over the real ones.

fanart category must be added as an option for many media, i totally understand your point. For the moment just upload regionally untagged as a workaround.

@kurzih Maintaining non cleaned or corrected images as main ones ends having the main sources as a pile of heavily damaged and sometimes cringeworthy resources. I´m agree to not clasify as legit and main ones heavily changed reconstructions with some failures or missing parts. But for many years, as you can see in the tons of work and contributions, launchbox community is working to provide eye candy art and keeping a good balance between acuracy and quality. I made myself some really acurate reconstructions with only little and near non visible changes to the real ones, and wanting to be fair i uploaded that creations as reconstructions. The point is, i'm not gonna upload HQ cleanings with hours of work to see them overlaped by low resolution images with sunfade, missing parts, tons of dust or damaged areas to acomplish some minor preference for preservation. There's other databases around the net with that policy of NO CLEAN, NO WORK, CREEPYNESS IS THE REAL EXPERIENCE. Moderation preferences of the community had favored clean art vs unaltered art. Reconstruction tag remains as some place for the less acurate reconstructions or cleanings (that ones with missing parts, heavy cuts, misplaced logos,etc) that could work as a workaround but aren't fair enough to confuse them with the real top notch HQ legit scans. We are talking about ages ago media, it´s imposible to find scans of everything, and many covers need a heavy work of reconstruction using poor sources from second hand marketplaces like ebay or yahoo japan. If somebody prefers this over this I think that person is missing the reason to manage a collection of games with a launcher. Every retrogame launcher promotes HQ and cleaned art, and compared to other communities, launchbox bunch doesn't accept mixing creepy fudges like false european or usa covers for japanese games in their main category. I'm satisfied with the global criteria in moderations and i'm not gonna support giving preference to damaged material. Is possible to have respect for original sources without being obsessed with impossible tasks of ortodox preservation.

Some issue detected. Moderation cue is stuck in one change in Sega Ages Virtua Racing of Switch, not mvoing forward at all. Also i can´t see my recent contributions in my changes status. @Jason Carr

And also, in the AES listing you have all the neogeo platform released games, because all of the MVS exclusives were released unnoficially in aes format by small stores, producers , they´re are listed as unnoficial releases.

https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5688/add-reconstructed-and-fan-tag-for-every Now, the database lacks of reconstructed and fan tag for 3d boxes or carts, this ends in a messy media downloads for people who only want legit art and want fanart and reconstruction only to complete the games that can provide it officially due to their prototype, homebrew or digital nature. For example in the 3d boxes category there´s a mixture between real recreated 3d boxes with their correct sides and fanmade ones, also there´s official regional releases with regional fanmade 3d boxes. Some people could only prefer to download legit ones but if you stablish a region priority the scrapping media could boast your collection with a lot of european fanmade o usa fanmade 3d boxes for japanese games that already have legit japanese 3d art. The same happens with carts, there´s only normal carts and fanmade ones. Some people prefer only legit ones and complete it as a second source with fanmade if there´s no real card available, but the only way to provide homogeneous cart art is to make arrangements using templates to give a common appeal to all the sources. We need the reconstructed tag for carts also to stablish a real diference between cart scans (normally with bad quality), reconstructed ones (using templates) and leave fancart category only for the non official ones.

Please i´ve opened a thread to discuss seriously with this issue.

Also don´t forget about languages tag. Another postponed database improvement. Is a good option to know what official languages and fantranslations are available for a game. I know that there´s could be some reluctancy to add fantranslations as well as an archive, maybe for copyright issues? But just adding the info of that exist could be good.

My Bad, dude! English is not my native language. Corrected. Thanks! Want do you think about the topic? https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5688/add-reconstructed-and-fan-tag-for-every

We need to adress this issue to provide good sets. In the past weeks, months, we are moving clear cart images created with card templates due to the lack of reconstructed tag and the persistence of some fellows to keep tacky cart photos in the cart category to provide an homogeneous set of carts for the ones who want good quality sets. Seriously, we need to adress this issue and get rid of NOT ARRANGED, RESTORED CARTS in the database. We had exactly the same issue with boxes in the past. Some users insisted on keeping dirty, misplaced, unrestored boxes in the database giving them prioriry over reconstructed and restored ones. That´s why the category reconstructed emerged, but the time goes and that´s a reality that most of the people prefer launchbox as a way to provide cleaner and restored art and not as a preservation vault and every dirty and non adressed cleaned box went away and was replaced with better and cleaner art. I think that we must modify the criteria about carts and discs, and give priority to homogeneous carts cleaned and recreated with templates in the first category and use the fancart category only for not retail art (workarounds for digital games and fanregion based art). In a nutshell, carts are messy to scan, they have curves, materials that could trigger strange brights or shadows, sources are mixed, and using it from their original sources, ended as having messy and tacky sets, not eye candy and they doesn´t work to provide a good experience when you navigate in bigbox themes. My proposal is to stablish a consensus about using voted community templates to give the carts section an homogeneous appeal, and get rid of not cleaned images. You know, diferent perspectives, angles, shadows, without their background cleaned. etc. In snes category for example i´m using two diferent templates. Not optimal but clean enough. The first one is to replace carts with a real cart photo but arranged in a pretty neat aspect and the other is a recreation template (no so faitful as the real one but cleaner and the most common used in hyperspin previously created art. What do you thing? This two are an efford to provide CLEAN ART. AND HERE WE GO... THAT´S THE ACTUAL STATE OF SOME ENTRIES... shadows, dirtyness, not cleaned backgrounda, and it´s not the worst example, there´s others with crazy perspectives or not straight angles.

Yes, but classifying restored snes cards as fancard aren´t correct too but we were doing it as a workaround because the RECONSTRUCTED CARD TAG doesn´t exist and many people insist on keeping horrible quality scans as legit cards with distorted proportions, shadows, not cleaned backgrounds, etc and we needed to move the cleaned and restored ones to fanart as a workaround. We can´t be so strict with the database capacities considering all the flaws that it still has. Tagging it as DLC in snes was aproved months ago and wasn´t detonate any crazy crusade to seek and tag any digital release in other platforms. Nintendo Power and Satellaview are an anomaly in game market because they were a pseudo pre-internet, digital delivery that wasn´t common in other platforms with the exception of seganet.

Every Nintendo Power Snes Game and Satellaview full game included in snes list was tagged as DLC. Rejecting this one is an exception. Ticket https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5669/tags-to-diferenciate-physical-release

Hi guys, what do you think about this feature? Please vote.

My skills were shit before launchbox too. HAHAHA, I made the efford just to elaborate art for the database. There was a work of years to complete the boxfront section (too many japanese stuff without scans i needed to search a lot across the internet to find fair enough pictures, and it took a lot of work. The usual stuff for my corrections aren´t the big deal. I´m using GIMP. First, I use the burn tool to increase darkness in black areas and brightness in white areas, this removes a lot of dust and dirtyness in the boxes. Next to it i clean up the remnants painting with paintbrush tool in solid color areas and cutting patterns to restore big scratches, for the dot/minor damage i just blur them with blur tool. WIth the perspective correction i resize the box to match box proportions (i have the size proportions of a eur, japan, usa box in files) if isn´t distorted ,or the cage transform for the heavily smashed ones. I have a vault of sfc and company logos or i retrieve it from other boxes, to finish it i upscale it using waifu 2x webpages if the main source has compression artifacts (in my opinion it reduces a lot noise and improves visuals a lot when they are downscaled). Maybe i could elaborate a brief video explaining the process if anyone is interested.

Work never ends. I´m improving some of your LQ uploads (the blurry ones of lower resolution), and creating 3d boxes and Fancards for Games that were only released digitally (satellaview full games, nintendo power and some homebrew and obscure unlicensed dirty games). But a lot of thanks for the huge efford. Glad to see another snes fan in the community. Also i really hate the dirty and uncutted-uncorrected card photos and i´m replacing these with better sticker sources and cleaner card images. If you or other snes fans want to know what are my sources for snes/sfc art i give you a list if you feel motivated to make something for missing media. PAL AND JAPAN HQ SCANS https://www.nintandbox.net/index.php/en/nintendo-boxes-project/SuperNES-SuperFamicom https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/scans/super-nintendo-entertainment-system/ STICKERS https://snescentral.com/scanlist.php?region=EUR&type=cart https://snescentral.com/scanlist.php?region=JPN&type=cart (I´m taking someones from here to improve the euro and japan stack (THE USA ones you´ve uploaded are fair enough, maybe someones need some cleaning but aren´t a bad starting point) And for everything that is not available in scanned sources.. well... i´m looking in ebay for High resolutions pictures, make a perspective correction with gimp, cleaning it and adjusting to real ratios and restoring replacing logos and cleaning dirtyness with colour adjustements and AI enhancers like waifu2x.

And heavily censored as a fanart? i mean covering totally the surface and not using minor workarounds like a star. This one as a example. To at least identify the game uploading as a fanart?

I did a little work replacing old card images with better quality. I stopped to mess with arranged ones tagged as fanart. Better to improve than starting another moderator caos.

Totally agree but big changes in database are something that cames so slowly. It seems that is not interesting for Jason or too messy for him. There´s old suggestions in the database to add specific genres and other stuff for years, but is still a pending issue.

Yeah i Know. We lack of that tag that could solve the problem.

@Jason Carr may i ask you for a suggestion?. When some debate like this one arises, we could offer some questionary to vote changes or a forum section for new suggestions for guidelines?. Most of the time we are moving by our intuitions of what decision could be the best considering how the database and aplication works. Maybe could be good to separate our doubts about missing links or adressed issues in some specific part of the forum named like Guidelines changes debate and suggested additions. The common trait of any contributor is to improve the database and eye candy features of launchbox. i´ve suggested in the past. The guidelines need constant updating and additions when some doubts or missing rules trigger these issues.