8.2-beta-1 Released

[Jason Carr]

Beta 4 is out now guys with a hopeful fix for the jumbled side bar items in the old LaunchBox, as well as some new stuff for LaunchBox.Next. I believe the above reported issues have been fixed, and we now have a right-click menu. Some minor styles have been updated, the buttons on the bottom all now work, etc.

[neil9000]

8 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Beta 4 is out now guys with a hopeful fix for the jumbled side bar items in the old LaunchBox, as well as some new stuff for LaunchBox.Next. I believe the above reported issues have been fixed, and we now have a right-click menu. Some minor styles have been updated, the buttons on the bottom all now work, etc.

configure is still grayed out for me? Hamburger menu still does nothing, am I missing something?

[Lordmonkus]

12 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

a hopeful fix for the jumbled side bar items in the old LaunchBox

Can confirm on my system this is fixed.

12 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

as well as some new stuff for LaunchBox.Next

Sexy green bar indicating which game is selected.

2 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

configure is still grayed out for me? Hamburger menu still does nothing, am I missing something?

Yeah, configure is still grayed out and no hamburger button but I am assuming that's still not hooked up yet.

Right clicking game menu works and so does double clicking to run games, so good job there.

[Jason Carr]

3 minutes ago, Lordmonkus said:

Can confirm on my system this is fixed.

Sexy green bar indicating which game is selected.

Yeah, configure is still grayed out and no hamburger button but I am assuming that's still not hooked up yet.

Right clicking game menu works and so does double clicking to run games, so good job there.

Configure should work for games that have a configuration path entered in.

[spectral]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

This is a side-effect of the fix we put in for search usability. I probably won't put in extra effort here for the previous version of LaunchBox, because of LaunchBox.Next. We can re-address with LaunchBox.Next depending on how it's working there.

Its fine and some people seem to prefer the way it is now. I'm happy to stay on 8.1 while sorting things out.

[ckp]

the old LB sorting is fixed for me in beta 4, but launching with it set to ALL platform is still empty in the LB.Next app (old LB is ok). I still have to click on any other platform and then back to ALL for the games to show up in ALL.

Edit: it's actually like this for any platform that LB.Next comes up on. I changed to Arcade platform, closed LB.Next, and reopened to a blank empty Arcade platform without even a scrollbar until clicking another platform and back.

Edited March 23, 2018 by ckp

[ckp]

i just hit F5 to see if refresh might make the empty game pane on startup appear with games, but doing that crashed LB.Next.

 

[ckp]

here's a weird bug in LB.Next.  i clicked on my Sega Dreamcast platform and right clicked a game and open emulator (demul.exe). demul opened.

Closed Demul. Then right clicked the same game and hit Edit and crashed LB.Next. Notice the weird path pcsx2.exe inside demul emulator folder which does not exist at all. I'm using Win 10 1709 btw.

Edit: this is repeatable. 

Edit2: it does this with any game in any platform. always appending that pcsx2 thing

Edit3: yes, i have the pcsx2 plugin

Edited March 25, 2018 by ckp

[ckp]

in my arcade (mame) platform i have Image Type set to screenshots and old LB shows just the gameplay screenshots like i want. in LB.Next it seems i have an assortment of front boxes and screenshots. so it doesn't seem to be honoring that setting from old LB for the platform.

[ckp]

Selecting a game in LB.Next has a very dark background image than I have set in my old LB settings. Probably not hooked up for that setting yet I guess.

[ckp]

i was browsing by Arcade platform in LB.Next with keys home/end/pageup/pagedown and got this crash.

[ckp]

tried playing a N64 game twice (retroarch) in lb.next but couldnt exit game with controller. had to use alt-f4 from my keybaord.  worked from stand alone mame game. i use xboxone controller with controller automation select+start buttons to exit games. works fine in old LB

Edit: same issue in dolphin and pcsx2 games as well

i guess the only reason mame exit works is because i have the same combo keys set in mame to exit games

Edited March 23, 2018 by ckp

[ckp]

in lb.next viewing by Publisher isn't at all alphabetized like it is in old LB.

Edit: same for Developer and maybe several others

Edited March 23, 2018 by ckp

[Chris Kant]

I try to add some steam games and the system ask me for the Steam API. last week I already insert this API Key and the system did not save it. is it possible that LaunchBox can save this so I do not have to reenter it? same for my Steam Name.

[Jason Carr]

@ckp Thanks for those reports. Much of that has not been hooked up yet. I'll look into those error messages.

@Chris Kant We're gonna hopefully get those to save before the official release.

[Jason Carr]

Beta 5 is out now guys, finally with the options to filter out games that are missing images or videos:

- New Feature: Five new options have been added to the View menu in LaunchBox to hide games missing videos, front box art, screenshots, clear logos, and/or background images. These options will trigger a process to populate a missing media cache that will allow quick navigation. There's also an option underneath these five items to "Refresh All Missing Media" in case you've manually added or removed images directly from the file system.

Getting this to perform well without any issues was a major challenge; we ended up adding properties to each game to specify/cache whether particular media is missing. You can force (re-)populating the cache using the "Refresh All Missing Media" option. It should automatically run the necessary process when you check one of the options as well. If you don't check any of these options, things will behave exactly as they did before and you won't ever have to worry about any of it.

LaunchBox.Next has also been updated in this beta with the beginnings of the main menu (hamburger icon). The Tools and Help menus are still empty, and some of the items that are there will pop up a "Coming soon" box, but we're getting there. I have two more major things to implement in LaunchBox.Next before it's mostly there: the game details side bar, and the working/progress functionality on the bottom. We'll implement the remainder of the menus as we work on those features.

I haven't decided exactly when we'll put out the next official release, but it will likely be out before everything is completed with LaunchBox.Next.

[eatkinola]

5 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Beta 5 is out now guys, finally with the options to filter out games that are missing images or videos

@Jason Carr Thanks for continuing to improve an already great app! It appears the plugin API changed with beta 5 related to the above improvement. Methods GetAllGames, GetGameCount, and HasGames on multiple interfaces (IPlatformCategory, IPlatform, IPlaylist) changed from (bool, bool) to (bool, bool, bool, bool, bool, bool). Would it be reasonable to restore the old (bool, bool) methods and then add the new 6-parameter methods you need to support the new filter-out-games feature? I suppose the 2-param methods could just defer to the 6-param method, and pass four false-bool values.

This API change breaks backwards compatibility for certain plugins (well mine at least but quite possibly others). I can easily update my plugin library to reflect this change, but users would need to update all themes if using an old version of the plugin, if they were to use LB-8-beta-5. Adding back the old 2-param method will probably avert a lot of of plugin-related bug reports.

 

[Rincewind]

Seems to of broken the HelperControl_v4 plugin @Jason Carr

[Jason Carr]

Whoops. Yup, I'll fix that for the next beta guys. Sorry for the breaking change there.

[Jason Carr]

On 3/22/2018 at 7:27 PM, ckp said:

the old LB sorting is fixed for me in beta 4, but launching with it set to ALL platform is still empty in the LB.Next app (old LB is ok). I still have to click on any other platform and then back to ALL for the games to show up in ALL.

Edit: it's actually like this for any platform that LB.Next comes up on. I changed to Arcade platform, closed LB.Next, and reopened to a blank empty Arcade platform without even a scrollbar until clicking another platform and back.

I'm hoping this is fixed for the next beta, which should be out shortly.

On 3/22/2018 at 7:32 PM, ckp said:

i just hit F5 to see if refresh might make the empty game pane on startup appear with games, but doing that crashed LB.Next.

 

This is related and should be fixed once the above issue is fixed.

On 3/22/2018 at 7:39 PM, ckp said:

here's a weird bug in LB.Next.  i clicked on my Sega Dreamcast platform and right clicked a game and open emulator (demul.exe). demul opened.

Closed Demul. Then right clicked the same game and hit Edit and crashed LB.Next. Notice the weird path pcsx2.exe inside demul emulator folder which does not exist at all. I'm using Win 10 1709 btw.

Edit: this is repeatable. 

Edit2: it does this with any game in any platform. always appending that pcsx2 thing

Edit3: yes, i have the pcsx2 plugin

This issue appears to be caused by that plugin; somehow the plugin is looking for the PCSX2.EXE file in the wrong place, and so it's getting a FileNotFoundException. I don't think there's anything I can do to fix this since the plugin is somehow getting the wrong path. I'm guessing this is a "current directory" issue somehow, but the plugin developer will have to solve it.

On 3/22/2018 at 8:44 PM, ckp said:

in my arcade (mame) platform i have Image Type set to screenshots and old LB shows just the gameplay screenshots like i want. in LB.Next it seems i have an assortment of front boxes and screenshots. so it doesn't seem to be honoring that setting from old LB for the platform.

Image types are not yet hooked up, so currently it always just shows the Front Boxes image group (which may have a series of priorities depending on your settings).

On 3/22/2018 at 8:54 PM, ckp said:

Selecting a game in LB.Next has a very dark background image than I have set in my old LB settings. Probably not hooked up for that setting yet I guess.

Background images should be working properly and the same as LaunchBox, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

On 3/22/2018 at 8:59 PM, ckp said:

i was browsing by Arcade platform in LB.Next with keys home/end/pageup/pagedown and got this crash.

Fixed for the next beta.

On 3/22/2018 at 9:10 PM, ckp said:

tried playing a N64 game twice (retroarch) in lb.next but couldnt exit game with controller. had to use alt-f4 from my keybaord.  worked from stand alone mame game. i use xboxone controller with controller automation select+start buttons to exit games. works fine in old LB

Edit: same issue in dolphin and pcsx2 games as well

i guess the only reason mame exit works is because i have the same combo keys set in mame to exit games

Controller automation has not yet been implemented in LaunchBox.Next.

On 3/22/2018 at 9:22 PM, ckp said:

in lb.next viewing by Publisher isn't at all alphabetized like it is in old LB.

Edit: same for Developer and maybe several others

That's odd. Might be the same weird sorting bug we ran into with LaunchBox. Of course I can't replicate it, but I'll look into it. Does this apply to everything except for platform categories?