CriticalCid

Awesome news! Hopefully we can get this out pretty soon

Keltoigael’s comment made me think that I should give you guys a proper status update for 2.0 as I'm constantly insisting to wait for it regarding small issues and feature requests concerning CriticalZone. To be honest, almost everything except the revised background video engine is ready for release since at least a month. My initial approach for what I have planned for the background videos didn’t work out as I would have wanted it and as I don’t want to release half-baked stuff I will withhold the release until everything is exactly like I want it. Currently I’m working together with @eatkinola to get it done (actually he is doing all the hard work, I’m just giving my input and do the testing ) and we are nearly at the finish line. At the moment we are waiting that Jason adds a missing feature for the plug-in engine so that we can move forward. So @Jason Carr if you read this, check your PMs Jason has also added a Wall View to Big Box in the latest beta version so I will probably include a custom version of it as well with 2.0 but that probably won’t delay the release at all, so no worries And before anybody gets too hyped: Please don’t expect a complete new theme. I've changed and added a lot of stuff but it looks mostly the same as the current version just with a few new added features and a lot of small changes to streamline and unify the whole theme experience.

I just looked again thorugh the theme engine documentation and I doubt that it's currently possible to revert the positions of the wheel items. At least not without coding a custom plug-in for that.

Shoot 'em up. Shmup is one of the most awful abbreviations we have in gaming and I cringe everytime when I hear it...

@BadServo Sorry I somehow must've missed your comment. Good observation, maybe it will help @Jason Carr to track the bug down. @xyzmusik I will offer CriticalZone 2.0 in a full background video version. Hopefully it will be ready for release by end of the month

Fortunately that's an very easy edit. Just use this alternative version of the theme instead: CriticalZoneNoBar.zip

Awesome update! Great job!

Alright, I think I see your problem now. Not all Views feature the video background and use the artwork which you’ve set up in the background image priorities instead There’s nothing you can do about it without manually changing the code in the theme itself. The upcoming new versions of CriticalZone/CityHunter will be available in a “BackgroundVideoOnly” version. So stay tuned for it.

Great to hear

Which version of CityHunter do you use? 1.8.2 or the beta version of 1.8.3? Are all Games Views affected or only a specific one? Have you renamed the theme folder of CityHunter?

I’ve heard that a bug related to your issue was fixed in the latest Beta. You may want to try it again with Beta-3.

CriticalZone uses the exact same code for background images as the Default theme so my guess is that some specific alterations to that code cause lag in other themes for you. I know that RetroFresh uses a heavy blur effect on the background images so my guess would be that the blur is what causes the performance issues for you.

As far as I know does this new feature not require a theme update and should work with any theme out there out of the box. 1. Are you using the latest beta version? (otherwise it won’t work) 2. Have you refreshed the Platform Wheel Image cache after changing the theme? (you have to do this everytime you change the theme if you want to use theme specific platform images) I’ve also suggested to Jason that the platform image cache should be always refreshed when you change the theme because of this reason. I hope he will add this soon so that this won’t be an issue anymore.

It depends from theme to theme and from view to view on how easy it is to merge parts from different themes together. In this specific case it’s luckily quite easy for you. Just go in the “Views” folder of the CriticalZone theme and copy the file “Wheel2GamesView.xaml” file. Than go to the “Views” folder of the BigCouch theme and replace the file there with the one from CriticalZone. Btw. this View will feature the box cover and automatically fade in and out in the upcoming CriticalZone 2.0. So stay tuned

Right, how dare you to report our beloved Chinese spammers!? No idea what happened, I guess a mod accidently banned your account instead of the spammer. I removed the ban from your account. Edit: Oh I see you already noticed

Unfortunately not that I'm aware of. Of course you can still update your set with this methode but you would need to go through your whole collection again and remove all the games that were added by the update process.

As I’ve pointed out in my post above you aren’t bounded to the already existing platforms in the drop down menu as LB will create the platform automatically for you if you just type in a new one in that field. For the sidebar: LB automatically hides any platforms with no games in it to keep the sidebar tidy. Of course they will still show up in the Edit Platform menu for obvious reasons. That they also don't show up in the drop down menu sounds just like a minor bug to me and you should be fine by just typing the name manually in the field.

Go to the playlist of your choice -> select all games with Ctrl+A -> right-click -> edit -> change the platform of the games to anything you want. You can delete the playlist afterwards. Tip: If the platform doesn’t already exist than you can just type in the name of it in this field and LB will create that platform for you. You aren’t bounded to the already existing platforms in the dropdown menu.

I honestly don’t know what Neil means as well, there's absolutely nothing problematic with it, rather the opposite. I'm guessing he just misread your post, so no worries. I for my part really appreciate your offer about adding an interface to your site for LB plug-in creators as I'm a huge fan of your work. So thank you very much

Basically the binding with the filter variable in it. At least the BigBox error message tells me that this is a relative URI when I try to use the binding of my code example above as folder path. Also huge thanks for looking into that. It’s really appreciated

Hey @eatkinola that’s a great plug-in that you have made. Great job! I would really like to add it to CriticalZone but for what I have planned for CriticalZone 2.0 I would need support for relative paths and a property to stretch the video for filling the whole screen. My plan is that the user can set up individual background videos for each filter (platforms, playlists, etc.) and I actually intend to use your workaround for initializing the correct folder paths based on the currently active filter. Also when the folder path doesn’t exist it should be possible to set a default folder path as fallback value which is used instead. For example the XAML code for this could look like this: <Grid Height="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualHeight}" Width="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualWidth}"> <TextBlock x:Name="BackgroundVideo" Visibility="Collapsed" Text="{Binding Path=FilterTitle, StringFormat='pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/CriticalZone/Videos/Background/{0}/'}" /> <aoc:AoMediaElement Folder="{Binding Text, ElementName=BackgroundVideo, FallbackValue='pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/CriticalZone/Videos/Background/Default/'}" StretchVideo="true" IsMuted="true" /> </Grid> I would really appreciate it if you could look into that

So great to see you back @Vlansix. We've defintely missed your great work on the database

To be honest, I find the updated point 5 very vague and confusing. Especially your example with the “+” symbol. Just take the opposite symbol “-“ which can be used as minus but also as hyphen that appears in nearly every entry with a subtitle in its name. Of course I completely understand what your point is but I don’t see any problems when symbols like +, &, -, etc. are getting used for the facing title. Generally what breaks the LB scraper is when characters are used that are not part of the rom set naming convention. For example No-Intro, Redump, and probably almost every other group are only using Low ASCII characters minus the operating system specific ones like /, :, etc. Personally I think we should orientate on that set of allowed characters as well for maximum compatibility with it. Here’s the documentation of the No-Intro naming convention and it’s a very good read of you want to understand a little bit more about the structure of this set. The Official No-Intro Convention (20071030).pdf

Great decision For starters it would be probably the best to just play around with it. Import a few systems and install a couple of themes from the download section in order to get a feeling of how the artwork, themes and views system work in BigBox and what already has been done with it before you start diving into theme creation yourself. The LaunchBox YouTube channel has many great video tutorials for setting LaunchBox up but if you have any questions feel free to ask, we’re all happy to help

Hey @Sub-Zero , it’s so great so see you here! What you try to achieve could be done with the fanart images. “Fanart” just means background in LaunchBox and you can set them for games individually and/or set one as default for the whole platform which gets used when a game has no individual Fanart image (the concept is basically the same like the themes work in HyperSpin). Basically you could set up the blue one as default background for the Wii U platform and then set the ones that differ as individual backgrounds for the affected games. Now when it comes to XAML you can set the positions/sizes/etc. of all the overlaying objects like boxart, wheel, game info, video, etc. The main problem you will probably run into is that BigBox doesn’t support individual layouts (called "Views" in Bigbox) for each system/games (yet!). So for the time being every platform would have to share the same layouts regarding the overlaying objects like video, boxart, etc. But fortunately you are not limited to just one layout as BigBox offers quite a few different Views you can use and edit. For example you have 4 Vertical Wheel Views to choose from which means you can potentially build 4 different layouts you can use for all your platforms (not counting all the other Views like CoverFlow, Horizontal Wheels, etc.) - Cid