Is it possible to give games in a playlist a different title/cover?

[Landcross]

Today I made my first playlist, mostly to see how the feature works. I've made a playlist of the Atari 2600 Sears Tele-Games. It was a bit of work because a lot of the Sears editions have different titles than the original releases (and yes, I submitted all alternative titles to the LaunchboxDB ). The thing is, the games in my games list all have their original titles and covers and I would like to keep it that way. However, it would be great if I could rename the games in this specific playlist + give them the special Sears covers too.

I don't think that's currently possible, is it? Or am I missing something?

Edited August 18, 2017 by Landcross

[CriticalCid]

That isn’t possible. Playlists are only filtering games out of your LaunchBox collection and don’t alter them in any way. I also don’t see any chance that this will be changed in the foreseeable future.

If you really want to do this you would have to import them again as duplicates and change them the way you want.

[Landcross]

7 minutes ago, CriticalCid said:

I also don’t see any chance that this will be changed in the foreseeable future.

Why not exactly (just wondering, I don't want to hurry anyone )? To me it looks like it wouldn't be that much work to incorporate. Playlists are saved in the xml files with a data-entry per game. You could very well add 2 more data points to the XML: DisplayTitle and DisplayCover or something like that.

[CriticalCid]

Those metadata fields in the playlist xml’s are there for filtering only and are not actually usable info’s for LaunchBox to display. They were added as fail saves so that the playlists can easily be shared with other users. People are using different ROM sets with different file names, LB database updates could have changed the games ID's, people could have manually changed the game name or other metadata, etc. So it just makes sense to use multiple factors to increase the chance that LaunchBox can find the right games on a different LB setup.

[Landcross]

5 minutes ago, CriticalCid said:

Those metadata fields in the playlist xml’s are there for filtering only and are not actually usable info’s for LaunchBox to display. They were added as fail saves so that the playlists can easily be shared with other users. People are using different ROM sets with different file names, LB database updates could have changed the games ID's, people could have manually changed the game name or other metadata, etc. So it just makes sense to use multiple factors to increase the chance that LaunchBox can find the right games on a different LB setup.

Yes, I understand that it's currently just for sharing/detecting the games. But that's why I thought it wouldn't be that hard to implement. It's just writing and reading 2 extra data points and they can be certainly shared. Custom titles are just text in the xml file, can be shared without 0 problems. Custom covers is of course a little more complex because if you have a playlist with custom covers that you want to share you have to include the cover images.

But, I'm not familiar with the programming behind Launchbox, maybe I'm dead wrong 

 

[CriticalCid]

Sure I get you. I don’t know how hard it would be to actually add it but technically is having a list with search patterns and “hijacking” the database two completely different pairs of shoes. Custom Images are probably a complete different beast and I’m very certain that this isn’t a quick thing to add by any means.

I’m not saying that this is a bad idea but I honestly don’t see much use cases for it and nothing that many users would use. Of course you are free to add that request to the “List of Small Things” but if you check the current list in the second post you will notice that it’s already very long. That’s why I’ve said that it’s most certain a low priority right now even if it actually would be easy to add.

[Landcross]

5 minutes ago, CriticalCid said:

I’m not saying that this is a bad idea but I honestly don’t see much use cases for it and nothing that many users would use. Of course you are free to add that request to the “List of Small Things” but you check the current list in the second post you will notice that it’s already very long. That’s why I’ve said that it’s most certain a low priority right now even if it actually would be easy to add.

That's true. It's a pretty niche usecase. I honestly can't think of another usecase myself either. Although, I could very well imagine people creating playlists and creating accompanying custom covers so that they all look in the same style or something like that. But I'm not really a media creator, so that's not my, uhm, 'area of expertise'  I would much rather see something like this having a higher priority than the feature discussed here, but if the developer(s) have nothing left to do, I still think it would be nice to add