LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

[Jason Carr]

Thank you Martin.

Hmm...more than one instance of CoverFlow...probably not currently but I can look into it. What's your plan?

[Maddoc1007]

I Was thinking about trying to create a Theme which would say have the platform Coverflow on the left say Colunm 4, Row 0 to 3 and the Wheelgames Coverflow say on Row 4 Columns 1 to 3, and you could access the wheels game coverflow  the same way you can access recent or favourites as this would be something no other frontend can do.

[Maddoc1007]

@Jason Carr I could do a mockup and email it to you n a few days outlining my idea for this particular view i have in my head.

[ALIE]

@Jason Carr not a request but something I have been wondering a little feedback.   The video showing off LaunchBox & BigBox when entering the side is extremely outdated.   Maybe a new one with all the features or at least the most important ones should be made ?.. 

 

Edit maybe this has already been done and I'm just sleeping over here. 

Edited September 17, 2016 by ALIE

[Thanos Reigns]

Works great for me with a Xbox 360 Kinect. That's the only good part about that device, the microphone could pick up a moth fart.

[Jason Carr]

That is good to know, @Thanos Reigns. @ALIE, you're very correct. I really need to update that video and the site as well; hopefully I can do that soon. @Maddoc1007, sounds good.

I trust the 6.9 release is treating you guys well?

[ALIE]

1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

That is good to know, @Thanos Reigns. @ALIE, you're very correct. I really need to update that video and the site as well; hopefully I can do that soon. @Maddoc1007, sounds good.

I trust the 6.9 release is treating you guys well?

Can't say I have used it much yet.  Currently in the process of fine organizing my roms and fine tuning all my emulators and getting the best option for all systems ... 

[shinra358]

"I trust the 6.9 release is treating you guys well? "

 

items still skip around in the wheel when traversing. the last few updates have even gotten the wheel to freeze up bigbox at times.

[Maddoc1007]

@Jason Carr gave the 6.9 release a good hammering over a few hours working extremely well no glitches to report Windows 7 SP1 cant comment on voice recognition as have no mic.  Fastest iteration yet.

KUDOS

[Sithel]

I went from 6.8 Official to the 6.9 Official with no other changes and now with the "Metallic" theme it no longer pulls my clear logos from that theme folder. It's only using defaults, and yes I cleared the cache. Thoughts on the cause?

 

Edited **

Seems like some coding has changed for binding the clear logos from themes. By design or mistake? Either way I fixed it.

Ver. 6.8 Themes went from ImageType="ClearLogo"

to

Ver. 6.9 ImageType="Clear Logo"

Thought @Jason Carr should know or better yet I assume he changed it for a reason

 

Edited September 18, 2016 by Sithel

[elliot763]

Hey Jason,

I don't know if this has been reported yet but I've noticed lately that when going back (from game menu -> game list OR from game list -> platform list). Sometimes the wrong video and/or background will load and then I can't go back again until I move up or down.

For instance, I was just scrolling through my PS1 games and then hit back to go to the platform list. The wheel showed the PS1 clearlogo as expected but the Dreamcast video was playing. If I hit the back button at this point to open the options menu nothing would happen. I would have to first scroll up or down to another platform (which would load the correct media) and then hit back to open the menu.

I was messing around with it to try and find out how to repeat the issue but it seems to happen pretty randomly (but frequently). I'll let you know if I can figure out a way to reproduce it.

Thanks

EDIT: It looks like if you scroll through a list and then select an item quickly before the new media for that item loads, when you return to that screen this issue will happen.

Edited September 18, 2016 by elliot763

[kmoney]

@Jason Carr Since the official LedBlinky plugin has been released I have noticed that it now takes about 4 to 5 seconds before the startup led animation begins when you first startup BigBox. I have contacted arzoo about this and he said it is due to ledblinky is reading the launchbox.xml at startup and the bigger xml you have it will cause more slowdown since everything is stored in one xml. I was wondering what your thoughts were on this and have you gave some consideration to splitting the platform xml's up by system? I know that it would probably be a big undertaking but I feel like it would boost BigBox performance so much especially with startup time and while scrolling through the menus and such.

[Sepulchre]

Maybe that would explain why Hyperspin starts up faster than BigBox, because it only loads up the "Main Menu.xml" that only lists the platforms, not everything else. Likewise, it could explain why transitions between platform menu items are snappier as well (clear logos with game video backgrounds theme).

For those of us with very large collections, tens of thousands of games, splitting up the XML could potentially provide a significant increase in performance (just a hypothesis).

[martinconroy]

On 16/09/2016 at 6:00 PM, Jason Carr said:

 

@martinconroy Bah. One thing that confuses me is why on earth your voices would be showing "Mobile" on a desktop version of Windows. What type of device are you using? Is it a tablet? A laptop? I also don't understand why the Microsoft libraries are giving me completely different results than what is in your list; I'm pretty baffled at this point. I want to put out the official release today so we might not be able to resolve this before 6.9, but we'll get there one way or another.

Try just changing the speech recognition options first. Go to Control Panel > Speech Recognition > Advanced speech options and the Speech Properties dialog should show up. At the top is a Language drop down. I'm curious to know what language you have selected there. There are separate options for both the speech recognition language and the speech synthesis language I believe, and I would guess the speech recognition options are more important.

Hi @Jason Carr - thanks for persisting with this. Currently using a brand new Alienware desktop with clean install of Windows 10 home, though my Dell laptop had the same issues.

As for why they are labelled "mobile", not sure - don't recall it ever being different.Have updated languages to include UK but that's all.

Below are my settings in the speech properties:

In language I have options for UK (selected) and ("English - US")

As you can see Desktop voices appear on this list and it's completely at odds with what appears in my Time & Language settings!
When I change the language to US in Speech Properties -> Speech Recognition I get the below warning which highlights that there is potential for conflict!

I have now changed The Region and language settings to US but to no avail - no recognition still. I'm happy to test as much as is required and will try to be on the dev session tonight for at least some of the time. Don't know if the easiest thing may be for you to try and install the UK languages as default for a while and see if you get the same results, or at least see if other UK users have any settings that are different?

[snarfo67]

@martinconroy One thing you might want to do is update your Windows 10--- build 1511 is from November of last year. If you haven't gotten 1607 automatically yet (the "Anniversary Update") you can download it manually from Microsoft's Windows 10 site with the update tool. Not a guaranteed fix of course, but being current is a good starting point :-)

[martinconroy]

4 minutes ago, snarfo67 said:

@martinconroy One thing you might want to do is update your Windows 10--- build 1511 is from November of last year. If you haven't gotten 1607 automatically yet (the "Anniversary Update") you can download it manually from Microsoft's Windows 10 site with the update tool. Not a guaranteed fix of course, but being current is a good starting point :-)

Thanks @snarfo67 - will do that now. My previous installation was on the Anniversary update so I don't think it's that but worth trying. Given the Windows Update said I was up to date I (foolishly) thought I was!

[martinconroy]

No change @snarfo67 but thanks for the idea.

[martinconroy]

@Jason Carr - I may struggle to get online tonight, but can be free tomorrow night after about 8pm in the UK (midday your time?) if you'd like to chat (skype?) or check out anything at this end (Teamviewer?)

[Jason Carr]

Thanks all; all issues noted and added to my list. I just put out a new beta that separates the XML files out in order to make it easier for Rocket Launcher and LEDBlinky. It's funny; I hadn't read this thread but I guess great minds think alike. We've plans to separate it out for a while and I figured it's best to do shortly after a release so there's plenty of time for testing.

Keep in mind that this latest beta will break imports and exports to LaunchBox zip packages. I have that on my plate to address. Let me know if anyone is seeing any other issues since separating out the XML. The LaunchBox.xml file will still remain in your LaunchBox folder but will no longer be used after things are saved for the first time with the new beta. A new Data folder is created that will contain separate XML files for everything. You might see some minor performance improvements in some cases during save and load operations, but as expected I do not think there will be anything significant (which is why I fought doing this for so long lol). We will be back to performance again soon.

[Jason Carr]

@martinconroy Thanks for all those details. There may be a big clue in the note about things possibly not working if they don't match the system's language settings. That's certainly interesting. I think what I'm going to end up doing is installing a virtual machine that uses UK English for everything to test with. That way I can debug my way through everything and figure out what on earth is going on.