Deleting images/artwork functionality

[Clavius]

Hi guys, First I would like to say that I recently purchased LaunchBox when 6.0 was released and I really love it. You guys have done an awesome job. I've spent the last week or so setting up various emulators with LaunchBox and RetroArch. I've worked with many emulation front-ends (MaLa has been my favorite for years, and it's what I use on my arcade cabinet) and I think LaunchBox is the easiest to set up that I've ever used. Anyhow, the reason I'm posting is that I have a feature suggestion to alter functionality slightly when editing games. If you're editing a game and click the red x to delete an image such as a front box art, it deletes the image from the hard drive even if other games are currently using that image. I think there should be a quick check to see if another game is also using the image before the image is removed. Here is a typical scenario that I've run into many, many times over the last week: 1) Import roms and let LaunchBox scour the database to automatically detect and give proper names for the roms and download art. 2) 95% of these will be correct, but usually there will be a couple of games, such as a game and it's sequel, that are detected as the same game (let's call these roms FunGame, and FunGame 2). 3) Both games will be using the same cover art, screenshots, etc., because LB thinks they're the same game. 4) Figure out which game is detected incorrectly based on the rom name. In this case let's say LB incorrectly thinks FunGame 2 is the original. Right click it and edit the game in LB. 5) Type in the correct name for FunGame 2 and match it to the correct game in the LB database, then let LB download new art for it. 6) Notice that the front box image, screenshot image, and other images for FunGame are *still* present in FunGame 2 along with the new, correct images for FunGame 2. Only the new art is correct, so use the red x to delete the old art so that it is no longer associated with this game. 7) Click okay to exit the edit screen and apply your changes. 8) Now refresh your images and notice that the artwork is now missing for FunGame. FunGame 2 is fine, but FunGame has no art now. Also, this really, really, really, gets complicated to fix when LaunchBox has two games that it insists are the same game when they are not. For example the NES has two versions of Indiana Jones -- "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Taito)", and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (UbiSoft)" It took me absolutely forever to figure out how to get the correct images set up for each of them. The solution was to delete all images for both games, download the images myself with my web browser, then rename one of the games to something completely different, manually apply all the images to both games, then finally rename the game back to what it should be. That was the only way to get it working correctly that I could figure out. So I think all of this may be solved by doing a check to see if an image is in use for another game before physically deleting it. Thanks guys!

[SentaiBrad]

Welcome! Pressing that red x shouldn't delete the image actually, so that might be a bug. Sequels getting caught by the scraper is known, and the scraper is already fairly strict, but it's a fine line. If it's too strict, slight variations may make it so a lot of games aren't found at all, and too much more relaxed and the issues might get worse. There still might be more we can do in this regard though, so we'll take a look at it. Letting LaunchBox change the name of the rom files sounds like a great idea, but that might annoy people more than anything. It also wouldn't work for systems like Arcade (MAME) that require the file names to be in a very specific format. In terms of fixing a game's metadata, you can right click and edit a game, change it's name back, deassociated it with the LaunchBox Games ID (or Wikipedia ID) that it's associted with, click the search box and select the proper game. Once selected, press the red x for the images to clear them out (doesn't delete them for me) then press the download images button to download the new images for the game. Choose what you want to download and click download. Press ok to save all the changes. Automatically figuring out what is mis-matched is a lot harder than it seems unfortunetly. Im not saying it can't be done, it most probably can be, but if we add more logic to our importer it can severely slow things down. Especially for users on weaker systems. Also keep in mind we have 1 developer mainly doing all of this. So maybe I am confused about what you're asking, but most of this is already present if not all (except for checking for duplicates).

[Clavius]

Sorry, I just checked and it seems the image isn't actually deleted from the hard drive (you need to use the Tools > Clean Up Images for that to happen). However, the art becomes unassociated from other games that use it. I assumed it had been deleted because of that reason, sorry about that. However, LB *acts* as if the art has been deleted, if that makes sense. I actually think that LB does a great job regarding detecting roms in the database. It's really, really accurate. Even if you can't improve the detection accuracy I think it's fine the way it is. :) The problem isn't the importer, it's the way LB handles the images after all the importing is finished and something needs to be edited. Also, I apologize if I was unclear; when I said that I had to rename the rom, I wasn't suggesting that LB should rename roms. What I meant was (let's take the FunGame 2 example in my original post) if I edit FunGame 2 within LB (assuming FunGame 2 also has the proper ID now) I just rename the title and leave the ID alone. This was the only way around the problem I had with getting the art to show up correctly for the Indiana Jones games on NES.

[SentaiBrad]

When the art gets downloaded the media gets renamed to the name of the rom. It's designed so that if you have external media (anything) that all it needs to easily work is be named after the rom file or game name and LaunchBox will automatically detect it. If you are playing around with the names it's hard for LaunchBox to assume what the name will be. If you change the game name then you can just download the art for it again, and use the clean up that you found later. It only downloads one set per name, so if you have the same game twice in the same platform, the same front box art will be used to help save space. We might be able to handle this better, but I am unsure how.

[DOS76]

Yeah the scenario of two games with the same exact name on the same platform isn't a common occurrence. I've run into this issue before when having TurboGrafx 16 and PC Engine games in the same platform and wanting to display the US and Japanese artwork together one of the major reasons I went to the split format for the consoles. It doesn't handle this scenario well at all.

[Clavius]

In the case I found the names weren't *exactly* the same, but were really, really close. The only real difference was the parenthesis at the end of the name showing the publisher. Maybe LB is ignoring information in parenthesis? It's possible I'm not explaining any of this in a way that makes sense to anyone, and I apologize. I have a pretty decent understand of how LB works as I've been using it for over a week and have imported many thousands of roms. I could make a video to help explain it better, but for now I'll try one more time. Try this yourself with these two roms and you'll see what I'm talking about. It only takes a couple of minutes to test. :) First, remove all your NES roms from LB and then use Tools > Clean Up Images... just to be sure you're starting from scratch. Take these roms as example. Import both of these and just choose front box artwork, that's all that's need to show the issue: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Taito) (U).zip Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (UBI Soft) (U).zip Upon importing, both of those will show up in LaunchBox as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (this is NOT the problem! keep reading!). Because LB thinks they're both the same game (ID #1859) they will share the exact same artwork. Because LB let's you edit the games this should be an easy fix, right? It's using the Taito version, so let's fix the UbiSoft version. LB displays the name of the actual rom files if you have the information panel on the right turned on. So, select each game until you find the UbiSoft version. Right-click it and select Edit. Now because we know the ID attached to this rom shouldn't be ID #1859, we can left click the red x button near the ID to let LB know that's the wrong ID for this game. Now that the ID is gone, we can click the "Search for Metadata" button that shows up in its place. When we do, we see that there are TWO Indiana Jones games... one from 1991 and one from 1993. I happen to know that the UbiSoft version is the one released in 1993, so let's choose that and it will populate a new game ID #27143. So far, so good! Now that you've given LB the correct game information, it's time to download the correct artwork. Click the "Download Images/Media" button and choose the front box artwork. When you're finished you'll now have 2 box covers and only one of them is correct. This is where the trouble begins... While still in the edit window, use the left/right arrows near the upper left of the artwork box to select the box cover from Taito, because that one doesn't belong to this game. Now click the red x button near the upper right of the artwork to remove the Taito box cover from ID #27143. Now you should have only the correct box cover displayed. Yay! Click okay to exit the edit screen. Now both games are displaying correctly! Double-yay! But wait... are they really? Select Tools > Refresh All Images Uh oh. Now you see the problem. The art for the game ID #1859 should not have been touched. Why did LB remove it? Getting these two different games, that have two different ID #'s and two differently named rom files, to display artwork correctly was very, very tricky to fix. The only solution I found was to: 1) remove all the artwork from both games, and use the cleanup feature to permanently remove the artwork from the hard drive. 2) make sure both games have the correct ID numbers. 3) edit one of the game titles within launchbox so they are vastly different (i.e. Indiana Burgers and the Last Leaf of Lettuce). 4) download all the art manually by google searching for the appropriate images. 5) manually adding the images to each game within LB by clicking the little yellow + button. 6) verify everything is correct and LB is displaying the appropriate artwork for each game. 7) now edit the title in LB from Indiana Burgers back to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but add (UbiSoft) and (Taito) to each title, respectively so that LB hopefully won't confuse the two.

[DOS76]

I understand you perfectly and when I mentioned the same exact name I was meaning the title in LB. This is the same as the PC Engine/TG16 scenario I mentioned as these games have different file names but they get the same title in LB. Yes it is very difficult to get the art to work right in this scenario and yes there should be an improvement in handling this. I don't have this issue because I had LB from way back from the even older image system that just changed recently where ever file had its own folder and titles with the same name were giving there own string of numbers to signify the differences.

[SentaiBrad]

You explained yourself well, Derek and I understood. Media can be in the name of the rom file incase you get media with a rom pack for example, but usually the media matches the game name in LaunchBox. As long as that is the same name and you downloaded art for it from the Database, LaunchBox will automatically assign the media to the same game in that system. When you remove it from one game to fix it though, it doesn't de-associate it from the other game. At least it shouldn't, and it hasn't for me in the past but that could have changed. Restarting LaunchBox would most likely fix that though.

[Clavius]

Okay thanks guys, I guess I just didn't understand that you understood. :P Brad: I tried restarting LB and the issue didn't go away. I checked the images/front directory and the only image in there is "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.jpg" I should probably mention that I'm using LB v6.2 and if there's a newer version maybe that's why you're not seeing it? Over the last 10 days or so that I've been setting up all my emulation inside of LB I've seen this issue happen any time LB thinks two different games are the same game upon import. Once that happens, correcting the artwork once the games have been identified correctly *always* leads to images getting removed from games that I'm not currently editing. I used the Indiana Jones game as an example here only because it was the toughest one to fix. Usually I can fix game art by just making sure LB has the correct ID #'s for each game and then re-download all the artwork within LB and everything is okay, even though the issue of removing art for one removes it from both. But with Indiana Jones that one was especially difficult to fix. Anyway, thanks! Let me know if you still can't reproduce and if there's anything else I should try in order to prevent art getting removed from games incorrectly in the way I described.

[SentaiBrad]

No that's odd, unless there is a bug or a recent change. If you haven't made a bug ticket already click Report Issue at the top and you can link to this thread in the description.

[Clavius]

Okay, I've submitted a minor bug for you. Thanks for your help!

[Zombeaver]

@Clavius You shouldn't need to do any of that. Firstly, I believe LB does ignore information contained in parenthesis in the filename for the purposes of scraping. However, as long as you have an image file in your Images -> [specific platform] -> Front folder and it's named identically to your rom name (and this does include parenthetical data... I think) it should automatically associate that image with that rom in LB. More importantly though, when you first do your import, you can specify (edit) what title you want it to actually look for on the final screen of the import wizard - if they're not, in fact, the same game, change the titles to search for (like "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1991)" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1993)" for example). That way it should pull the correct metadata from the get go. If they both just say "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (and they probably will since it should be ignoring the parenthesis part of the file name by default) it's going to assume they're the same game when it scrapes and associate the same database entry with both. In the event that you do need to change the covers after the fact, worst case scenario is you could manually change the image file names to reflect the full rom file names and they should associate correctly in LB. My guess in your case though would be that it would have only pulled 1 image, because it thought they were the same game. Because your files may be "game (1)" and "game (2)" but it just searched for "game" and pulled in an image that it named "game.jpg". My assumption as to the reason it disassociated the first (correct) image in your case was because the only differentiating element in your two rom names was text that's in parenthesis, and the image file name that pulled in likely wouldn't contain that part, so if you disassociate the image from "X rom" (no consideration of parenthesis part) it's disassociating it from both. @SentaiBrad please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this!