CriticalCid

Now that you are adding new fields to LB at the moment, is there any chance to finally get the „Max Players“ field added from the LBDB into LB?

Hey Austin, how’s it going mate? Great to see you around here again. That’s definitely a nice little background video you made there

Great improvements! I like it how you make more use of LaunchBox extensive metadata. Just a small note: I've noticed that you have listed the release date twice. One time at the beginning of the information panel and another time at the right bottom.

Unfortunately you would need to edit the XAML as well because @eatkinola changed some of the syntax that is used with his plug-in.

I wouldn't give the image a specific size and just set the stretch property to fill the grid.

Yes, I don't keep the sub-version numbers in the title anymore. All v2 archives were updated to 2.2

Updated to v2.2! Changelog: v2.2 - LB v7.15 Beta (12/03/2017) Updated: @eatkinola’s video engine for the background videos was updated to the latest version. It now uses WMP or VLC (prior it only used WMP) based on your "Video Playback Engine" settings in BigBox. If you have performance problems try to change the video engine first and see if that helps. I think the changelog is pretty much self-explanatory, huge thanks to @eatkinola for constantly working on refining the engine! I'm really interested to hear from you guys how the new version performs for you, please let me know

Your drawings are just so beautiful, incredible job man! For these few days that you are messing with BigBox theming you’ve created a pretty solid first version of your theme, respect! Of course there are definitely some things that can be refined like adding the platform name in the PlatformView because as you don't use any clear logos I have absolutely no indicator on which platform I am when there is no image for it. A generic default background image for the GamesView which is used when there's no image for the platform would be great as well because the View looks kinda broken with a pitch black background. Also the Play Mode info in the GamesViews doesn’t really fit in that small box at all. I understand that all of this involves some more time consuming artistic choices so it's absolutely no biggie considering how fast you've converted it Just a small tip: You can disable all Views you don’t use in your theme in the ThemeSettings.xml inside your theme folder (except both TextList Views, they can’t ever be disabled for some technical reasons) Oh, and I’m sure that you will be bombed with requests for new platforms, platform categories and playlists as you have a lot more systems you can play on the PC compared to the Pi, so you better start hiding

There are 2 different types of star ratings in LB that you can/have to implement independently from each other. Your personal ones (the only ones you can currently add to your theme) and the community ratings (the ones you see in the database). Jason just recently added support for the community ratings inside LB in the latest beta version but as far as I understand it still needs to be added into BigBox as well. If you want to try out the beta and be ready once Jason has added support for community ratings inside BigBox than you can activate beta updates in the LB options: Tools -> Options -> General –> Updates When you do this you should also follow this thread here for feedback, error reports and update news: Or you just wait for the next stable release and work with placeholders for now. For example you could add the personal ratings twice and replace the second one with the community ratings once they were added.

Yes, the DataBinding approach works as well but I would suggest to use a more dynamic version for it. Your current code is fine if you have a manageable amount of platforms or just want it for specific platforms, but it gets really messy the more platforms you add and you would also need to add every new platform manually. So I highly suggest to use this code here instead: <TextBlock x:Name="BackgroundPlatformName" Visibility="Collapsed"> <TextBlock.Text> <MultiBinding StringFormat="{}pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/retrorama/Images/Theme/Gamelist/{0}.jpg"> <Binding Path="SelectedPlatform.Name" /> </MultiBinding> </TextBlock.Text> </TextBlock> <Image Source="{Binding Text, ElementName=BackgroundPlatformName, FallbackValue='pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/retrorama/Images/Theme/Gamelist/Default.jpg'}" Opacity="100" Stretch="Fill" RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="HighQuality" /> What this code does is to create a hidden TextBlock which gets populated with the correct path for the image as it uses a multibinding method to insert the name of the currently selected platform as a variable. The image element on the other hand just points to the content of the TextBox to get the file path from there. You can also specify a fallback value which gets used as default file path when there doesn't exist a file named like the platform title, because otherwise you would just get a black screen if you hit a platform you have no image for. Also a small tip regarding "Active" vs. "Selected": If you don’t need to show data or images instantly than you should always use the “Active” instead of the “Selected” tag. “Selected” is a known performance killer and if you call a lot of them in your View then you can really bring BigBox down when you navigate really fast through your collection or when the attract mode kicks in. So try to avoid "Selected" when it's not really necessary.

Hey Phil, great to see you here The TransitionsPresenter has always a small delay in it that you can’t disable but you can try this instead: <Grid.Background> <Image Source="{Binding Path=SelectedPlatform.BackgroundImagePath}" Stretch="UniformToFill" RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="HighQuality" /> </Grid.Background>

Your theme turned out great. Good job on this!

Yes, unfortunately it's indeed not possible to deactivate the TextList Views.

If there already exists one than yeah, sure. If there isn't one than you have to send me all the artwork for it and I build it for you. See the requirements in the first post for requests.

Currently the audit only checks your image categories/priorities and not single image types. If you only want to check the actual Clear Logos than you have to disable all other images types in your Clear Logo image priorities settings. I completely agree that this is not very intuitive and an option to audit every single individual image type would be great.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that this will ever happen as things such the Autohide stuff are hardcoded in the theme code itself and aren’t controlled by BigBox. @psych0matt You would need to edit the theme code for that and remove the trigger that causes the autohide. @SNAK3ATER should be able to tell you which line you have to remove

Ah, I see what the problem is. Replace all instances of SelectedPlatform with ActivePlatform And if it’s still lagging replace SelectedGame with ActiveGame The search & replace feature of your text editor comes in really handy for such tasks. @viking Selected.Platform and Selected.Game are known performance killers and it’s better to only use them if you need to show the element / get the value of it instantly. Active.Game and Active.Platform have a small delay before they get updated and therefore have an enormous better performance when you scroll quickly through your collection. Maybe you should change that in your theme

I hadn’t specific dimensions in mind when I created the theme. I just tinkered around with the sizes/spacing until they fitted for all popular wheel sets that I had at that time (Default Clear Logos, SilverRing, Crylen and Zombeaver’s set). You could try out the aspect ratios of one of these sets and see if it works for you.

Sorry for the late response. It should be possible but unfortunately there isn’t an easy solution as it seems that I can’t call the banner images directly with the standard BigBox elements, so I have to build a workaround for it. Unfortunately I don’t have any time to dive in any theming at the moment but I come back to your request once my current real life situation has calmed down a bit.

Yes that’s completely normal and the reason why you have to add the Backup folder as Add-Path in the first place. The scanner does remove absolutely everything that is not 100% correct in the source folder. Besides outdated files that can also mean files that were simply renamed or moved around in the newer MAME version. The rebuilder will automatically fix/update these files and put them back to the source folder.

I guess I could make it clearer, you’re right with that, I can't just assume that everybody knows how the Fanart background system works. But on the other hand have you “Background Videos” enabled in your options so don’t be surprised if you get exactly that. WIth that said, it is completely unrelated to your playlist issue but if this solution works better for you than great!

I think you understood the term FanartOnly a little wrong here. It simply means that it uses the default Fanart background code in all Views like the Default theme. And just like in the Default theme it will use the platform/game video as background instead of the Fanart images If you have background videos enabled in your options. Of course I could force disable background videos to make it “really” FanartOnly and avoid confusion but I don’t see the point to artificial restrict the options and preferences of the users.

Your folders are correct, they look the same as for me

I’ve just created a Metroid playlist and it works completely fine on my end with your videos. I'm sorry to say that at this point I have no idea how to help you any further. I’ve encountered the same problem with playlists before in older revisions of the background video plug-in but I thought that they were all gone as I've never had any issues with it in its current version. Maybe @eatkinola can think of anything else on how to help you? I can’t promise an exact date any than “soonish” but eatkinola is currently working on a new version of the video plug-in that may or may not could solve your problems, I don’t know. If you are willing to wait I can get you the beta version of the new CriticalZone version once it’s finished and if the problem still persist we can further trouble shoot it.