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LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+


Jason Carr

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19 hours ago, Maddoc1007 said:

@Jason Carr No issues for me either would it be possible to put in an override command in bigbox that when background music is being used that the video sound is muted instead of having to go to options and turn video volume down to 0%, as when testing i noticed a small speed increase when you turn down the video volume to 0% while listening to music?  

I'm not fully following here. You're saying you already see a performance increase when turning the videos download to 0% volume? Why would we need to actually mute them then?

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I'm on beta 6 and I just finished a lengthy testing of the audit feature. So far it works just fine with no crashes or errors.

The only issue is that when it's first used after opening LaunchBox there's a bit of a wait before it goes into action. Subsequent audits run immediately.
Mind you, I've seen this with other LaunchBox functions when I first use them. For example whenever I go to Edit Game I also get a delay, but after that the Edit Game opens promptly.
By any chance was there an initialise-when-needed delay added to LaunchBox back when the big speed improvement in initial launching was brought in? Just curious.

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Video > Themed

Video > Gameplay

 

Folders from inside of the video folder. Seems like pretty much extending a path that's already there with a copy pasta and a change of the 2nd folder :P

Said vids you mentioned can be grouped that way by what folder they are in, no?

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@Maddoc1007 I get you, makes sense. I just figured there was something I was missing. Agreed that it would be useful, but I won't be able to get it into 7.5.

@spycat You got it, that's exactly what it's doing. It delays loading some of the extra metadata databases until they're needed in order to help with the startup time.

@shinra358 Yes, of course that's how we'll implement the folder structure. That's not the problem and doesn't make it any easier to implement. We'll need a bit of restructuring in the code, and also a migration process of sorts since the videos will be expected to be in a different location. It's nothing I can't do in a couple days, but currently there are higher priorities on the list.

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Alright guys, beta 7 is out. For starters, I fixed the errors from @DOS76 and @Norfair regarding the audits. However, I haven't been able to identify @Manuel Leiria's null reference issue, so please let me know if anyone else is able to replicate it. My understanding is that it is related to prioritizing music over video audio, but I have a hunch that it might be unrelated. @Manuel Leiria, can you confirm either way?

Secondly, @dmjohn0x inspired me late last night to implement startup videos, and they are now included in this beta. He had a video built that's pretty awesome, and it's available in his thread here:

I'm using VLC (just using the app directly) to play the startup video full screen, and then I'm killing VLC once it's loaded. It's not a perfect solution (especially since VLC does take some time to load sometimes), but it does seem to be working pretty well. To use it, just put a video in LaunchBox\Videos and name it Startup.mp4. I haven't allowed customizing the video path because it would slow down startup (the video is played before any of the settings are loaded).

Also related to the startup videos, there's a "Minimum Startup Video Duration" setting in the Big Box General options that will force showing more of the video if Big Box loads too quickly.

Finally, some bug fixes:

- Fixed: When switching games views in Big Box, sometimes CoverFlow images were re-generating and taking a while to show up (due to conflicts with the previous view)

- Fixed: VLC has been changed to always use the LaunchBox\VLC\vlc.cfg file for configuration instead of no configuration or the system's default configuration

Note that the VLC configuration file change should at least now allow you to specify DXVA if you want further performance increases and your system supports it (see earlier on up the thread). It's not exactly easy to change though; you'll need to modify the vlc.cfg file in a text editor and change the "avcodec-hw" line to "avcodec-hw=dxva2". Make sure you remove the # that is in there by default. In the future we may provide a proper setting for this, but this is at least a step in the right direction. :)

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Oh, one last thing. There's this as well:

- Improvement: Big Box now hides the taskbar while running in order to prevent it from showing while switching between the startup video and Big Box, and while running games

That will come in really handy I think, but it also scares me, because if Big Box crashes, you'll have no task bar. I'm currently not sure what to do about this. I know Rocket Launcher annoys me sometimes because if it crashes you're often left with a completely broken desktop, which I'd like to avoid, but I don't have any quick solutions. I might try and put another EXE next to it to detect if that happens and recover.

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@Jason Carr, the reason I had said it might be related is because this issue occurs in LaunchBox as well, and only when Auto-Play Soundtrack is active. I've tried this a lot, and it always boils down to the same, switching from one game to another then another while playing music. It doesn't seem to happen otherwise. But I've decided to go another route, and I'll revisit this sometime in the next few days.

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Just now, Manuel Leiria said:

@Jason Carr, the reason I had said it might be related is because this issue occurs in LaunchBox as well, and only when Auto-Play Soundtrack is active. I've tried this a lot, and it always boils down to the same, switching from one game to another then another while playing music. It doesn't seem to happen otherwise. But I've decided to go another route, and I'll revisit this sometime in the next few days.

I see. I'm trying to put out an official release on Friday though, so if you could test the previous scenario, I'd really appreciate it.

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7 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Oh, one last thing. There's this as well:

- Improvement: Big Box now hides the taskbar while running in order to prevent it from showing while switching between the startup video and Big Box, and while running games

That will come in really handy I think, but it also scares me, because if Big Box crashes, you'll have no task bar. I'm currently not sure what to do about this. I know Rocket Launcher annoys me sometimes because if it crashes you're often left with a completely broken desktop, which I'd like to avoid, but I don't have any quick solutions. I might try and put another EXE next to it to detect if that happens and recover.

@Jason Carr how about a bat file with this for relaunching explorer?

taskkill /im explorer.exe /f 
timeout /t 3
start explorer.exe

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2 minutes ago, Manuel Leiria said:

In Launchbox. When it happens in Big Box it just crashes and shows no message.

My hunch is that this is only happening in LaunchBox now; sorry for the never ending questions, but have you seen it crash Big Box since yesterday's beta?

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4 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

My hunch is that this is only happening in LaunchBox now; sorry for the never ending questions, but have you seen it crash Big Box since yesterday's beta?

You know what, no I haven't :) I just spent the last two minutes shuffling back and forth, and so far, not a thing.

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