sudopinion Posted August 19, 2014 Author Share Posted August 19, 2014 I currently use game-folders for all my games/roms and would like to retain all metadata/images in their respective folders. Is there a way for you to make this possible? XBMC/MediaBrowser currently use this structure for their movies and it seems to work well for games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 19, 2014 Share Posted August 19, 2014 sudopinion said I currently use game-folders for all my games/roms and would like to retain all metadata/images in their respective folders. Is there a way for you to make this possible? XBMC/MediaBrowser currently use this structure for their movies and it seems to work well for games. All of the game data is kept in the Images folder and XML file. We've actually had talks on the forums before about how to change the way LB stores its information. This is already similar to how Kodi stores its information. It uses a userdata folder and an images folder, the only difference is its location based on OS. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Userdata Maybe I'm just not understanding what you mean then? Could you elaborate? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sudopinion Posted August 20, 2014 Author Share Posted August 20, 2014 Could you elaborate? I want each game to retain all its information, assets, artwork etc...indipendently. The paradigm is adopted from xbmc/mediabrowser. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/413403/Paradigm.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 sudopinion said Could you elaborate? I want each game to retain all its information, assets, artwork etc...indipendently. The paradigm is adopted from xbmc/mediabrowser. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/413403/Paradigm.html This is part of the discussion we had actually. Doing that would change how LaunchBox handles roms all together. Right now, its assigned an Id based off Hardware, so each persons game collection is different. If you look in the images folder, you'll notice they're all separated, first by name so its still alphabetical, then by the ID so the program knows how to handle it. That is as far as the separation will most likely go. Now, we have other features planned that could utilize the same structure. So instead of being images it could be Data or something, and everything but the xml data could go in there. That is likely. The XML however, wont be split up. We've discussed splitting it up per game or per console, and the fact is, if that happened it would make LaunchBox operate a lot slower. It may not be too noticeable with a library of say 100, 500 or even 1000; but giant libraries would have even more lag than right now. Instead of parsing one giant file structure, its parsing folder, then folders, then reading each XML separately then parsing the data. How ever, like I said, there are other features planned that would warrant to include pictures and other data together. One of the new features is a soundtrack option, so the images and music could belong together in the same file structure, but honestly I think that is as far as Jason would be willing to go with that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sudopinion Posted August 20, 2014 Author Share Posted August 20, 2014 ...if that happened it would make LaunchBox operate a lot slower.... Indeed it would be slower. Mediabrowser uses a caching service to remedy this kind of problem, and I understand that isn't within the scope of the project here. assigned an Id based off Hardware What? I thought LB was supposed to be portable. I'm confused. ...If you look in the images folder... I know that there is often a need for unique identifiers, but this seems to be...unnecessarily complicated. I also notice that there is some character replacements which is troublesome. I'm certain you're aware that this is problematic. Nevertheless, I really like LB and I look forward to its bright future. Keep up the great work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 sudopinion said ...if that happened it would make LaunchBox operate a lot slower.... Indeed it would be slower. Mediabrowser uses a caching service to remedy this kind of problem, and I understand that isn't within the scope of the project here. assigned an Id based off Hardware What? I thought LB was supposed to be portable. I'm confused. ...If you look in the images folder... I know that there is often a need for unique identifiers, but this seems to be...unnecessarily complicated. I also notice that there is some character replacements which is troublesome. I'm certain you're aware that this is problematic. Nevertheless, I really like LB and I look forward to its bright future. Keep up the great work! LaunchBox is 100% portable. What I meant by ID's is that when you import a game, LaunchBox creates an ID for each entry based on a users Hardware. It's actually a very simple process. The reason why they're ID's is so that there isn't any confusion in the software its self. If LB just read entries based on Name alone, there could be a lot of confusion internally if you have something named the same. The way that Jason chose to make sure there was no possible problems was to create a unique ID. Easy way to do that with the way he coded it is based on Hardware; as far as I believe. As far as character replacements, Windows its self can not read certain characters in certain situations. : being one of them when it comes to names in Explorer. So if there is odd renaming, that is most likely the possibility since the images folder is based also on the importing from TheGamesDB. So LaunchBox can see : for example, and you import a game, it fixes the name to that in most cases. Then it generates the images folder, but has to change certain aspects so that its writable to the disk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 Hi sudo, welcome to the forums. Let me clarify some things here... The ID generation is *not* based off of hardware at all. It's a simple industry standard GUID. LaunchBox does *not* observe your hardware for anything. And yes, LaunchBox is fully portable. Not sure how we worked hardware into the discussion, but that's not right. Brad is right regarding the character replacements in the images paths. It's not problematic if it's done consistently, and it's currently posing zero issues. However, I understand your desire to have everything inside the game folder. This is an option I might add at some point soon, because it keeps getting requested. It will likely end up in the premium version I'm planning for December, however. It is likely to slow down LaunchBox a hare, but I doubt it will be too significant; we'll have to see how it goes when I tackle it. One more thing, we are looking for more help beta testing. Interested? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 Jason Carr said Hi sudo, welcome to the forums. Let me clarify some things here... The ID generation is *not* based off of hardware at all. It's a simple industry standard GUID. LaunchBox does *not* observe your hardware for anything. And yes, LaunchBox is fully portable. Not sure how we worked hardware into the discussion, but that's not right. Whoops. I apparently worked GUID in to hardware based ID's. That is another common practice if you need something based on hardware, however we do not. xD Sorry for that mixup then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sudopinion Posted August 20, 2014 Author Share Posted August 20, 2014 Jason Carr said ...It will likely end up in the premium version I'm planning for December, however. It is likely to slow down LaunchBox a hare, but I doubt it will be too significant; we'll have to see how it goes when I tackle it. One more thing, we are looking for more help beta testing. Interested? Sure. I'll give the beta a go. Are you doing nightlies or have a build repo? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 Great. Nothing that advanced ftm. Just been posting beta releases here: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/features/launchbox-beta-testing Though you're absolutely right, would be good to get nightlies going. I'll add that to my to-do list. Also worth noting is I have an issues list here: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues?status=new&status=open It contains everything: new features, bugs, etc. I'm asking people not to add to the list (I'd rather maintain it myself and get things to come in via the forums), but feel free to browse it (and maybe vote or comment on things if you feel inclined). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 I should have another beta release coming within the next couple days. If you can subscribe to the beta testing thread I linked above, you'll get notified. Thanks, sudo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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