7.10-beta-1 Released

[Napalm2016]

Yeah I've got it all backed up I've learned that hard lesson before, doing a scan on the drive found some errors on it so maybe on its ways out

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

[Lmagnus87]

7.10? I expected the  big jump to Launchbox 8.X

 

but well, 7.X can be polished a little more 

 

Great Work Jason!!!

[Jason Carr]

On 4/28/2017 at 4:56 PM, Maddoc1007 said:

@Jason Carr Gave the new beta a spin no problems thus far KUDOS.   How does the transitions:TransitionPresenter TransitionSelector="{Binding ImageVideoTransitionSelector}" Content="{Binding ImageVideoView}" (the small non background video) stretch the images when using it in the games views is it uniform to fill? if so could you set it to Fill as when you download screenshots for arcade they are all different sizes and don't look right by not stretching to their container as have looked all over the xaml and don't see a setting to allow per theme to overwrite this.  Screenshot of new view i'm working on for my theme HT for PC which has either small video or screenshots in the arcade machine window as well as marquee that work and change per game and fading wheel.

I'm loving that view, @Maddoc1007. I trust you got this solved since I saw the video of it. Right now the placement of the videos is a serious pain point with the themes, so that is pretty high up on my list for the theme improvement stuff. I should have a better solution for that soon.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/29/2017 at 10:16 AM, Expello said:

Hi,

can you add an "unattended installation" feature? The DirectX UAC query is a bit annoying. ;-) 
I do not want to permanently disable UAC.

Thanks a lot

This has come up before. As much as I'd love to not install DirectX for every update, we will inevitably get a bunch of reported errors if we don't. Previously we skipped out on DirectX for updates, but unfortunately users ran into too many missing DLL issues so we had to add it back in. As far as I know there's no way to install DirectX without elevated privileges.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/29/2017 at 2:41 PM, AFaustini said:

@Jason Carr sorry for the noob question, but how can i change the background image like you do in 7:34 in the latest dev stream?

Think I answered you in the live stream, @AFaustini.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/29/2017 at 6:26 PM, Maddoc1007 said:

@Jason Carr Watched your news on YouTube glad your going to be working on the Games Database.  When you integrate the arcade systems will you make sure that LaunchBox scrape as will be set to the way the integration works as off now i've noticed that when certain systems are set to scrape as themselves ie Sega System 16/32 etc they dont pull down certain images such as Marquees unless they are set to scrape as Arcade and get rid of the options to scrape as anyhting but to what you set them to scrape as?  @Vlansix Thrilled to hear your back working with LaunchBox KUDOS welcome back.

Good point about the marquees; I'll add that to my list.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/29/2017 at 6:45 PM, bundangdon said:

@Jason Carr I mentioned this idea on another thread/post and was wondering if it would be possible to implement a 'generic' image? In other words, for box images which are missing or unavailable, we could use a "default" image to go to instead of the standard launchbox/bigbox 'generic' one, which could be created by the user. An example is shown below with a "before and after" of a Commodore 64 game without any boxart. Hope you can make this one happen, and it generated a lot of "Like This" on my original post-message earlier

I would like to see this as well, so we should add it to the next poll.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/29/2017 at 7:37 PM, Kriven said:

This update seems to have broken my Big Box's ability to shuffle its background music in a really weird way... The first song is random, but after that it keeps leaping to the exact same song and playing the rest of that song's album. I took that album out of the "Background" folder, and Big Box started playing another album by that artist (again starting with a song in the middle of the album). I've checked file names, folder name, all of the playlists... Big Box isn't loading a playlist file, I don't think, because it isn't playing the songs in the order that they appear on a playlist. It's just playing the same artist as #2 and then going right on through all of their stuff. I can't figure it out, and it wasn't happening before the update.

Okay, I'll take a look.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/29/2017 at 9:31 PM, elitemanhood said:

Jason thanks for the great beta release!

 

One thing with Platform Category Clear Logos Images looks like we can only set them under the Root  Launchbox Images\Platform Categories\Platform\Clear Logos folder. Can we have the option to have Platform Category Clear Logos folder per theme just as we can set Platform Clear logos per theme? Thanks!

That is indeed on my list.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/30/2017 at 0:11 AM, Norfair said:

Hello @Jason Carr

Did you also do some bug fixing for the "Download Metadata and Images..."?

I've done some tests and I think this problem is gone:

Can someone else confirm this? That the download doesn't ignore existing images in the LB Games DB.

No bugs were fixed, per se, but I'm convinced this was never a bug, but rather a confusing design decision on our part. Previously, if you didn't replace images, no new images were downloaded for categories that already had images. That, in particular, is no longer the case. Any new images will be downloaded now.

[Jason Carr]

On 4/30/2017 at 3:47 AM, ALIE said:

Hey @Jason Carr i decided to start adding alternative region names.

starting with  "Disney's Aladdin in Nasira's Revenge"  i have added 4 regional names,  (by the way  Norway isnt in the regions option if you can add it.)

but LB isnt combining them when i hit consolidate?.  

This is still on my plate. Alternative titles have not yet been integrated into LaunchBox.

[Jason Carr]

Beta 3 is out now guys with some serious performance improvements from the live stream this morning:

- Improvement: Massive startup performance increases for both LaunchBox and Big Box; in some cases it is now well over twice as fast; used multi-threading and other strategies

- Improvement: Significant performance increases when selecting platform categories in Big Box

Hopefully that helps quite a bit.

[ALIE]

4 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

This is still on my plate. Alternative titles have not yet been integrated into LaunchBox.

That explains it then ☺️

[ALIE]

Tested the start up time on my crappie laptop didn't expect miracles. 

Specs. 

Intel Celeron CPU 1000M 1.80GHz.

Ram 4GB.

Start up before updating. 

LB - 56: seconds. 

BB - 1:56 seconds. 

Start up after updating. 

LB - 44: seconds. 

BB - 1:36 seconds. 

 

[Norfair]

6 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Beta 3 is out now guys with some serious performance improvements from the live stream this morning:

- Improvement: Massive startup performance increases for both LaunchBox and Big Box; in some cases it is now well over twice as fast; used multi-threading and other strategies

- Improvement: Significant performance increases when selecting platform categories in Big Box

Hopefully that helps quite a bit.

I've already done some startup performance testing in 7.10b3 and I don't understand what's going on.

In 7.8 I had a total startup time of 4s, very fast.
Then in 7.9 it went up to 23 seconds (I did add some playlists, but that don't explain the 19 extra seconds).

This is my test on 7.10b2:
1. Before Initializing (before any GUI is shown) 3s
2. Initializing 3s
3. Populating Games 7s
4. Caching Playlists 4s
5. Loading Interface 6s
Total: 23s

This is my test on 7.10b3:
1. Before Initializing (before any GUI is shown) 3s
2. Initializing 3s
3. Populating Games 4s
4. Caching Playlists 0s
5. Loading Interface 11s
Total: 21s

During the whole startup process, the CPU doesn't exceed 8% for any single core.
The Game/Playlist loading is much faster, but the Interface loading is even slower than before. And the Initialization was about 0s in 7.8, now it's 6s.

[neil9000]

On ‎30‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 3:37 AM, Kriven said:

This update seems to have broken my Big Box's ability to shuffle its background music in a really weird way... The first song is random, but after that it keeps leaping to the exact same song and playing the rest of that song's album. I took that album out of the "Background" folder, and Big Box started playing another album by that artist (again starting with a song in the middle of the album). I've checked file names, folder name, all of the playlists... Big Box isn't loading a playlist file, I don't think, because it isn't playing the songs in the order that they appear on a playlist. It's just playing the same artist as #2 and then going right on through all of their stuff. I can't figure it out, and it wasn't happening before the update.

Just to add @Jason Carr I have also just noticed this today, starts with a random track then goes sequential after.

[Jason Carr]

6 minutes ago, Norfair said:

I've already done some startup performance testing in 7.10b3 and I don't understand what's going on.

In 7.8 I had a total startup time of 4s, very fast.
Then in 7.9 it went up to 23 seconds (I did add some playlists, but that don't explain the 19 extra seconds).

This is my test on 7.10b2:
1. Before Initializing (before any GUI is shown) 3s
2. Initializing 3s
3. Populating Games 7s
4. Caching Playlists 4s
5. Loading Interface 6s
Total: 23s

This is my test on 7.10b3:
1. Before Initializing (before any GUI is shown) 3s
2. Initializing 3s
3. Populating Games 4s
4. Caching Playlists 0s
5. Loading Interface 11s
Total: 21s

During the whole startup process, the CPU doesn't exceed 8% for any single core.
The Game/Playlist loading is much faster, but the Interface loading is even slower than before. And the Initialization was about 0s in 7.8, now it's 6s.

That is odd; it's possible that there's something unique about your collection that is affected by the changes we made. If you can, reboot your machine to see if there isn't something else weird that's going on. If you're still seeing the same results, PM me your Data folder if you can and I can test.

[Porl Hendy]

Great update @Jason Carr

 

specs:

i7-6700HQ

8GB ram

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M

 

Beta 2

LB 12.5

BB 24.9

 

Beta 3

LB 7.7

BB 14.8

Thanks again

[Expello]

34 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

This has come up before. As much as I'd love to not install DirectX for every update, we will inevitably get a bunch of reported errors if we don't. Previously we skipped out on DirectX for updates, but unfortunately users ran into too many missing DLL issues so we had to add it back in. As far as I know there's no way to install DirectX without elevated privileges.

 

Ok I understand. But you only need to integrate a query which checks which directx version is installed and only if it is needed directx installed. Or is it so simply not possible?

[Jason Carr]

3 minutes ago, Expello said:

 

Ok I understand. But you only need to integrate a query which checks which directx version is installed and only if it is needed directx installed. Or is it so simply not possible?

Unfortunately it's not that simple. There are a million different DirectX DLLs, and you have to check for each individual one. I'm also not aware of an official MS way of doing it outside of running the installer (other than a hack).