faeran

Hi everyone, Another beta round is upon us. This would be a shorter round the usual, as we are hoping to address some of the major issues that we have with 13.19 that have cropped up. Thanks to all who help test these beta versions. Don't forget to include the following information in your feedback to help us out with tracking down with any issues you may face with these betas: Your Windows version Description of the issue Can it be reliably reproduced on your end? Reproduction steps You can opt into the beta within LaunchBox by going to Tools > Options > General > Updates and turning on Update to Beta Releases. If a beta release is available, you will get prompted each time the app opens up, or you can manually check using Menu > Help > Check for Updates. Beta Changelog Beta 1: New Feature: Added a new Teknoparrot emulator profile to assist users with setup Improvement: Achievements scan option now supports RVZ files for Nintendo GameCube and Nintendo Wii using the Dolphin emulator Fixed: The "Attempt to hide console window" emulator option caused flickering, windowed mode, or prevented emulators from launching Fixed: Bug that prevented the Big Box options menu from functioning when the Sounds folder was missing Fixed: Crash related to the Game Save backup, restore, and delete options Fixed: Rare visual errors where Arrange By headers were missing when using custom badges from a plugin Fixed: Badge menu visual issue where parent categories didn't display a checkmark when all child elements were enabled Fixed: .scummvm files can now be imported into the ScummVM platform using the Single Platform and Drag/Drop import wizards Beta 2: Big Box Game Details menu view not fully initializing Known Issues Known Issues in Beta 1: We have been heavily testing the reported issue with Big Box freezing in certain scenarios. We are unable to reliably reproduce it. If you are one user that is facing this issue the following information would be extremely useful: Theme it is freezing on View it is freezing on Which section of Big Box you are in (eg. All Games, Platforms, Platform Categories... etc) Which plugins you have installed What you were doing when Big Box froze (eg. was it in Attract Mode, did you return after a while and press a navigation button and then it froze) Which game did it freeze on? Whether you have 3D Models turned on or off List of transitions used Do you have background music playing Do you have game music playing Do you use videos and source of the videos (eg. Steam videos, EmuMovies videos... etc) Screenshot of the freeze could be helpful Big Box Game Details menu view not fully initializing - Addressed in beta 2

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Yeah, it's because the name search on the GamesDB uses the main name and any alternate names. The alternate name for this game is "Starwing", so when you search "Star Wing", it wouldn't find this particular game.

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I just ran about 4 different types of imports on my TurboGrafx-16 roms, but each time it worked just fine. I assume you are either setting a specific import option I'm not, or your roms are significantly different, or there's some other factor going on that's different than just an ordinary import. Maybe you can take me through the exact process, step by step, option by option, that you are doing. A video could definitely help here.

This is actually an issue with region tagging on the Games Database. If you notice, there's no Europe box on the Games DB for this game. We have a fairly lengthy set of fallback systems in place for this scenario, and it looks like none of the fallback scenarios were hit until the very last one (actually the Android app is missing some of these fallbacks that the Windows app has), which is a hard coded set of region priorities where the NA box is probably set as one of the higher priorities, and therefore, since it found an NA box, it downloaded it. If you look on the GamesDB, there looks to be a bunch of other countries with a box front, but not one for Europe. The simple solution there would be to get a box front on the Games Database with the Europe tag on it. I've adjusted one myself and I'll try and quicken the process to a GamesDB metadata file update so I can test and confirm without having to wait 24 hours for the server-side metadata rebuild.

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Ok, interesting. I just set that same thing up, but not seeing an issue, games are still running fine, so something else also must be configured. If you can, zip up your data folder and PM it to me, maybe that will give us some clues. Good to know. Good deal.

Can you be more specific to what exactly is your symbolic link and how you are utilizing it?

A very specific scenario that we are unable to reproduce on our end. Every attempt at importing either a UNC or mapped network drive is successful. If you can zip up your Data folder and send it to me in a PM that may help track down what's going on in your build.

That could do it, if that's the case for everyone, that should be fixed internally already.

We need one more foundational building block in place before we can look into it, but once that is done, the goal is to make this emulator as seamless as we possibly can. I wouldn't want to make users go through some hassles of setting up dummy files and such if I can help it, so stay tuned. Good deal. Platform videos have already been fixed and tested internally, so they should be good to go. Everything else I mentioned in my response is also fixed or shored up and is ready internally. Unified was definitely not made for a 1:1 screen aspect ratio like that, which is why you are seeing it like that. However, since I'm the one who coded that theme, I could look into what it would take for it to work in that aspect ratio.

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It's referring to these options you can see that are grayed out when on the free version: Big Box has something similar for both Controller and Keyboard controls. From the sounds of it, while your friend would benefit from those options, it doesn't sound like that's their immediate issue.

It sounds like you are referring to creating a platform while in the Platform Category section of LaunchBox, where when you right click on a platform and choose to create a platform, it will automatically place it under that platform. This also happens in Big Box, but you'll also need to be in the Platform Category section in Big Box.

That's too bad. At least internally I ran it for about 2-3 straight days using VLC without any issues, so maybe it's reduced to more of a hardware related issue. At least we all have WMP that seems fixed for the first time ever, so we'll take that win. Internally we've thought about it, and we may as well do it in the future, but there's going to be some trade offs, and we'll have to weigh that to what the actual pros would be if we did this. If we do this and we find there's very little, if no actual real life user gains, it may just not be the smartest choice. We'll be weighing those choices internally. We've ran some extensive testing, but just simply cannot get achievements to not scan properly across multiple accounts, so this might be something on your end. Try and remove your RetroAchievement credentials within the options menu. Restart LaunchBox and then add them back in. Not sure if that will help, but you never know. Also ran some extensive tests but games always did end up importing eventually. I did see that sometimes games were importing slower than previously, although other times where it was almost instant. It's possible it depends on what LB is currently doing behind the scenes at the moment you add the games into the folders, but we'll see what we can do to speed that up, and depending on our findings will depend on when that will make an appearance. One thing to note is that relative pathing is baked into the app itself for everything, including all media and the like, so most likely what your issue is is not related to relative pathing directly. I did some extensive testing to see if I could reproduce what you are seeing. I set up a new version of LaunchBox, created relative paths to both ROMs and Emulators, but they launched just fine. I then set up a network drive version of LaunchBox, set up network UNC paths that were relative to both ROMs and Emulators, but everything worked as intended. The only difference in Beta 4 is that you no longer have to load up the local database file into memory during startup. If you want that benefit right now, then you'll have to be on Beta 4, or you can wait for the release cycle to complete.

Thanks for your beta report. 1. Thanks for letting us know, we will see what we can do for the next beta. 2. I'm seeing platform videos working in most situations here. if you can be more specific about the view you are using and whether you use platform categories, primary and secondary filter sections, and what they are, that could help. I am seeing in specific combinations of these settings that sometimes a platform video doesn't play, so we'll look into that, but I want to make sure I'm seeing what you are seeing. 3. Make sure you upgrade this theme to the latest version (I think it's 1.21), many changes to all themes took place after the move to MAUI (which happened in version 1.16). 4. This is an unfortunate known issue. Not with this update, but with YouTube changing their systems to stop streaming like this from happening. Basically means it broke the streaming feature for all versions of LaunchBox, not just this beta. We've spent considerable time looking for solutions, but there's nothing as good as what we used to use. At best, we found a solution that could download the video and audio streams and then piece them together, which may possibly work for downloading the video locally but no streaming options yet, but we will keep investigating but is unfortunately out of our hands here.

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That's the plan. If you look over the changelog over the last year, a lot of updates tend to include performance improvements of some kind. This one is a bit different in that it's less of a performance update, and more of "let's change how the entire app works". 5000 lines of code changes later and here we are. The SQLite database change is strictly contained to the local database that gets downloaded and used throughout the program. This is not a user's library data (those are still xml files). This is essentially the entirety of the games database in a file. As people add games into the database on the website, this file grows to include it. No user data will be touched with this update, and so there's no concern there. In the future, if we ever do some systemic changes to user data, we'll be sure to make it a big deal and call it out as much as possible.

And depending on how long ago that was, ffmpeg also gets their own updates, so you never know these days. Good observation. Are you still crashing in beta 4? I'm not crashing when using your theme but it brought up a good point that the old star rating elements (which were just text and didn't ever perform well), were replaced with new elements that play a lot nicer. Looks like the old element still needs the binding refresh treatment in order for them to properly show the correct user rating. We'll get that done before release.

Good deal. Not sure exactly what the issue was. If it was with the theme itself everyone would be getting the error, but since I wasn't, I can only assume it was a combination of some theme code and another factor on your machine. I remember maybe 7 or 8 years ago this was brought up and of course you have the whole thing where it would be a huge undertaking, with sweeping systemic changes across both apps to achieve this, but MPV is simply build on top of ffmpeg, so if we were going to go through that hassle, we'd probably lean towards just using ffmpeg. I know @C-Beats would be super happy with another sweeping systemic change on his plate. I'm hearing that his fingers may need something to do.

Looking to answer as many things as possible and clear up some misconceptions in this thread. Thanks for testing this (and to fursphere for testing this). The good news is that it does look like .net 9 has somehow finally solved the extremely long standing issue of WMP's fairly bad long term memory leak issue that previous .net versions have always had. We are also seeing this in the short term (1-2 days) tests that we've done. We also see the issue with VLC, we've updated VLC to their latest stable release and it's possible that it also solves the hanging issue with that as well. Ran some even shorter term tests and haven't had a hang yet, but if you guys want to try this as well, would be nice to confirm. I'm not sure about that thread, but just to put some actual clarity to this, Big Box has always had long term memory leak issues with WMP. If you aggressively run Attract Mode with the fastest settings memory would spike upwards and max out fairly quick (under 12 hours). We've heavily tested this for years, when we were on .NET Core 3.1, then again when we upgraded to .NET 6, and nothing seemed to make a difference. However, WMP always seemed to perform a little lighter than VLC in the short term, and if you don't use attract mode, or don't keep LaunchBox open for weeks, you wouldn't really run into this. The other disadvantage of WMP is the limited codec set it has, but that can be negated by not using video files it cannot handle, or installing a third party codec pack. I'm definitely glad that .net 9, in these early tests, have shown that WMP no longer has this issue. On another note, we spent a good 4 or 5 months last year grinding in Big Box and got it to a point where we could run it for a month without any issues. We ended up finding that Big Box (under normal conditions and using VLC) didn't have memory leaks, but it did have a .net limitation where it wasn't clearing something called the ATOM table out, and when you hit that table's limit after a few days (under the fastest attract mode speed that may not actually be selectable in the options itself) Big Box's performance would severely drop. This should be fixed in beta 4, let us know if you are seeing it fixed on your end as well. It was something to do with changes to .net 9 in how it decided to handle UNC paths.

Beta 4 is out with the following changes: Improvement: This update replaced LaunchBox's legacy XML-based local game database with a high-performance SQLite database. Expect a noticeably faster startup time, lower memory usage, and a solid foundation for even more performance gains in upcoming releases Improvement: The included version of VLC has been updated to version 3.0.21, bringing performance improvements, bug fixes, and updated codec support Improvement: Platform Clear Logo and Icon for Bandai Super Vision 8000 is now included when importing this platform Fixed: The auto-import feature for Playstation Vita games using the Vita3k emulator is now working correctly Fixed: Resolved an error that occurred under specific conditions when using UNC paths Fixed: Badges and Star Rating graphics on the GameDetails view should now work as intended (introduced in beta 1) Fixed: Media Carousel alignment under certain conditions in specific custom themes Fixed: Included 3DO Interactive Multiplayer logo not showing up after platform import This is a huge under-the-hood change, maybe larger than anything we've had. The main change being the switch over from one giant XML file to an SQLite database for your local games database metadata. This file is used for many, many things throughout the app, including all imports, metadata, media downloads, the related games feature, and more. We could make all of this go super fast by loading the xml file into memory, but as the database grew the memory footprint naturally also grew. SQLite allows us to keep the majority of the speediness of the old method without the need to load it into memory. From a user perspective, as the changelog entry states, users will notice faster startup times and a lower memory footprint.

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