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LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+


Jason Carr

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@Jason Carr I forgot to mention this a few days ago but there is one thing I noticed when I was importing some Steam games. I have a platform called Steam and I have all my Steam games on that platform but occasionally I do purchase some new games and want to import them to that platform. Well I went through the Steam import process again and it found the 4 additional games that I purchased in my Steam library which is great. But instead of LaunchBox importing them to my Steam platform, it created a Windows platform and imported them to it instead of my Steam platform. I of course have Steam to scrape as Windows but I thought I remember last week you had mentioned that this issue was resolved to where it did not change the platform name is the reason I bring it up and just wanted to let you know.

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5 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

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.

I have been testing my BigBox startup times with a chronometer, and after the last update I didn't notice any improvement. If anything, it's a few seconds slower (was opening in 23 seconds previously, now seems to be up to 28 seconds). I have skipped a few updates though and I guess the test depends on a lot of other factors.

Now that we have separate XMLs, what might speed things up a bit is making BigBox read only the Main Platform xml on startup, and then reading other platforms on demand after you select them. Or even better, continue to load them on background after the Main Platform wheel is initiated.

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On 10/9/2016 at 0:26 AM, Jason Carr said:

That's my hope. The image thing was giving me nightmares.

Jason, i don't want to be inapropiate. But i beg to you! Slow down a little the development on the app and please concentrate for a while on the database. Moderating and contributing is turning into a real mess. Deletions don't work, someones are still uploading hacks because we don't have hacks markers. The release dates are changing fast because don't have regional data and someones take USA release as date and other japanese... The missing alternate names and regional data makes scrapping of other releases than USA and typical names fail. The developers and publishers list is a mess of redundances.Please pause the eye candy improvements, there's a lot of work of contributors and moderators and with this state of the db is really making a hard thing to do.

 

Edited by Freestate
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8 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

@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.

I think you're right @Jason Carr, in that it will be much easier for you to see and debug locally though I'm here for any questions etc. Think all I did post Win 10 installation was basically change all speech, language, region etc etc to UK versions and delete the US versions (though adding back the US language pack didn't seem to help).
Anything you need just shout.

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12 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

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.

If we have separate XML files, Maybe it´s time to develop sub wheels?... pleeease :D

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56 minutes ago, kyoken said:

If we have separate XML files, Maybe it´s time to develop sub wheels?... pleeease :D

I hadn't thought of that. I put my TG16 full set and my handful of PC Engine Japanese exclusives under my TG16 wheel. If there was an option to add sub wheels, I could have each system inside, PC Engine, PC Engine CD, SuperGrafx, Turbo CD etc. Cool idea.

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2 hours ago, kyoken said:

Its the most wanted feature in Hyperspin, think about it, since we have "scrape as" and rename system, split it by company (Sega,Nintendo),Arcade, Console, Handhelds....

Enviado desde mTalk

To split by company first we need to clean up the crazyness of redundancy on company names on the database. There's hundreds of duplicates.

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To split by company first we need to clean up the crazyness of redundancy on company names on the database. There's hundreds of duplicates.



Yes, database need a clean up, but i mean split systems by manufacturer, (no videogames), this is a job for the database

Enviado desde mTalk
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Hi all,

After i installed the latest beta i expire some issues.
These are all related to the latest changes to launchbox.xml and the separation of it, sorry if this is already reported.

  • When i delete games or an entire platformfrom the database, after a restart of LaunchBox the games/platform re-appear.

     
  • The latest changes also broke compatibility with Rocket Launcher.
    In the screenshot i added, I just imported Sega Genesis in LB, but it won't be added to RL.
    I suspect a change to the LaunchBox module in RL is needed for this.

LB-RL.jpg

 

(edit: removed an non-issue due to non-reading)

Edited by rebelone
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21 hours ago, kmoney said:

@Jason Carr I forgot to mention this a few days ago but there is one thing I noticed when I was importing some Steam games. I have a platform called Steam and I have all my Steam games on that platform but occasionally I do purchase some new games and want to import them to that platform. Well I went through the Steam import process again and it found the 4 additional games that I purchased in my Steam library which is great. But instead of LaunchBox importing them to my Steam platform, it created a Windows platform and imported them to it instead of my Steam platform. I of course have Steam to scrape as Windows but I thought I remember last week you had mentioned that this issue was resolved to where it did not change the platform name is the reason I bring it up and just wanted to let you know.

Unfortunately nothing has been done to prevent this for *new* games. When importing games via the ROM importer, you get to choose the platform anyways. For Steam, however, it just defaults to Windows currently. I think the Steam and MS-DOS importers are probably the only things affected by this, but perhaps we should add an option to select the platform name for those importers.

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14 hours ago, Freestate said:

Jason, i don't want to be inapropiate. But i beg to you! Slow down a little the development on the app and please concentrate for a while on the database. Moderating and contributing is turning into a real mess. Deletions don't work, someones are still uploading hacks because we don't have hacks markers. The release dates are changing fast because don't have regional data and someones take USA release as date and other japanese... The missing alternate names and regional data makes scrapping of other releases than USA and typical names fail. The developers and publishers list is a mess of redundances.Please pause the eye candy improvements, there's a lot of work of contributors and moderators and with this state of the db is really making a hard thing to do.

 

I know, I keep putting this off. My apologies. Part of the reason for it is the upcoming Retropalooza; I've been wanting to do quite a few things before the conference. I should be able to get back to the database this week.

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1 hour ago, rebelone said:

Hi all,

After i installed the latest beta i expire some issues.
These are all related to the latest changes to launchbox.xml and the separation of it, sorry if this is already reported.

  • When i delete games or an entire platformfrom the database, after a restart of LaunchBox the games/platform re-appear.

     
  • The latest changes also broke compatibility with Rocket Launcher.
    In the screenshot i added, I just imported Sega Genesis in LB, but it won't be added to RL.
    I suspect a change to the LaunchBox module in RL is needed for this.

 

 

(edit: removed an non-issue due to non-reading)

Looks like I need to test deleting platforms with the new XML model; will do. Per RocketLauncher, we are aware that this will "break" the existing implementation. Things should still work but changes to your collection will no longer be updated in RocketLauncher until the new version of RocketLauncher is released (simply because RocketLauncher will continue to use the LaunchBox.xml file which is no longer updated). I notified bleasby from the RocketLauncher team of the changes yesterday and he will be integrating the new file formats soon.

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Just put out a new beta; I focused primarily on performance in LaunchBox when switching between platforms. I improved the rendering, caching, and data population routines all to be more performant. It was actually the rendering/painting operations that were causing the biggest amounts of lag when switching between filters and repopulating the boxes. The single biggest performance gain came from caching the rendered text that is displayed below the games.

The caching routines have been significantly cleaned up and also simplified. Previously LaunchBox would cache images in the background, but this was causing quite a bit of confusion ("Why is LaunchBox using so much CPU usage!?") as well as hurting the performance elsewhere a tad. In this beta, images will only be cached once they've been scrolled to. However, we now do a much better job of refreshing the images that are actually displayed on the screen first, so I don't think this will be much of an issue. That said, leaving LaunchBox overnight will no longer automatically cache all of the images. We may add that back in based on the feedback from these betas.

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