GreenGriffon
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Posts posted by GreenGriffon
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Betas aren't just advance previews. They can and do contain bugs, stability issues, and in-progress features that are being field-tested. Jason constantly provides fair notice about this.
If you don't have the time or the patience to handle those possibilities, opt out of the betas and stick with the official releases.
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Nice work, thank you good sir.
I'll be testing after tomorrow. Tomorrow evening I get to go to the Marvel premiere of Avengers Endgame
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There are plenty of use cases for being able to hide platform.
Just in my own situation, there are platforms that I've added before I've properly configured the emulator. I wouldn't want people browsing that platform in BigBox and trying to load a game that isn't ready to play yet.
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6 hours ago, damageinc86 said:
This is especially useful for all the different arcade games with unique buttons. Come to think of it, it would probably be just as useful for consoles if someone were to go into the game's manual and then make an image with what each button did like your example.
I've actually done this by system as well for the home consoles on my setup. The arcade games are the only ones I have a unique per-game control scheme image for at the moment, but I'm slowly making more.
I've had dozens of people play on my arcade cabinet, and it's always the same problem. They start a game, then turn to me and ask, "Hey, how do I play this game?".
It's not a problem with my RetroPie setup, as you can set unique launching images for each rom. They just have to be named a certain way.
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I've brought this up before, but with pause screens on the way, now seems like a good time to make the request again.
Please - I'm begging you - allow us the ability to set a particular image (or perhaps a new image category?) as the pause screen for each rom.
If we can't easily do this as a startup screen, being able to press a button mid-game to see the controls would be the next best option.
Thank you!
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Man, not sure how I missed this project. Really beautiful box art Mr. RetroLust.
Thanks very much for all your hard work.
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Awesome work, Krakerman. This is phenomenal work.
Do these only work with RocketLauncher? Or is there any way to adapt these to MAME as well?
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Hey RetroHumanoid, love your theme, and it's become my default on both of my cabinets.
Quick request if it's not too much to ask. Would it be possible to add a game view showing the 3D box, just without the carts or the spinning CD's?
The reason I ask is, there are tons of bad images for those that get pulled down. For example, CD's without transparency, so you're left with a spinning white box. It just looks sloppy, and takes away from the otherwise awesome look.
Thanks for any consideration you can give this request.
GG
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9 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:
Beta 5 is out now with some major Big Box theming changes/improvements, including new support for platform-specific games views, performance improvements, and bug fixes. See below for the details:
Some very nice quality-of-life changes for theme creators. Well done, sir!
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8 hours ago, Retrofrogg said:
Thanks for your reply @Jason Carr, that sounds great. @GreenGriffon - just because you consider it "nit picky or of questionable value" doesn't mean that everyone else does. I think Jason's doing a fine job of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Yes, he is doing a fine job of prioritizing. And, the community polls are an effective tool in helping do so. Isn't that exactly what I just said?
And to add to your point, what one person wants isn't necessarily what everyone else wants. Hence, I repeat, the community polls.
We've come full circle.
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1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:
Honestly I would never have expected people to have that many preferences regarding the order of the screenshots in the sidebar, but I'll add it to the list of features to add to the next community poll.
Any project that allows an open dialogue with stakeholders is going to open itself to all sorts of requests, some of which could be considered nit-picky or of questionable value.
I think sticking to the community polls has been an effective way to avoid Launchbox suffering from too much 'scope creep', which can doom any project.
Just my take, anyway.
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8 hours ago, neil9000 said:
But what about people like myself that dont want the game title screenshot first? If it was added it would need to be a option that the user could specify in the options. So not as easy as just changing the priorities in the code for Jason.
Not that I think this is a priority, but I wouldn't want the title screenshot appearing first either.
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Hi @Jason Carr, on the latest official 9.3, I'm having a problem.
When exiting any MAME game, BigBox loses focus, and I have to hit Alt-Tab to make it the active window again. Never had that happen before this build.
I thought maybe it had to do with the startup screen because I could still see it when I alt-tabbed out. I tried disabling the feature, but the lost focus issue still persists.
My install has no mods, 3rd party plugins, or anything odd. Just using the CriticalZone Blue theme.
Thanks.
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Excellent. Am I right in assuming that the startup load delay will be roughly how long the startup screen will appear before a game is loaded?
And to answer your last question from the previous thread, yes, I was definitely asking for a new image group in LB. That way, we users as well as theme creators could (hopefully) have more control over the startup image displayed for each game or system.
Thanks very much!
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1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:
This does work already as-is, sans for the fact that there's not a specific new image type available in LaunchBox for it, so you'd have to hijack an existing one. But, for example, if you just put those images in as fanart on your games, then they would show up just fine in the default startup theme, and it's easy to remove the extra stuff if you want to.
I'm not sold on the thought that adding images directly into the startup theme instead of XAML would be the best solution here.
Thanks @Jason Carr. I get what you're saying, but this sounds like it would create a giant problem with every LB theme that uses fanart as backgrounds. Looking again at my use case where I'd like to display the controls for a game, I would suddenly have those instructions as the backdrop while browsing games in BigBox. That would look terrible.
I think it's worth clarifying the approach I'm pitching. Not replacing the XAML theme - simply allowing the user (if they wish) to override the themed startup for a game or system by having a properly-named startup image in the right place. Nothing more than that.
Or, perhaps another image folder type called "startup screens" or something could be created, and we could use that for this feature going forward?
If there isn't any interest in allowing that flexibility, I completely understand and won't say another word about it. Thanks for giving it consideration though.
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16 minutes ago, Lordmonkus said:
This would be better for the pause screen function once that is added, the loading screen goes too quickly to really read it on my system.
Good point, but this is just my particular use case where there is actually something to read.
Other users might simply want to choose their own specific game or system artwork rather than random fanart / backgrounds, which tend to vary greatly in both quality and relevance.
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2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:
A single static image would be a pretty boring way to start games, and it would be missing the progress bar, so I'm not sure that that's really worth implementing on its own. Right now the default startup theme just uses the game's fanart background, but it would be easy to tweak the theme to display any image type you want in the background. So long as you can get the images into LaunchBox, it should be fairly easy to use them as startup screens with a simple theme tweak.
Thanks @Jason Carr. I wasn't actually speaking about something like a fanart background. That would indeed be boring. I meant something more specialized.
Here's one of my own WIP artwork projects as an example.
With hundreds or even thousands of games on a given device, I want to be able to show my users the controls for each game using a launch screen. This art is intended for Retropie (I build custom Raspberry Pi retrocades). Going forward, I would love to be able to do this with my full-sized cabinets that will be based on Win10 with Launchbox as the frontend. Obviously my particular launch screens are specific to the joystick layout I'm using, but it's just a rough example for illustration.
Here's the logic I'm proposing. Each LB platform has an image folder called "Startup Screens". Each rom that is loaded searches for an image in the following order:
1. romname.jpg (a per-game launch screen)
2. default.jpg (a general launch screen for the platform)
3. If neither exists, the "themed" launch screen is generated
Feel free to completely shoot this idea down, but I think it would be a tremendous addition that would give the user total flexibility over the launch image feature, and yet another reason to abandon the use of RocketLauncher.
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2 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:
Next week I'll start on the emulator-specific settings, and we'll start perfecting the startup screens.
Hey @Jason Carr, I'm loving the startup screens feature being added, so thanks for working on that.
Quick question - would it be possible to include the option to use a single image selected by the user as a startup screen (rather than one generated by a theme)?
The reason I ask, is because there's already a wide variety of loading screens out there, by emulator as well as by game title. It would be great to be able to choose either a theme, or be able to have select image that can be displayed per title, or per emulator.
I don't know how much extra work this would involve, but thanks for any consideration.
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3 hours ago, RetroHumanoid said:
Sorry...got some sleep then thought about it
overwrite this one in the views folder of the wii-u addon
No worries. With everything you've created here these past few weeks, I'm amazed you get any sleep at all!
Thanks for the fix.
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48 minutes ago, RetroHumanoid said:
Make sure you are using the Wii-U addon from "Unified Refried - Consoles - v1.6.1" and you are in Wheel3GamesView for spinning discs
Sorry, now I'm confused.
I'm indeed on Consoles 1.6.1, however I'm using View #2 with the wheel fade for all of my consoles.
The disc-based systems all show spinning discs in View #2 (thankfully the cart systems don't spin). For some reason Nintendo Wii-U game discs do not spin.
This is a bug, or intentional?
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Small bug report...
For the Wii U platform, for some reason the discs don't seem to spin.
Awesome theme, thanks for all the hard work.
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1 minute ago, natemac00 said:
@Jason Carr Just to nit-pick, these are "Offical Beta Releases", it would only be unofficial if 'I' edited your code and made a release. But you are the developer and are releasing it.
It's not unusual for a developer to label their own beta/non-RC builds as "unofficial". Sometimes that word is even used interchangeably with "experimental".
Regardless, Jason can call his own work whatever he likes
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34 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:
Beta 9 is out now with the following:
- Improvement: Scraping is now improved for no-intro ROMs with tildes (~) in the file names
This has been driving me nuts for a long time - thank you!
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Any improvements are worth the minor effort of having to click a button to enjoy them.
Great theme project, thanks for all your hard work.
9.8-beta-1 Released
in Beta Testing
Posted · Edited by GreenGriffon
Not sure about other emulators, but I know the keystroke to pause MAME is 'P'.
Since that's helpful for pausing and tweaking options within MAME, I would choose something other than that key.