Videos and/or animated GIF's for LaunchBox game icons...

[CadetStimpy]

When I'm browsing the games on my PS3, some of 'em have a little repeating video-clip (w/sound, sometimes) for the 'icon'. That might be an interesting option for LaunchBox. Naturally, you'd want to be able to select whether you wanted an available video-clip for the game icon, or just the static icon. I dunno, maybe that's a lot of overhead, but with recent hardware power, I believe it's feasible. You could, of course, only display an animation for the selected icon (not all icons on the screen, as that might be "too busy", anyway). I think it could be cool...

[Jason Carr]

Hi Stimpy, are you thinking for Big Box or LaunchBox or both? I can see that being pretty cool, though I still have a lot of work to do on the LaunchBox games list in order to support animation. The LaunchBox games list uses GDI+ which doesn't support much of that very well. I need to switch it out to use WPF or DirectX, or something.

[CadetStimpy]

Actually, I was thinking both, but it sounds as if it may be more work than the 'coolness' would be worth, but that's your call.

[SentaiBrad]

That sounds really cool, I only have one worry, and its performance. We have some performance issues on even half way decent PC's now, then add in video / gif's? I mean... 1 or 2 wouldn't kill a machine, or even a small library of say 50 games. But multiply that by my library? Would it be something that can be implemented well enough and possible with GPU help? Also, new Premium Feature?

[Jason Carr]

Yeah, it'd be optional, of course.

[CadetStimpy]

Brad, if only the selected game was animated, and the non-selected ones were static, that wouldn't be much of a performance hit, would it? Or even if just the ones you could see on the screen (not your entire library) were the only animated ones, perhaps that wouldn't be too bad, either.

[SentaiBrad]

Maybe the ones you have selected could move / play, but this would also still require a lot of disk space and ram to perform these functions. The video / gif would need to be loaded in and out of RAM each time, page files etc. I really do like the idea, but I am more curious now if it is out of the current scope of LB. Granted, LaunchBox can be made to adapt to anything, so we could eventually get there. Especially with proper DirectX implementation. It would require another pre-req program like .Net but it could tap in to more power for LB. It was also never a question of if it will be optional. I know your thought process at least that much Jason, my main concern over the complexity of this is will it be a premium feature.