FlightRisk

What's odd is @Antropus seem a bit rude. He abandoned the project and does not even respond to any messages or email, even to say "I just don't have time". He works in film effects and is a 3D artist. I tracked him down on Facebook and 2 or 3 other places non-game related where he continues to post regularly. I sent him multiple messages in each place to get an answer. I have no idea why he wouldn't respond as a simple courtesy. He spent so much time on this, it doesn't make any sense he wouldn't at least turn it over to the community and put it on Github for people to continue. Maybe he will reply to someone at some point. Good work on your version of something similar Pacman.

You answered the question. I was wondering if a manual "scrape" had to be done or if LB somehow looks and whenever you add a new game, it automatically puts it in any playlists you have activated.

Amazing. I shall play. An interesting feature of the playlist, since it is just a different view of the same game and same data, is that you can use it to do a bulk edit on games a lot quicker and with less room for error than the manual selecting each game with perhaps cntrl-click and the bulk edit feature. For example, instead of looking through 2000 games to find all the Vector games like "Tempest", "Star Wars" and "Battle Zone", you just use the auto populate feature of a playlist to put all the games into a "Vector Games" playlist. Then I can right click and select "edit" and bulk edit any field I want for all the games at once, for example to change the emulator. Then if you only used the playlist to perform the bulk edit, you just delete that playlist.

How does the auto-populated feature work then?

Lordmonkus - Making wishes come true But what happens if I edit the stock playlists and delete all the roms I don't have now, but add one later? Will it pick it up or do I have to manually add it to the playlist. For example I add a capcom 1 game that I didn't have before? I guess what I am asking is that I don't want to have to track what is a cave game or a cps1 game, I just want it to go into the right playlist.

Then I would like to report a bug ? I went through 2 platforms, my Mame/Arcade folder (2800 games) and my Handhelds. All the backgrounds are the same, black. With transparency, they are a dark gray as you can see from the picture. The only backgrounds that are different out of thousands of games are ones without a 3D Box image that shows your Rubic's Cube logo (it makes those backgrounds purple) and these 3 in the upper right corner that are a dark forest green. So to be clear, of all the thousands of games on my system with image art, only 3 have a different color than the rest. I checked "colorize scrollbar", "colorize game selections", "...popup", ... fade" and nothing at all changed. Everything looks exactly the same. Any thoughts?

This is one of those things I wish there was a manual for. Is there a tutorial anywhere? I want to know technically how a playlist works and what all the options are in the right click "edit" box. Where does it get the names for what is in the list? An XML file? How does it know what to put in what list? What happens if I check and uncheck the "autopopulate" box? Will if refresh my list right then? If I go to the "games" tab and delete the games I don't have, what is it doing behind the scenes? What happens if I delete missing roms in that list and then import games that would have been in that list? And where did all the artwork for the menus come from? Was that in a pack I downloaded? For example, in BigBox, almost every platform is there working. When I select "Williams Classics", all of the wheel art and all of the videos are already there. I assume the videos came when I scraped the platform, but what about the wheel logos? Basically, I want to understand it so I can manage it and not delete something I will need or add things and not notice that they aren't going into the right playlists automatically.

Ok, that was it. So even though all the boxes look identical, there must be something in some of the images that you key on. What is that? How do you determine what color to match? Since it was only games with no image and 3 other games out of 3000 that I could tell, I am going to check them in Photoshop

I don't think this is something I did, but I had a semi-transparent black/gray background border in which every game sits. 3 out of 3000 of them (all in a group) changed to a dark forest green. And when you click on them, the side details panel changes to the same color. Is this a bug? What could cause just a few games to change backgrounds?

I have had clear logos and boxart as backgrounds. When I prioritize backgrounds, they zoom to fill the screen. Yet that doesn't happen with clear logos. When I select marquees, they also seem to be zoomed. How can I get just the 1 to 1 image of a marquee to display as my background when I click on a game and give it the focus?

If in settings, you select prioritizing of clear logos, they don't adjust for the width of the right side panel. So they are centered in the background from the right side of the platform panel to the right side of the screen. This is fine if you have the game details in the right panel disabled, but if you enable it, they don't adjust and center in the screen. For blownup boxart, this is fine, but for something small, it doesn't look right.

I noticed that if I minimize the screen without launching a game, the audio goes away. Whatever Jason is doing to put LB into the background or minimized isn't always working.

If I select a game, sometimes the music for the video running in the right side panel keeps playing while I am playing a game. This is LB.Next 15, Mame .199 and rocketlauncher. I'll try to narrow it down.

Semantics! Are you practicing for the job of press secretary? ?

This is important because if you don't catch it, you think LB.Next is locked up. I am not sure if it matters if you are in windowed or full-screen mode (windows form icon in top left). In either case, I had LB.Next taking up the full screen. I right clicked on several games and went to the menu to import the metadata and artwork. I noticed it was stuck on 99 percent complete with the thermometer bar at the bottom. I tried clicking "cancel" and everything else I could and it just gave the error beep that it was not accepting input. I noticed "1 error" or whatever it says in the bottom right of the screen and thought to use Alt-Tab to see what was open on the desktop since I couldn't see if anything was behind my LB.Next window. Sure enough, there was a message box there listing the file it couldn't download and asking me if I still wanted to save everything else I downloaded. I could continue once I clicked yes on that popup. If that box gets the focus, taking away control from the main window, it needs to always be on top. Not sure if it affects anything, but my screensaver was on when the error occurred and when I moved the mouse to get the screen back, that is when I saw LB was "stuck".

Wouldn't it be easy to have a right click context menu for the left game platform panel with "spacing" as an option? Or in the options where you have the game text spacing just have "menu item vertical spacing"? Or is is not so easy because this is a "theme"? I know everybody thinks their pet peeve is the most important feature, but this seems to be a top request.

I am not sure why this is not in there yet since Jason said this was "feature complete" and that was one of the things on the list as requested by several of us. I looked through all the menus and still don't see it as an option.

This is months old, but thought I would add a solution for searchers. If it is working in RL, but fails in LB and BB, it is usually what @damageinc86 mentioned; the wrong emulator is set in LB. We usually import roms by setting the emulator to "MAME" in order to get the more detailed import window that allows us to filter roms that are fruit/slots, non-working, mahjong, etc. If you don't remember to change the emulator back to RocketLauncher, it won't use RL to do fades and bezels. Go to your platform name in RL, hit cntrl-A to select all the games, then right click and select "edit". Select "emulator" in the dropdown for what field you want to edit and then select "RockeLauncher". It will change all the games to use RL and everything will work the way you set it up in LaunchBox.

Those "hover menus" aren't gone, just not implemented yet. Jason calls them "mouse cursor popup options" and they are on his list. But I'll add a vote for new mind reading technology. I think that is part of Visual Studio 2019 ?

I would love to have that thread here as well. Yeah, it is a bit of a learning curve on the themes. I haven't done it either. If you know Visual Studio, it makes it a little easier. Are there multiple downloads for your bezels, or have you included all in one zip. For example, you have asteroids bezel where it is accurate and covers a part of the screen on the left and one that doesn't. You also have versions from a year or more back and then "version 2" versions. It would be nice to know I have them all to be able to select the ones I want.

@Krakerman, Welcome! A lot of us love your bezels. Can't wait to see your themes. Would you like to start a thread like you have on the RL site to point people to your EmuMovies FTP downloads? Or maybe they can be hosted here too. Not sure how Jason handles what is for download here.

Ah, interesting. You wrote such a great article on BGFX too in another thread! I'll give that a try too.

@Lordmonkus, Have you tried BGFX here or just plain HLSL?

Yep, there is beam intensity, beam_width_min and beam_width max and screen gamma. They all control the line width and if you can see the brighter dots where the vector lines join or touch. Now I just need to figure out the secrete of the RL loader vs. using Mame. Mame sees my .ini changes and also adjust a gamename.cfg file. RL does not. It sets a more limited number of options. When I hit tilde in Mame, I can scroll through a ton of settings, including shadow masks. I read somewhere that RL tells Mame to ignore the .ini files and use RL settings, so I will have to learn how that works or tell RL to let Mame use a settings .ini file.

I must be making some simple mistake. I have the .198 non-merged romset. I noticed I didn't have Pac-Man in LB under Arcade. So I looked and "pacman.zip" wasn't there. I copied it into the folder with the rest of the roms and told LB and clicked on "tools -> scan for added roms". It didn't find anything. So I "imported" it and it worked. Does "scan" work differently than I think?