Request: Achievement Notification

[Flickstiq]

I'm really enjoying the addition of RetroAchievements to BigBox, and I was hoping to add a quick request. Would it be possible to have an on-screen notification when you reach an achievement? Something like the toast that you get on Xbox when you accomplish one. It's nothing essential, but I personally enjoy seeing it pop up in the moment rather than needing to dig through menus to see what I triggered during a given session. I realize that other users may not want this, so maybe something that can be turned on or off in the Options menu. I also want to say thanks for the feature, and I hope that the devs consider my request.

[neil9000]

Hi and welcome to the community, I don't believe this is possible as its not Launchbox/Bigbox unlocking the achievements its the emulator. Launchbox/Bigbox do not know if a achievement has been triggered the only reason they show after the fact is that we are using the Retro Achievements api to see what has been unlocked. I don't know what emulator they you are using but I use retroarch and that gives me a message in the bottom left when I unlock a achievement.

[Flickstiq]

I was thinking along the same lines as you with what Retroarch does within it's system. It's clearly something that can be done if Retroarch is doing it. I'd guess that there is a way to call it with the API. What Retroarch does is fine, but I was hoping that BigBox could do it more elegantly if that makes sense. Have a big blurb of text thrown on the screen in Retroarch isn't as nice as the Achievement notifications that we see on other platforms. And BigBox is all about the look of things in the interface. It's all about making the system look great, so I feel that having an attractive notification falls in line with what BigBox is all about. But maybe it can't be done. I just assumed that it could since Retroarch is already doing a basic form of it.

[damageinc86]

I'm sure in theory you could figure out when retroarch is throwing that message to the screen, and then convert it to a nice little icon with text pop up notification. I have no idea though, as I know nothing of actual programming.  But that would be a great step to take in the quest for seamless retro gaming via frontend.

[Jason Carr]

I would love to see this too, guys. Unfortunately though, no, it's not really possible. The API has no way to provide a "notification" when an achievement is gained. The emulators work because the code for attaining the achievement is all running within the same process, so it's relatively simple to do. For us to do it, we would have to somehow tap into the process of the emulator, which would be tricky in itself. On top of that, it would be completely different code for each and every emulator. So sadly, as things currently stand, it's not even a possibility.

The only thing I can think to do at this point is to constantly ping the API every few seconds to detect for changes. But that's a terrible idea as it's extremely wasteful and it's likely to bring the retroachievements.org servers down. The best approach to possibly get this implemented in the future is to ask the retroachievements.org team to add some sort of notification features to the API.

[Flickstiq]

That makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate you taking the time to respond. I will look into making a request at RetroAchievements to see if they’re willing to add something like this. Hopefully they are because it is something that is very common within the subject matter. 

[damageinc86]

I would wonder if you could tap into anything in the retroarch program?  Doesn't that keep track of the retro achievements for every core and do that update message for each core when you are playing different ones?  the standalone emulators I can see being next to impossible, but it seems like it might be a possibility if you could tap into the update message that retroarch displays.

[Jason Carr]

3 minutes ago, damageinc86 said:

I would wonder if you could tap into anything in the retroarch program?  Doesn't that keep track of the retro achievements for every core and do that update message for each core when you are playing different ones?  the standalone emulators I can see being next to impossible, but it seems like it might be a possibility if you could tap into the update message that retroarch displays.

Possible, but it's not really a good solution and would be likely to break upon new releases of Retroarch. So, as usual, if we're going to do it I'd want to do it properly.