SentaiBrad Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 He should be soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CADScott Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 CliveBarker said Congrats to Jason and the community for constantly improving LaunchBox. If Jason can develop LaunchBox full time, this can only get better. Agreed! In the short time I have been a LaunchBox user, I have seen some amazing changes and additions, and this from a single person working part time! I have had just enough development and coding experience to know how much effort Jason must put into this amazing software, and it must be incredible to see it and the community that is now around it develop and grow. Very much looking forward to the future direction of this amazing program, which I must say is almost single handedly responsible for my rekindled interest and obsession with retro game playing and collecting. Congrats Jason, and many thanks for your outstanding efforts! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 22, 2016 Author Share Posted February 22, 2016 Thank you very much, guys. My last day on the job is this coming Friday, and then 100% of my time goes to LaunchBox. I can't wait. Thanks for bearing with me for the last couple of weeks, of course my work is heavy right now since I'm leaving. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 Alright guys, new beta is out. I got sick and tired of TGDB going down so I ragequit. We're no longer reliant on TheGamesDB.net. LaunchBox is now connected to a read-only database hosted by us (based on the data from TheGamesDB.net). The data is basically an outdated copy of the data from TGDB, including images. Whenever TGDB does come back up (based on my talks with Flexage I am confident that it will but not sure how long it will be), we can update the data in our own database from the data in TGDB database. Soon enough though we will be branching out completely and allowing users to contribute to our database. I think you'll find that imports are faster and cleaner now. Please test everything you can as soon as you're able; I'm hoping to put this out as an official release as soon as possible, since LaunchBox 5.7 is so crippled without TGDB being available. This has no effect on our plans to add additional scrapers such as MobyGames. That is still planned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Yea, this situation sucks really bad but we gotta move past it, and we are. I look forward to creating a better database with the users here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GatoSoft Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Thanks for this great update, Jason! ^_^ It's good news to know that LaunchBox don't have to rely on TheGamesDB anymore. :D Pretty unstable website in my humble opinion. :$ By the way: if you're going to make a fork from TheGamesDB, count with me for adding items to the database. I've a lot of info and artwork that TheGamesDB doesn't have. :3 By the way, and as side note, I were uploading content to TheGamesDB a couple of months ago and, I don't know why, someday my account seemed to be banned because I couldn't login anymore even when the site were running OK. I was never in middle of troubles in there, but my account was deactivated for some reason and the admins never answered my messages. :( I want to contribute to the community with everything I can so, here I am if you need me. :P Keep up the good work! :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 Awesome, thanks @GatoSoft. I'm hoping eventually we can allow contributions to the database from directly inside of LaunchBox. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LogicalEgo Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Metadata submission inside of LB would be fantastic. I know myself and a few older Hyperspinner's would not have any issue with submitting artwork and the likes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GatoSoft Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 That would be really awesome! :D It sounds a little troublesome because of moderation and such but it would be a great feature that would put a flag on LaunchBox that others frontends still doesn't have. ;) EDIT: I almost forgot: what about metadata from GameFAQs? It have a lot of artwork and info of even rare and obscure games. Could be possible to add support for GameFAQs in LaunchBox? o_o? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CliveBarker Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 GatoSoft said That would be really awesome! :D It sounds a little troublesome because of moderation and such but it would be a great feature that would put a flag on LaunchBox that others frontends still doesn't have. ;) EDIT: I almost forgot: what about metadata from GameFAQs? It have a lot of artwork and info of even rare and obscure games. Could be possible to add support for GameFAQs in LaunchBox? o_o? I have investigated that, because I was interested in seeing GameFaqs support in LaunchBox, but sadly, it seems that GF owners are not interested in making an API. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drybonz Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 I'm checking out the new beta now, but it doesn't seem to be pulling metadata from the new LB/GamesDB server. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 Drybonz said I'm checking out the new beta now, but it doesn't seem to be pulling metadata from the new LB/GamesDB server. Currently, since the database is read-only, there's no reason to retrieve metadata from the server. It's simply using the local metadata database, which has a side of effect of making everything a lot faster. Going forward we may stick to this and provide daily updated database downloads or similar because of the performance benefits. So the images are the only thing being downloaded from the server at this point, by design. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 Another new beta is out that fixes some minor issues (EmuMovies error showing up unnecessarily, unnecessary download errors, etc.). Hoping this is ready for official release, and want to push it out ASAP due to TGDB. Please yell if you find any glitches. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drybonz Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Jason Carr said Drybonz said I'm checking out the new beta now, but it doesn't seem to be pulling metadata from the new LB/GamesDB server. Currently, since the database is read-only, there's no reason to retrieve metadata from the server. It's simply using the local metadata database, which has a side of effect of making everything a lot faster. Going forward we may stick to this and provide daily updated database downloads or similar because of the performance benefits. So the images are the only thing being downloaded from the server at this point, by design. If we need to tag the games with proper titles, etc so that it knows what images to pull, is there still no way to do that as of now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 Drybonz said If we need to tag the games with proper titles, etc so that it knows what images to pull, is there still no way to do that as of now? It should work just as it did before. You shouldn't notice anything different there. I don't really know what you mean, but the metadata search should work as usual and should then let you download images. You *can* download EmuMovies images now though without selecting a game from the database. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drybonz Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 I'm saying the metadata search is not working for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 Drybonz said I'm saying the metadata search is not working for me. Can you explain? "Not working" unfortunately doesn't help me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drybonz Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Never mind... my apologies... I thought it was going to show as "gamesDB" still in the search results. Sorry for adding confusion to your probably already stressful day! o_O Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 No worries @Drybonz, appreciate the testing/feedback. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 GatoSoft said EDIT: I almost forgot: what about metadata from GameFAQs? It have a lot of artwork and info of even rare and obscure games. Could be possible to add support for GameFAQs in LaunchBox? o_o? Yea, we researched at least half a dozen places. We could force out the information if we wanted to, but then they could IP Ban the users who connect. If they don't have an API it won't happen, which they don't. There's also nothing that says users can't have images from GameFAQ's and have them on their HDD. A lot of my JRPG's have images only from GameFAQ's. keltoigael said Metadata submission inside of LB would be fantastic. I know myself and a few older Hyperspinner's would not have any issue with submitting artwork and the likes. I am glad people think that would be awesome, because we do too, and that is exactly what we plan on doing. Just please give us some time to get that sorted. We still have a difficult road ahead of us just making sure our database works, is stable, and will be sufficient for our community. We need to make sure that it is stable before adding in tons of features. If it turns out to be less stable then we hoped, then adding in features to let users add data from within LB will make it more unstable unfortunately. Jason goes full time with LaunchBox this weekend though, so stuff like this will get done a lot lot faster. We also need to check with EmuMovies, because now we have their data integrated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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