alfredolvera

Hey @SsjCosty. if it's cool/useful enough for me, I would gladly pay for it. Can you tell us more about your plugin?

WOW! ? That's enough for me, @Jason Carr. Decision made! I'll be sticking with LB and with my support for the foreseeable future! When planning for that overhaul, I would also politely ask for you to look at my 2 video examples above to see (IMHO) the current quality bar with Wall Views on looks, performance, features and flexibility that are on the launcher market and that I would also love to see in BB. With your response, I’m more than confident that I’m supporting the best launcher. Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to read and write your reply. Rock on, LB community and Devs! ?

Hi guys. I will try to make this post as brief as possible: As I’m writing this, my Windows installation is acting funny and two of my hard drives are dying. I ordered a new one and it just arrived and with the weekend now at hand, now it’s the perfect opportunity for me to do a format and clean install of everything. That includes making a backup of my LB installation and voilà, I’m up and running... Or, taking this opportunity to start fresh with another launcher. For the past 3 years of using BB, I’ve seen with envy how much progress other launchers have come in terms of a TV-optimized UI have come. Just a couple of examples: Pegasus. Who I personally talked to this theme developer, (who is a UI designer in his professional life, BTW) offered him money to port his theme to BB and he said that before Pegasus, he started the theme on BB, but found out it was pretty much impossible to do it and he went with Pegasus instead. Playnite. As I’ve talked before here and here and the last time I tried talking about this topic from july 2019, it appears that main issue with BB and the one I’ve been tracking progress for the past +2 years is the lack of support or advancements with the wall view. 95% or so of the themes for BB that have been launched for the past 18 months, new and old, don’t support it and with a good reason: theme developers have told me publicly that its simply not much that you can do with it. I even put on a bounty for anyone interested in creating a TV UI optimized (not wheel or list based) and not a single theme developer came forward. I’m a 37yo man. As many of you, I don’t have a lot of time to manage (let’s not even talk about “playing”) my games. Having and maintaining two launchers, organized and functional, isn’t a possibility for me and now it’s the time where I have to decide what to do. I saw that there’s some option to use Pegasus with LB’s database but that’s also out of the question: Pegasus, in it’s efforts to make it cross-platform isn’t very elegant or efficient with LB’s ways, and for example, all my Steam games that use a INK or URL “executable” don’t work with this method. Also, the community there is small and the developer’s efforts (that are great) are few and far between. I would have to start fresh with Pegasus or better yet: Playnite that it’s starting to grow its community and the developer has been very active with development and support for the past year. I love LaunchBox and I love Jason: Both his ability to code an unrivaled and perfectly organized and functional database/launcher, and what he stands for personally. I’ve decided several years to continue my yearly BB plan instead of the lifetime one to further support him and LB. But it’s time for me to make a decision because even if I value the way I organize them, I also value in the same height the visual experience of how I select and launch them. TLDR: So, this is why I come to you, guys: Do you know if Unbroken Soft. has any current plans/desire/interest to have better support and theme customization and/or theme handling of the wallview or any “grid” methods in particular? Because if I can, I don't want to change launchers and start a library again, but the advancements in other ones are too good for me to ignore. Hope @Jason Carr @C-Beats or any if you guys can help me with this decision. Thanks for reading this long-ass post. I truly am. ?

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that one of the most recognized and respected gaming websites and staff just had a very brief conversation about LB and BB on their latest podcast. It's behind a paywall (and I would pretty much encourage anyone that's interested to pay to do it, their content is superb) so here's a little clip about the discussion. Link: https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/the-hotspot-episode-360/2970-20180/premium-video Cheers, all. Update: Later in the same episode, one of the hosts talks about his BB setup and shows it on camera:Then, the editorial head of the site, Jeff G said: "Look at this diamond-plate-ass, metal-ass pickup-up-truck-looking interface. What are you doing?!" Ahd yeah, here's hoping BB gets a much needed face-lift this year. Agreed that theme wasn't one of my favourites in our community, IMHO 2020-05-01 20-22-56.mp4

Hey @donkeywaffles! Thanks for this fabulous theme! Just one question: How can I display the platform "device" instead of the platform video? I'm attaching what I see, and I want it to look just like the screenshots you posted. Thanks for the help!!

Hey @Everyone I would like to take a moment to try to persuade you to vote for the (in my opinion) one of the most important features in this poll: Big Box Wall View Overhaul My case: As you can see HERE and HERE both @Grila and @CriticalCid (two of the most recognized theme developers) have had problems with the wall view since September 2018, citing limits on what it can do and limiting their creative visions. The goal? A real, well fleshed out, balls out, true 10 foot experience, console-like quality UI, like these dreams: Without these upgrades, this kind of User Interfaces are going to be VERY hard to exist on our premium product, Big Box. Believe me, once we have this kind of upgrades, I think the theme development scene will improve tremendously. Please, to all of you: Vote for Big Box Wall View Overhaul This is our opportunity to tell @Jason Carr that this is the most important thing for the future of Big Box, the main feature that keeps the development going as a succesful business! Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your hard work, Jason!!!

Hey @spektor56! I just tested the plugin's latest versions and it's coming along nicely!!! But I encountered some bugs. Do you want me to report them here? What files would you need to identify the issue?

Just yesterday? Good job, man! Github bookmarked. We'll be looking forward to any updates that you make Thanks for your hard work!

Hi @spektor56 I tried your exporter and as far as I can see, it works fine for simple platforms (NES, MAME, etc) but there are a lot of platforms (Like WiiU, PC games and PS3) where the "rom" isn't just a zip or iso file you can just copy or call from a root directory, as you have to execute an eboot.bin file or something deep in the games folder structure, so in the metadata exported by your plugin, telling Pegasus that all the roms are called EBOOT.BIN in a root folder isn't helpful. Also, having downloaded metadata duplicated for both LB and Pegasus can pretty quickly fill your hard drive, especially if you are like me and have a collection of +10,000 games, so maybe there's a way in the Pegasus xml to call out where the metadata from LB already is, so you can just choose the frontend of your choice with a single roms and games installation. I agree with what you said: LB is just flawless for organizing, scraping and launching games from a KB+Mouse. But, as I said in the past on this forums and after having tested all the themes available here and in the downloader, I just don't think they are good for "10 foot" console-like interfaces for a big TV (like this one) on BigBox. Needless to say, I was extremely excited to see someone working on this and I really hope you can expand it further. Cheers!

Hey @Lahma any new version we can help you test in the meantime? Cheers!

Ditto. Hope @Lahma will have time to work on it soon!

Thanks Lahma! Hope you enjoyed your time out of town. Can't wait for this update Cheers!

Same thing happens to me. Here's the log! Debug 2019-03-04 05-48-46 PM.log

My guess is that you can blame Hyperspin for that aesthetic popularity. I guess people got really used to those selector wheels and clear logos

Yes please!!!

+1!!!

How important is it to you for the startup screen to fade into the game? Is it worth the performance sacrifice to you while playing the game? Not important, especially if it means a performance sacrifice. How important is it to you to use bezels? Are they worth the performance sacrifice to you? Not important, especially if it means a performance sacrifice. That's why I try to use Retroarch (which have native bezels support) whenever I can. What features are you most looking for with startup screens? I always wanted them used with fan art backgrounds, mainly to hide the fact that sometimes from a cold boot Cemu, Retroarch and others can take up to 30 seconds to load on a platter HDD. Something nice to look at while the game or the emu loads. I would also LOVE to select how much time is the screen active. I think this should be user configurable. What features are you most looking for with pause screens? To be honest, I have no interest in a pause screen since they sound like a ginormous task (having compatibility as you said with windowed, borderless, full screen, different emus, different gfx APIs like DirectX, Vulkan, etc. and so on) with little benefit, and I would love that time to be devoted to other features. But if I had to come up with something, I guess I would like to have Save State and Restore State selection, just like the "classic" consoles nowadays. Good luck, Jason!

To any mod: I think it's better to close this topic, if you agree. Conversation is all over the place, with lots of negativity toward LB and BB, not at all my intention with the original posting. If this gets locked, and some other theme creator wants the bounty, just please know it's still on. Thanks all.

Hey Jason. Thanks for your reply. I’m so sorry to hear that my comments sounded passive-aggressive. English isn’t my first language and I guess my point was lost a little in translation. The thing that I wanted to express is that for me, I felt that this years development felt a bit slow, seeing that most of the features that I wanted weren’t a priority. It’s the same for other that also wanted other features developed, but I also understand that most of the prople are happy with all the new improvements. I saw that there were lots of people happy with BB controllers perfomance, but i have a somewhat beffy PC and I personally didn’t noticed them I also saw that most were happy with nested options, but I personally don’t use them . I did use the new MAME importer for cleaning the arcade section of my games , so I was pretty happy with that ☺️ Its great to hear that the wall view will be developed further. Thanks for that!!! And sometime ago I learned that you should put your money where your mouth is, so here’s the latest payment for my lifetime subscription: P01-3869046-9772617 I would copy here the other payments but I’m on my phone ? not the best way to search for old emails So, again: thanks for the support Jason. I’m looking forward to development in 2019. BTW that feature from the poll for downloading themes from BB its going to rock! And also incentivize more people to develop themes, I imagine. cheers!!! ???

That's extremely sad to hear, @alec100_94. I don't have lots of experience with programming but reading your frustration was heartbreaking to read. Care to enlist the limitations that you encountered with XAML, so maybe Jason can comment on them? You can't just swing by with a purrrfect video and leave! JK. Hey Jason, care to comment something on the sentiments that me and others left on this thread? It would be great to know if the wall view isn't a priority now, or if it will be developed more when time permits. Thanks!

Democracy SUCKZ!!!11! We should be able to vote with $$$. LOL JK! ?

Thanks, @Lordmonkus. I try to follow LB's development closely and I did vote on the last feature poll. I'm also very aware that this is mainly a one-man project and I try to keep my expectations realistic, when development time comes into consideration. I can only guess that nested categories were also a huge task to complete since I do know a little bit of database management, but as I said that wasn't a feature that I was looking forward to, but as the poll results showed there were lots of people that wanted it, so kudos to them and to Jason for being able to do this!!! Again, this thread isn't a "OMG JASON YOU SUCKZ DEVELOP FASTER!111!!" one. It's just a reminder that there are people like me who would love more work on BB's grid view, and to offer any theme developer a little bounty if someone would like to tackle a theme like the one discussed. Cheers!

That's great to hear! I requested at bitbucket the Now Loading screen revamp back in january and it's great to hear that it will be looked at https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/3522/request-definable-now-loading-box-or That's exactly right, I'm sure that everyone here has a feature that they consider "critical" and would like to see it worked on next. For me, I don't use nested categories, and I'm just hoping that the grid view in BB can be updated and expanded. EDIT: I can only guess that nested categories were also a huge task to complete since I do know a little bit of database management, but as I said that wasn't a feature that I was looking forward to, but as the poll results showed there were lots of people that wanted it, so kudos to them and to Jason for being able to do this!!! Well, as you can see in this thread both @CriticalCid and @Grila (both fantastic theme developers, I might add!) said that "I can say that the current BigBox grid view lacks some very important features" and "Yeah, the Wall/Grid View is really limited in its current state." As I said, I'm not a theme developer but it sounds to me that there currently some limitations that make a grid theme like the one on the video or the one that @PlayingKarrde made kind of difficult to do on BB's current state. I would love BB's implementation to be reworked so the grid view can be as flexible as it can to be able to accommodate more themes that aren't based on the wheel or vertical list layout. Not complaining and I'm not feeling entitled to anything, here. Just another user wanting to have a productive conversation of BB's future