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I've been kinda silent here cause of work :/ but i had a bit of time again to work on my own frontend for launchbox called Massive (in size and hopefully in features sometime in the distant future :ph34r:)

Without further ado, here is a short pre pre pre alpha video: 

As you can see it's based on Unity3D and parses the xml's generated by launchbox.

Everything (3d models, textures, sounds etc.)  is loaded dynamically from easy to edit theme files (currently .ini based) .

Currently i haven't adjusted the platform files so most 3d models are rotated wrong.

I'll probably never release it cause bigbox but jason (who's seen a different version a while ago) said himself it wouldn't make bigbox obsolete (and it definately doesn't in it's current state :P)

But yeah this is my WIP Wii-Flow like launcher for Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, IOS, Raspberry Pi etc. it runs on everything...

I'll keep working on it when i'm bored... only god (and maybe Jason 9_9) know when there will be 3d support in bigbox or bigbox for other platforms.

 

Edited by Izegod
my spelling and grammar suck and i hate myself for this reason, thank you for your attention :P
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Just now, damageinc86 said:

I actually dislike the way the 3D boxes look currently. It just never looks really correct. There's some aspect of it that always feels skewed a bit. I like having regular 2d boxes just front and back. But it's a great effort nonetheless. 

Yeah that's more of a personal preference thing though. I us 3D boxes exclusively in my setup and I love them, each to there own as they say.

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Thanks for the mostly nice feedback guys :D

I've already fixxed the fullscreen video issue and added fuzzy matching for the covers / textures and the reflective floor (optional shader).

The position & rotation of the boxes in the current wip massive theme are fully adjustable... you can put them flat on the ground for a more traditional coverflow if you want.

Fully rotatable arcades cabinets would be "possible" but i don't know if theres a universal marquee layout for the images.

Building 3d models for every arcade would be a) very time consuming and b) VERY hard on the system since i couldn't spawn just instances of one object with a different texture... which also means pooling wouldn't work...

So instead of ~10 3d models you'd have to keep THOUSANDS of 3d models ready for mame... not a good idea and loading them all on the fly.... eh... rip hdd / ssd xD

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A little update:

implementing object pooling for the covers helped ALOT... as you can see in this video... i've increased the amount of covers from ~10 to infinite and it runs better than before as you can see by the enabled debug fps counter :D 

Now your 20000+ title collection from mame shouldn't bother it anymore ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...
  • 2 months later...

I didn't have the time to work on this for a while but i recently started a "new" project.

I'll rewrite Massive in JS using Electron and babylonjs because Unity3D was kinda overkill... +Electron Apps run on nearly every platform, be it windows, linux, macosx etc.

My tests so far look quite promissing imo, here is one from today:

It renders 800.000 individually lit triangles and runs 2 backgrounds threads at the same time (emulating file loading / parsing etc. for example). Steady 60 FPS. :D

It also plays music and a sound on keypress (that's when it changes the bg color).

This is the native windows version (x64), at work i tested it on linux and it ran pretty good too (reduced triangles cause shitty work pc :P)

 

I don't know how well it can launch other programs (emulators) and monitor them yet but that'll come next... i already know how to parse all of launchbox's files from c# project / unity. So i'll just have to translate those to javascript. :)

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I obviously had too much free time at work today and this is the result:

- parsed all of launchbox's xml files

- added basic theme support... well in this case a theme is just another js file so you can do whatever you want in them :P

- added some helper functions like the fps display, cleaning strings, music helper

- fullscreen mode & detection

- video snaps with sound

It uses kinda a lot of ram cause of the benchmark cube, without it it'll drop to ~200mb'ish... will increase again later tho because we will have to store atleast a decent amount of snaps in ram so our pooling will work and won't be visible to the user

i'll just have to add application (emulator) launching and monitoring next and it's basically a working (ugly) frontend. :D

The cube theme shown below just loads 3 hardcoded snaps right now but as i've parsed everything already we just have to throw all that junk into a for loop and go through our array... bam full blown frontend :P

 

Edited by Ize
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Aaand finally another (small) update:

Last week was kinda slow but i managed to add some UI stuff and finally 3D Boxes.

The window now scales everything more or less properly at any resolution and as seen at the end, i've added the first tweened motion to switch between boxes / games

Next is the coverflow stuff :D

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Well, that was easier than expected:

- implemented basic coverflow

- added fuzzy search | finds the correct texture from a folder of files

- started work on a real theme (i only load 9 game boxes for testing)

- logic is now actually in the theme file so it's 100% customizable (rotate left/right, details view etc.)

- games can actually be launched now :DMassive will resume it's previous state on exit (music stopping / starting in this case)

probably more i forgot... heh... 

 

Now i'll start working on the basic theme and cleaning up this (Massive :P) mess so others can actually work with it.

It's still clunky af and kinda buggy but all the basics are in now :)

Edited by Ize
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