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LaunchBox Beta Testing


Jason Carr

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Jason I've tested the new version on desktops in my bedroom and kitchen. I also tested on both a tablet and on my new Windows HDMI stick and the performance of the animation in BigBox is very good in my room and in my kitchen. It isn't bad on the tablet or the stick which both have Haswell Atoms in them, but I will probably opt out of using transitions on the lower speced machines anyway. Things look great as every thing is progressing BigBox is on par with Plex Home Theater for delivering a stunning visual platform to access your media from (and that is no small compliment coming from a raging Plex addict like myself)
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Hi, Have to say this is an incredibly nice (option-rich and visually) front-end. Just purchased it and was pretty amazed how well it runs and with the Big Box mode even playing videos! My biggest initial concern is there's currently no filters in big box mode for displaying only installed games (or in the program at all, really, but you can setup a custom filter I suppose - still for a gaming software, a field for whether or not the game is actively installed would be nice). This seems to be an issue more for big box where it's harder to navigate through 100s of games than the regular mode. I imagine this feature will eventually make it in, but it'd be nice to have for sure! I don't leave a ton of games installed, so despite owning 100s of games, maybe 10 or so stay installed at a time. Having to browse through a list of 100s of games to select one of those 10 seems like a bit confusing to me, sorry if I overlooked an option that's already in as I'm new to the software.
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hi Jason, Sorry upfront bro. I realized some things this weekend. 1) Something was not right and I couldn't put my finger on it. I fell in love with LaunchBox because of multi-platform, multi-row, box art / banners. BigBox does not have this. Its scrollable titles. 2) BigBox does not have borders, shadows, and the fan art is being wasted in the background. There's no definitive sectioning. Everything is just flat on the screen. The fan art is only showing at 30% brightness by default probably in case of white or light colored images so you can read the description. using up the whole screen for stuff may be a bad thing. 3) The default platform images, especially the PC one has to go. Again, they're just sitting there as a square. When I look at those images in the screenshots section of your website it just doesn't even compare. BigBox should be like that just couch and idiot friendly. When my wife or guest pick up the controller I don't want there to be chance of them deleting my whole database. You know what I mean. Again sorry Jason. Just my opinion. By the way it runs a lot better now although I did turn off the transitions. I like the fading from section to section though.
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Hi @bookw, I do see your point. That is less of an issue with Steam these days, as you just get prompted to install a game if you try and run a game that isn't installed. But yes, I suppose we do need a way to filter out uninstalled games. You'd be surprised how little that is mentioned, though; believe it or not. If it was a regular request I would have added it by now. But I agree, it does feel like a very important feature. Hopefully it won't be too difficult to add and I can get it in soon.
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@Game Lounger, I'm always happy to hear feedback, but there's absolutely no reason to shed anything in such a negative light. Quite honestly, I'd much rather hear "I don't care for this" and "I don't care for that" than "I hate to have to break this to you, but your whole concept is flawed". I don't really know where you're coming from, but your feedback is not at all constructive. I don't ever mind if people call things crap, so long as they present a better solution...but it seems you haven't, so I don't really know how to turn your comments into anything positive.
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@Jason new transitions are very smooth and are working good am more and more a BigBox user also my daughter loves it as well (and the animations transitions) and is getting better than me at manouevering around it. As for the direction of BigBox i wouldnt like it to change more like LaunchBox with borders etc, if there was then possibly there wouldnt need to be a BigBox mode, LaunchBox on its own would suffice. As for platform images if people dont like the images they can change them through LaunchBox platforms to images they'd prefer themselves personally i like the majority of the images supplied and any ones i wanted to change i have. Looking forward to the next release already. And thanks for such a wonderful frontend.
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Hi Jason, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it to come off like that. Believe me when I say that I appreciate all your hard work so so much. The concept is not flawed. Actually it's almost perfect. Functionally it does pretty much everything most of us want / need. You are a very thoughtful developer. Thank you! Just installed beta 35. BigBox crashed without an error code while I was going through the options area. Ill try to reproduce it.
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@Game Lounger, sorry I interpreted you negatively. No worries at all; it's just hard to read into flat text sometimes. Per the crashes, I was afraid of that. Some of the performance optimizations I made I knew were risky. They're gonna be hard to solve without any kind of error text, especially if they're random, so any and all details you can give me will be helpful. Thanks much. Oh, what version of Windows are you running? (Sorry if I've already asked.)
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Heya. First, I'll note I have a pretty big collection in LaunchBox, and it's always ran a little bit slow until that performance optimization a few betas back - now I can scroll through my platform libraries pretty smoothly either in LaunchBox or in the BigBox mode. Reporting a positive success there. (Win10 with my LaunchBox/collection on SSDs, 7,000 titles.) Now for my greedy suggestion. I really like adding music/movies to each file in BigBox, but I was wondering if there was a way to do that with platforms (and the "front page" of BigBox mode) as well. Example: You select Nintendo 64 in the scroll menu, and then you can have a general N64 trailer or whatever playing. Having that (with an option for a default soundtrack to play in the background while navigating BigBox until you select whatever) would make for more of an arcade experience, IMO. Unless this is already doable to some degree. Then I'm blind. Much obliged on the program in general, I've messed with a lot of different frontends for years and this has been the best by far.
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Most of what you've asked for is actually planned. So just give it time. Remember to all the new forum posters, Jason is the only coder on the project, with a family and job. So sometimes, certain area's can take a while to get updated. If its on the list, its on the list. :P
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Haelstrom said Works for me. I've lurked here for a while, I'm honestly surprised how often the client gets betas. I'm used to programs in this scene taking years to get minor updates, haha.
He's alone, not lazy. :P We've also talked about making LB open source in the past and putting it up somewhere like Git. But we pretty much mutually agreed that it wouldn't be a good idea, at least for the time being and a good while more than likely. I try and do a lot to help. Watch the forums, answer as much as possible. I get 20-40 e-mails a day. xD I also worked on the Trailer, Some Photoshop stuff, maybe a shirt in the future. There are others here also who work hard just to make LB better. Our community really has done a lot of cool things and really shaped how LB turned out. I remember in 3.0 Jason and I talking. I was always suggesting random stuff. I believe a Theatre Mode, which is what we called it then, was talked about. Even way back when. A few of us have also gone out of our ways to test emulators and find the best auto-population settings. Speaking of which, I still don't see the emulators in LB that I gave you a while ago Jason. ;)
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I'm on beta 34 at the moment and when I just launched BigBox I got an error linked to the update window - see images. Actually there are 2 error boxes associated it seems with the 2 buttons in the window. If both error boxes are closed, they can be made to reappear one at a time by hovering over NO followed by YES after you close the NO error box. LaunchBox itself pops up the beta update window without errors.
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