7.8-beta-7 Released

[Jason Carr]

Beta 7 is out now guys; it fixes a number of bugs from the previous betas. Specifically:

- Renaming platforms was causing duplicate platforms and other weirdness
- "All" games for platform categories wasn't showing any games
- Platform category behavior in the sidebar wasn't showing the right games

I'm sure there's more but those are the major fixes. Going forward I'm going to continue to focus on bug fixes, as well as implement the following for playlists:

- Auto playlists custom fields
- Auto playlists support AND or OR for multi-text fields; possibly come up with new comparison types
- Adding games to playlists from within Big Box
- A new tab in the playlist add/edit window to display the games in a grid for custom sorting
- Custom ordering for playlist items
- Auto-populating of certain playlists on imports (such as Capcom Classics, Namco Classics, etc. for the Arcade platform)
- Download platform videos support for playlists

I'm not sure if all of the above will make the cut, but those are the current plans.

[JaysArcade]

So bugging you weekly about the top level app loading won't help get that feature enabled? LOL  I get it. I'll stop asking.

It's really the only thing I miss from that other frontend though. The Inception style thing I can live without, although I think it would be really cool.

Thanks for all you do Jason.

[Zombeaver]

Thanks Jason.

My one request for playlists would be the ability to quickly switch between platforms and playlists in Big Box via hotkey (which could be assigned to a controller button). Preferably you could do this from anywhere but even if it was relegated to the platform screen that'd be something.

[Norfair]

Renaming platforms seems to be working fine now, in beta 7

I've done some more testing on the platform sorting issue.

For some reason the platform "Nintendo 64" plays a part in this error on my setup.
When I change a platform title to something that comes after "Nintendo 64" alphabetically everything is fine. When it comes before "Nintendo 64", the sorting issue appears. This applies to a title change on any platform.

This will cause the sorting issue:
Title: Nintendo 63
Scrape As: Nintendo Entertainment System

But this is fine:
Title: Nintendo 65
Scrape As: Nintendo Entertainment System

I don't know if "Nintendo 64" plays a part in this issue on every system.
But maybe you can recreate this if you try changing a platform title to something very "early" alphabetically.
For example, changing a platform title to "aaa" or "111"
 

Edited February 25, 2017 by Norfair

[ALIE]

55 minutes ago, Zombeaver said:

Thanks Jason.

My one request for playlists would be the ability to quickly switch between platforms and playlists in Big Box via hotkey (which could be assigned to a controller button). Preferably you could do this from anywhere but even if it was relegated to the platform screen that'd be something.

I second this we talked about it quickly in the YouTube comments. I think i made a ticket but yah hopefully it can be done if it isn't a time consuming one :).  

 

@Jason Carr a question with the next big feature probably being Nested. Any chance of seeing more platforms added to the database before or soon after? Would love to Nokia n gage in the database and in LB.  Yah there's no emulator but still for a collection management point of view  I'm sure there's more systems people have maybe we could get a list made before hand. 

[damageinc86]

Yeah i'm sure i've asked for it as well, gotta have a hotkey/controller button mappable for playlists.  Also, would like some tutorials on new features when they come out, instead of rummaging through the options never knowing where it is buried.  Like, how do we add a game to a playlist within BigBox? 

[DOS76]

If you see Jason's 1st post the playlist for BB isn't in yet but its on his short list of new features to implement so it should be coming soon.

[Charco]

We could hardly expect tutorials for features currently in beta, as they are subject to change before the stable release. Once they are in a stable build, sure, tutorials come very regularly from Brad.

[Fursphere]

@Jason Carr
Some feedback for playlists.

For auto-populating can you add some "exact" search features in the contains logic?  For example - I built a playlist for Contra to look for "title contains Contra" - but it picks up "CONTRAption zack" (love that old dos game).   I know in other computer systems adding quotes is a way to get an exact match.   like "Contra" or something.   

Could you add an "audit" feature to playlists (right click - audit) - or something.   Right now its still not clear if i'm deleting  a title from the just the playlist, or form the database it came from.  An audit feature could possible pull all the details like you do from the platform audit menu?   Might be really complicated though.    

thanks!

Edited February 25, 2017 by Fursphere

[frostmute]

I can't seem to find a way to display a platform wheel image for an Auto-Populated Playlist that is included in the Platform List. In Big Box it just shows the text name in the main Platform List for that playlist. I tried adding an image in the playlist config area, as well as creating folders for the "platform" in the Images folder, but Big Box doesnt seem to want to use them. I refreshed the Wheel Image cache as well to no effect.

[cammelspit]

Having an issue where games are not being removed from an auto-generated playlist. Expected behavior would be that they are added to an exception for being parsed but they just stay there.

[Gowayn]

On 24/2/2017 at 10:31 PM, Jason Carr said:

- Auto-populating of certain playlists on imports (such as Capcom Classics, Namco Classics, etc. for the Arcade platform)

How does this work? i'm trying a fresh import of mame but I don't see any new playlist.

[neil9000]

2 hours ago, Sir BLaDE said:

How does this work? i'm trying a fresh import of mame but I don't see any new playlist.

If you re-read it, Jason says,

I'm sure there's more but those are the major fixes. Going forward I'm going to continue to focus on bug fixes, as well as implement the following for playlists:

- Auto playlists custom fields
- Auto playlists support AND or OR for multi-text fields; possibly come up with new comparison types
- Adding games to playlists from within Big Box
- A new tab in the playlist add/edit window to display the games in a grid for custom sorting
- Custom ordering for playlist items
- Auto-populating of certain playlists on imports (such as Capcom Classics, Namco Classics, etc. for the Arcade platform)
- Download platform videos support for playlists

I'm not sure if all of the above will make the cut, but those are the current plans.

 

 

So not in yet, but planned before the official release

[Pr0FiT]

I've had this problem with at least the last few versions of this beta. In addition to the info there last night I did a full uninstall/install of LB beta and have the same issue.

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/35989-multi-disc-importing-is-broken/

[flores9]

@Jason Carr I changed to the playlist view to create a new playlist. After this I selected the Platform view, then I selected the Platform category view and suddenly this happens.... three systems are without category... they lost the extract as field

Edited February 27, 2017 by flores9

[tSRDazz]

Not sure this is really the right place to ask, as I don't want to risk using the beta (but I appreciate everyone who does!), but will auto playlists be able to list, for example, consoles with region exclusive games? My job involves talking about games exclusive to outside of America, and having a way of listing those titles in Launchbox would be amazing.

[Jason Carr]

On 2/24/2017 at 3:46 PM, Zombeaver said:

Thanks Jason.

My one request for playlists would be the ability to quickly switch between platforms and playlists in Big Box via hotkey (which could be assigned to a controller button). Preferably you could do this from anywhere but even if it was relegated to the platform screen that'd be something.

Added this to the to-do list for 7.8 since this does seem to be a common request.

On 2/24/2017 at 4:05 PM, Norfair said:

Renaming platforms seems to be working fine now, in beta 7

I've done some more testing on the platform sorting issue.

For some reason the platform "Nintendo 64" plays a part in this error on my setup.
When I change a platform title to something that comes after "Nintendo 64" alphabetically everything is fine. When it comes before "Nintendo 64", the sorting issue appears. This applies to a title change on any platform.

This will cause the sorting issue:
Title: Nintendo 63
Scrape As: Nintendo Entertainment System

But this is fine:
Title: Nintendo 65
Scrape As: Nintendo Entertainment System

I don't know if "Nintendo 64" plays a part in this issue on every system.
But maybe you can recreate this if you try changing a platform title to something very "early" alphabetically.
For example, changing a platform title to "aaa" or "111"
 

Thanks for the additional testing, @Norfair. Unfortunately testing those things on my system still does not reproduce the out of order platforms or categories. At this point, I'm pretty certain that it's happening only on certain machines, because I've tested other collections that cause the problem for other people, and when I load them up on my machines everything is fine. So there's something wacky going on that I haven't been able to pinpoint. It may have something to do with metadata, but that's not the *only* thing it has to do with since it seems isolated to only certain machines. So...sigh. I'm still stuck.

[Jason Carr]

On 2/24/2017 at 4:47 PM, ALIE said:

I second this we talked about it quickly in the YouTube comments. I think i made a ticket but yah hopefully it can be done if it isn't a time consuming one :).  

 

@Jason Carr a question with the next big feature probably being Nested. Any chance of seeing more platforms added to the database before or soon after? Would love to Nokia n gage in the database and in LB.  Yah there's no emulator but still for a collection management point of view  I'm sure there's more systems people have maybe we could get a list made before hand. 

Sure, we can come back to this shortly after we get the arcade playlists stuff implemented, as we'll need to clean up the platforms lists. There's also an annoying amount of confusion/arguments/moderation rejections going on because of disagreements over which platforms should or should not exist, so hopefully we can address this stuff in a live stream after the 7.8 release.

[Jason Carr]

On 2/25/2017 at 6:47 AM, Charco said:

We could hardly expect tutorials for features currently in beta, as they are subject to change before the stable release. Once they are in a stable build, sure, tutorials come very regularly from Brad.

Yeah, @damageinc86, we can't put out tutorials before the official releases. We've done that before and that causes some mass confusion lol. We will have a tutorial out on the playlists after 7.8 comes out.

[Jason Carr]

On 2/25/2017 at 9:08 AM, Fursphere said:

@Jason Carr
Some feedback for playlists.

For auto-populating can you add some "exact" search features in the contains logic?  For example - I built a playlist for Contra to look for "title contains Contra" - but it picks up "CONTRAption zack" (love that old dos game).   I know in other computer systems adding quotes is a way to get an exact match.   like "Contra" or something.   

Could you add an "audit" feature to playlists (right click - audit) - or something.   Right now its still not clear if i'm deleting  a title from the just the playlist, or form the database it came from.  An audit feature could possible pull all the details like you do from the platform audit menu?   Might be really complicated though.    

thanks!

Per contains, you just need to use Equals instead of Contains for an exact match.

Per deleting games from playlists, it should, in theory, be prompting you and making it obvious what the game is being deleted from. We may have a had a glitch in previous betas where that popup wasn't showing. Are you getting a message to come up when you delete a game from a playlist? If not, it sounds like we have a glitch on this stuff. But the popup makes it obvious, so I don't plan to have a specific playlist audit feature.