Big Box Freeze Ups

[NJDave71]

I have been using BigBox for over a year and i have seen incredible advancements.  This community has provided so much content and material that has really elevated this product.  I have even contributed a Theme and Some plugins.  With that said, I have notice that BigBox will Freezes up during navigation or between views.    I do not have any issues with other programs or emulators.   

If anyone has suggestions of performance tweaks, kindly share them, 

Thanks 

 

[CriticalCid]

What theme are you using?

[NJDave71]

Aeon Nox and city Hunter 2

[CriticalCid]

I see. I’ve run the latest version of CriticalZone V2 in Attract Mode overnight the last few days to test its stability with the latest version of @eatkinola's themer plug-in and BigBox was frozen 3 of 4 times for me in the morning.

So all the themes you are using use an older version of his plug-in as well, so it’s good to know that it's definitely not something that he had introduced recently. But I have yet to come to the conclusion if it’s related to his plug-in at all or if it’s an issue of BigBox itself. Can you say on which version of BigBox or theme you started to experience the freezes?

Anyway, thanks to your info I have a better idea of what I need to test to identify the problem

[Jason Carr]

I'll do some testing with those themes myself. I've been running the original CityHunter in Attract Mode for weeks with no freeze-ups and no issues. I haven't tested the latest version of CriticalZone 2 or CityHunter 2 overnight, but I did run into some stability issues with the previous versions. I'll do some further testing.

Since it's been so difficult to get @eatkinola's plugin running stable (and I know why that is, it's because of the difficulties of working with the VLC videos), perhaps I should just build the functionality into Big Box itself.

[NJDave71]

Around the first round of 7.15 beta.  Just before the introduction of retro achievements.  It about the same VLC started to misbehave.  That was the beginning of the video glitches as well.  

Aeon Nox uses two plugins.  One I wrote for scaling text and date time.  And the multi background video plugin.  

I have notice more freeze up with horizontal wheel vs the vertical wheel

I you have a theme you like me to test let me know u can look at it tonight or tomorrow.  

Let me know if you see any freeze ups with Aeon Nox also test vertical vs horizontal.  

Thanks 

 

[CriticalCid]

4 hours ago, NJDave71 said:

I you have a theme you like me to test let me know u can look at it tonight or tomorrow. 

You could test other themes that don’t utilize the Themer plug-in by eatkinola and see if you experience the same freezes with them. Afaik it’s currently used in CriticalZone V2, City Hunter V2, Aoen Nox and Nostalgia.

[NJDave71]

Was that the plugin for embedded fonts?

[CriticalCid]

No, it's the multi-background video plug-in.

[NJDave71]

Thanks I will remove that later and and see if I still have the locking up.  

[NJDave71]

I force populated the images and I now don't have any lag at the moment.  Will continue to test. I didn't remove any plugins.  

 

Edited December 11, 2017 by NJDave71

[NJDave71]

 

I have changed my theme to use background fan art in stead playing a background video.   Even though i choose to force populate the game wheel images.  if i navigate by letter choose the letter S The Wheel is empty but i can navigate and see videos but if i wait a minute the images start to appear.      I have also notice that Clear Logos load much quicker then box art.   

I have also notice that the vertical wheel performances better then the horizontal wheel.    

During Freeze up CPU is at 99% and then will return to 52%.     

If I turn off all videos which cheapens the experience the UI  smother but still have issues with images repopulating.

@Jason Carr can you look at background loading and Multi threading.    My machine is setup to shell Bigbox instead of Windows 10.    I notice a Lot of Reading of the HDD with the recent betas.   

Try this out.

Create a New  Windows 10 User Account  something like BIGBOX

1.  Press Window Key and the letter S to bring up windows Search
2.  Type User Accounts and select Settings
3.  select manage another account
4.  Add a new user in PC setting
5.  Add someone else to this PC
6.  I don't have this persons sign-in information
7.  Add user without a Microsoft Account
8.  Create the user and leave the password blank if you want to just auto sign in
9.  Click and follow the on screen instructions.

Windows Auto Login to BigBox (make sure you have logged into the new account)
* Warning we are about to modify the registry and it's only for the new user account created above
1) Open REGEDIT (start menu > run, and type in REGEDIT ).
2) go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon.
3) add a new string value (Edit > New > String Value) called shell. and set the value to the path of the new shell to point to your bigbox executable e.g C:\Launchbox\bigbox.exe.
4) log out and log back in

ta-da 

 

[Jason Carr]

@NJDave71 For 7.14 I went through every single image loading process across the entire app (Big Box) and made 100% sure that all images were loading in a background process, so I can confirm that background images are indeed loading multi-threaded.

[CriticalCid]

So I let BigBox ran in Attract Mode with CriticalZone V1 and the latest LB beta for roughly 20 hours and absolutely no freezes at all on my end. I’ll do some more testing to confirm that but as of now I’m highly tending to say that the plugin from @eatkinola causes the freezes.

[LogicalEgo]

10 minutes ago, CriticalCid said:

 

So I let BigBox ran in Attract Mode with CriticalZone V1 and the latest LB beta for roughly 20 hours and absolutely no freezes at all on my end. I’ll do some more testing to confirm that but as of now I’m highly tending to say that the plugin from @eatkinola causes the freezes.

You are running the latest plugin correct? The older, which mine still uses does have an issue with attract mode. I am still waiting on the final version, or close to before updating my themes.

[CriticalCid]

Yes, I've tested it with the two most recent versions. Originally I let it run to check if another issue that I've found last week was gone after eatkinola had fixed it but instead I came across all those freezes.

[LogicalEgo]

2 minutes ago, CriticalCid said:

 

Yes, I've tested it with the two most recent versions. Originally I let it run to check if another issue that I've found last week was gone after eatkinola had fixed it but instead I came across all those freezes.

I will continue to hold off before updating. The version I am using now is decently stable among other issues.

[Jason Carr]

@CriticalCid and @keltoigael, it's certainly up to you guys, but it would be my preference if we could put out a new version of both sets of themes (CriticalZone and CityHunter) without the plugin. I just don't like there being stability issues with the latest versions of the most popular themes. That, and I'd love to be able to use the updated themes myself but I can't with the stability issues.

I do want to clarify and thank @eatkinola for the awesome plugin; I just think that perhaps the video stuff would be better done internally in Big Box code rather than in a plugin, due to the annoyingly complicated code required for videos. Certainly none of this has ever been @eatkinola's fault. If you guys remember, we went through hell getting the video playback to be stable when we initially developed it all.

Going forward, after the 7.15 release, I am hoping to come back to this and integrate at least some of those video features into Big Box directly.

[LogicalEgo]

14 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

@CriticalCid and @keltoigael, it's certainly up to you guys, but it would be my preference if we could put out a new version of both sets of themes (CriticalZone and CityHunter) without the plugin. I just don't like there being stability issues with the latest versions of the most popular themes. That, and I'd love to be able to use the updated themes myself but I can't with the stability issues.

I do want to clarify and thank @eatkinola for the awesome plugin; I just think that perhaps the video stuff would be better done internally in Big Box code rather than in a plugin, due to the annoyingly complicated code required for videos. Certainly none of this has ever been @eatkinola's fault. If you guys remember, we went through hell getting the video playback to be stable when we initially developed it all.

Going forward, after the 7.15 release, I am hoping to come back to this and integrate at least some of those video features into Big Box directly.

Personally I have zero issue with this but we would have to redo the themes, not that big of a deal. We will lose the ability for multiple video playback and cross fading but if you want to add those features into BigBox I would love that.

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, keltoigael said:

Personally I have zero issue with this but we would have to redo the themes, not that big of a deal. We will lose the ability for multiple video playback and cross fading but if you want to add those features into BigBox I would love that.

Thank you @keltoigael; I do want to get those features integrated, especially multiple video playback. I'll look into that for the next version.