8.0-beta-1 Released

[shinra358]

To be honest, most of these are kinda lazy. For the older systems, they mostly are cutoffs from the game boxes. Itll be better for the community to participate and make good ones for the website. Thats whats taking me so long to release my theme, im literally making every banner and bg myself.

 

Not to mention jpgs instead of png, game names mostly are too small, or game name in diff language.

Edited February 9, 2018 by shinra358

[SNAK3ATER]

1 minute ago, shinra358 said:

To be honest, most of these are kinda lazy. For the older systems, they mostly are cutoffs from the game boxes. Itll be better for the community to participate and make good ones for the website. Thats whats taking me so long to release my theme, im literally making every banner and bg myself.

Having a viewable banner is better than having no banner at all Shinra, Originally my Bigflix theme was supposed to have steam banner support in one of the views but I scrapped the idea since there isn't enough contents for other platforms to warrant a banners view.

While I agree with you that there are lazy submissions on that website atleast it's a good start and we can gradually build our database from there.

[shinra358]

I feel ya. But itll also be double wrk cleaning and replacing when the time comes. Thats why i made emphasis before to do the normal text like the clear logo banner when theres no pic instead of that big gray box but jason forgot

[Jason Carr]

1 hour ago, Lordmonkus said:

@Jason Carr Something that has come up in Discord recently is the option for the search in Launchbox to not auto search based on what is typed but instead to wait until the user has pressed the Enter key.

The way it currently is can be problematic for those on slower systems and slow typers.

Noted.

[Jason Carr]

31 minutes ago, SNAK3ATER said:

Nice find Cid! This site has lots of steam banners for retro platforms and it has an API for searching too. Can this be added to future beta updates jason?

Yes, we can look into adding it for the future, though I'm not sure of the priority of it. It won't make it into 8.0 since I'm looking to push that out ASAP due to the Steam import issue.

[JamesBond@ge]

2 hours ago, shinra358 said:

I feel ya. But itll also be double wrk cleaning and replacing when the time comes. Thats why i made emphasis before to do the normal text like the clear logo banner when theres no pic instead of that big gray box but jason forgot

First World Problems.

[alnyden]

6 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Is anyone else seeing any performance issues with Aeon Nox 2.0? Or any other theme? These performance issues are puzzling me because I haven't experienced any of them in any of the 8.0 betas.

@alnyden What do you mean by "taking 30 seconds to load"? When does it take those 30 seconds?

I have Aeon Nox set to a specific playlist.  When I select that playlist, I hear the select sound play before the software freezes up for aprox. 30 seconds before the playlist appears.  Afterwards, everything works as normal.

[NJDave71]

Do you Have an AMD or Intel chip? 

[alnyden]

54 minutes ago, NJDave71 said:

Do you Have an AMD or Intel chip? 

AMD.  

[Typhon]

On 2/8/2018 at 11:45 AM, Jason Carr said:

Okay, apparently we did have an issue where alternate names without regions were not being sent down to the LaunchBox Metadata.xml file. Not sure how that issue went unidentified for so long, but thanks for catching that. I know you had mentioned something like that earlier as well.

I just fixed it on the server so that alternate names without regions will come down into the Metadata.xml now as well, though you'll need to make sure the metadata updates in order to test it (it's the same thing where it'll only update once a day and it updates whenever you try and search for a game or run an import/download process, etc.).

@Jason Carr, I am now going through the list a 2nd time, to ensure all missing games work, and I'm encountering a problem: some of the really bad names have already been deleted.

For example, Ninja Gaiden Shadow is listed as "Ninja Gaiden Shadow / Shadow Warriors / Ninja Ryukenden GB" on the Retro Achievements website, and that is the exact alternate name that I entered, and it was accepted. You can see a screenshot of that here:

It is already gone. I expected as much - when I first started entering in these alternate names, that was one of my concerns. People will see these terrible alternate names, and just delete them, because they don't know what they're for. Why wouldn't they? They're awful. If I didn't know any better, I'd delete them myself as a moderator.

So again, I implore you - create a new region, and call it 'Retro Achievements.' I will personally do all of the legwork, and go back through that long list and add the 'Retro Achievements' region, so that anyone who sees a terribly named game knows what it is for, and will think twice before randomly deleting it.

It was a lot of work (16+ hours). I am happy to contribute - but I would like some sort of safeguards in place, so that the work wasn't for nothing.

Edited February 10, 2018 by Typhon

[Drodrick]

49 minutes ago, Typhon said:

@Jason Carr, I am now going through the list a 2nd time, to ensure all missing games work, and I'm encountering a problem: some of the really bad names have already been deleted.

For example, Ninja Gaiden Shadow is listed as "Ninja Gaiden Shadow / Shadow Warriors / Ninja Ryukenden GB" on the Retro Achievements website, and that is the exact alternate name that I entered, and it was accepted. You can see a screenshot of that here:

It is already gone. I expected as much - when I first started entering in these alternate names, that was one of my concerns. People will see these terrible alternate names, and just delete them, because they don't know what they're for. Why wouldn't they? They're awful. If I didn't know any better, I'd delete them myself as a moderator.

So again, I implore you - create a new region, and call it 'Retro Achievements.' I will personally do all of the legwork, and go back through that long list and add the 'Retro Achievements' region, so that anyone who sees a terribly named game knows what it is for, and will think twice before randomly deleting it.

It was a lot of work (16+ hours). I am happy to contribute - but I would like some sort of safeguards in place, so that the work wasn't for nothing.

I've noticed that all the alternate name without his region specified region does not run properly, So the game with this alternate name without specified region, the metadata region and merged simply does not run; 

 

[Typhon]

Are you using the latest beta? No issues on my end.

[Drodrick]

Yes, but in the moment to import games it was some games without images, boxes, and not merged, mainly japanese versions, i did not understand why, So i took a look on the databases, and all the games that did not have artwork and it was not been merged, are games as an alternative names without his specified region, take a look in your roms it posible that you have some roms without cover art and not merged, then take a look in the databases, So I've corrected almost than 500 alternative names without his corresponding region, it is posible that this is the cause of your deletion

Edited February 10, 2018 by Drodrick

[Typhon]

No disrespect intended, but after reading your other thread, it seems safe to assume that when you re-entered the alternate names, you probably changed many of them, even if only slightly. The names have to be exact in order to work, in the context of alternate names, for the purposes of Retro Achievements.

Which means I now have to go through the list a 3rd time, and submit further changes. 

Not your fault though. We'll get this sorted out.

Edited February 10, 2018 by Typhon

[Drodrick]

Don't worry, No It was not for me jejejej, I'm just corrected all the N64 and Snes games library for the moment.

So that's the idea, have the best best available videogames database!! I'm going to work with in it as well, and its better in this way you'll have more approved changes jejeje , I corrected a lot by following the next steps:

 

In fact, I'm just created a bitbucket entry, if you want to support it in order to improve our databases!!

https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/3852/it-is-necessary-that-every-alternate-name

 

Edited February 10, 2018 by Drodrick

[Typhon]

I hate to ask this, as I suspect it would not be as easy to implement, but I would like it very much if the 'alternate names' get imported to the Data\Platforms XML files, and stay there, for the sake of Retro Achievements games, instead of depending on the Metadata.xml file. It could be one field containing all of the names, separated by a semi colon, the way genres already are.

I do not like the idea of Retro Achievements functionality being dependent on data that can and will change, due to community ignorance. This is a solution that would still encourage users to keep the alternate names accurate (for RA functinality), but at the same time, allow their own personal setups to be safeguarded once the data is imported (and possibly edited by the user) correctly one time.

Here is a screenshot of what I have in mind. If you went this route, you could also include a 'scrape as' field for the 'Alternate Names' tab, which would solve the problem of Retro Achievements classifying a game under the wrong platform (e.g. Game Boy instead of Game Boy Color).

Example 1

 

Example 2

I'm now a little paranoid about updating Launchbox, knowing how it all works.

Edited February 10, 2018 by Typhon

[DOS76]

yeah it sounds like maybe a locked field for RetroAchievment alternate names needs to be added hopefully this will get sorted out for you guys.

[NJDave71]

13 hours ago, alnyden said:

AMD.  

Interesting.....  I have also notice freeze ups on AMD CPUs. 

[NJDave71]

Quote

@Jason Carr definite issue with Amd.  Is it my theme,machine or Bigbox?

 

Edited February 10, 2018 by NJDave71

[teeedubb]

On 10/02/2018 at 7:54 AM, SNAK3ATER said:

Having a viewable banner is better than having no banner at all Shinra, Originally my Bigflix theme was supposed to have steam banner support in one of the views but I scrapped the idea since there isn't enough contents for other platforms to warrant a banners view.

While I agree with you that there are lazy submissions on that website atleast it's a good start and we can gradually build our database from there.

It would be nice if LB could auto generate artwork like aeon nox in Kodi does, eg for banners it would use a portion of the fanart with text over the top. LB could use a screenshot, since all games have these available, and the font of the system. This could be also used to generate missing covers etc - Ive seen a few of these in the db.

Eg:

 

Here is how the banners look in Kodi. Granted it it using game logos for text, but I guess there could be a priority system in place eg if no logo available then use text

 

Edited February 11, 2018 by teeedubb