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LaunchBox.Next Now Available


Jason Carr

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46 minutes ago, noiseordinance said:

I love seeing the performance boost on Launchbox. You guys truly are committed to this! Any plans to overhaul the performance on Bigbox? Coming from longtime use of Hyperspin, Bigbox is amazing in terms of ease of use and updating, and the themes are better, but the performance leaves something to be desired on a reasonably spec’d Pc (i5 4460, GTX 970, SSD drives). 

Big Box performance is more due to the fancy display/graphics than anything else. LaunchBox.Next and Big Box use the same underlying code and engines, so it's not like I can overhaul Big Box like we're overhauling LaunchBox. That said, we will continue to focus on improving performance.

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34 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Big Box performance is more due to the fancy display/graphics than anything else. LaunchBox.Next and Big Box use the same underlying code and engines, so it's not like I can overhaul Big Box like we're overhauling LaunchBox. That said, we will continue to focus on improving performance.

Thanks Jason. Bigbox / Launchbox is without a doubt the best frontend and it's a pleasure supporting such a committed team. Cheers!

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On 4/5/2018 at 8:42 AM, Jason Carr said:

Big Box performance is more due to the fancy display/graphics than anything else. LaunchBox.Next and Big Box use the same underlying code and engines, so it's not like I can overhaul Big Box like we're overhauling LaunchBox. That said, we will continue to focus on improving performance.

@Jason Carr I do have a question along these lines. You mentioned a long time ago, back when you were regularly streaming, that BB would be getting a 3D engine for it. Since you say that BB performance is mostly due to the fancy graphics and such, would not offloading that lions share of that work to the GPU be an apparent solution to this? Is there any updates on that as it has been a while and I haven't heard anything about it. Just thinking out loud here and my curiosity has been peaked about this once again.

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1 minute ago, cammelspit said:

@Jason Carr I do have a question along these lines. You mentioned a long time ago, back when you were regularly streaming, that BB would be getting a 3D engine for it. Since you say that BB performance is mostly due to the fancy graphics and such, would not offloading that lions share of that work to the GPU be an apparent solution to this? Is there any updates on that as it has been a while and I haven't heard anything about it. Just thinking out loud here and my curiosity has been peaked about this once again.

The 3D engine is still in limbo; I haven't been back to it since Vlansix was working on it. Unfortunately Vlansix has disappeared, which is the reason it's in limbo. I may or may not get back to it, but surprisingly it hasn't really been a popular request.

Regardless, Big Box *does* offload and use the GPU significantly. WPF does that automatically via DirectX. It's certainly not as optimized as a AAA game, but that's the cost you pay for rapid development, the theming engine, etc.

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So this is a weird one - Controller input (for navigation) and Controller Automation aren't working correctly for me in Next, but works fine in normal LB. I'm not sure if controller navigation is supposed to work at this point but I assumed that Controller Automation still would. The hotkey input screen doesn't recognize any inputs though.

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39 minutes ago, Suhrvivor said:

I don't think controller automation is implemented yet. I've been using Next since its inception and controller support never worked for me (works fine in regular Launchbox though).

Well controller navigation I kindof expected not to work, but automation not working surprised me - I figured that was more backend.

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I like the numbers next to every list in the left panel but the total numbers are a little off, games that are in a playlist are counted again even though they're are already counted for the platform they came from. This results in weird numbers. Here's an example; if you compare the number of all the games with the sum of all the platform categories, they don't match as they should:

lb_next.count.thumb.png.27ab0a88a1bd742e80b115d2d8b6ebd4.png

Edited by Suhrvivor
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21 hours ago, Zombeaver said:

So this is a weird one - Controller input (for navigation) and Controller Automation aren't working correctly for me in Next, but works fine in normal LB. I'm not sure if controller navigation is supposed to work at this point but I assumed that Controller Automation still would. The hotkey input screen doesn't recognize any inputs though.

These have not been integrated yet.

8 hours ago, Rod said:

@Jason Carr I was wondering whether the keyboard and gamepad control will be implemented in Launchbox.Next before the official release next week? (Currently in Next I can only use the mouse to navigate and start games).

No, unfortunately these will not likely be implemented before the official release, though of course they will eventually make their way in.

7 hours ago, Suhrvivor said:

I like the numbers next to every list in the left panel but the total numbers are a little off, games that are in a playlist are counted again even though they're are already counted for the platform they came from. This results in weird numbers. Here's an example; if you compare the number of all the games with the sum of all the platform categories, they don't match as they should:

lb_next.count.thumb.png.27ab0a88a1bd742e80b115d2d8b6ebd4.png

There's no proper way to do this; it's confusing no matter what we do. I also have to keep performance in mind; it's not worth combining all the games together and removing all the duplicates just to get the perfect count on the platform categories, as that is a major performance hit. We may still tweak it, but it's not something that can ever really be perfect due to the complications of playlists and duplicate games.

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@Jaon Carr, So what are you developing in? Visual Studio? What version? What framework version. VB, C#, C++? You mentioned WPF, and I thought I saw that it wanted to make sure it had certain a certain runtime version installed. Is this open source? Wondering if you have multiple people working on it and need any help. I so love Delphi over the years for it's simplicity and speed and being a true compiled IDE rather than VS's interpreted runtime. VS will never be able to run as fast as a compiled EXE with all the dependencies built into the EXE, but the tools in WPF and XAML, the GAC, make development pretty easy and transportable. And it is interesting to have a solution that is part VB and part C# and it all works ;)

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1 hour ago, FlightRisk said:

@Jaon Carr, So what are you developing in? Visual Studio? What version? What framework version. VB, C#, C++? You mentioned WPF, and I thought I saw that it wanted to make sure it had certain a certain runtime version installed. Is this open source? Wondering if you have multiple people working on it and need any help. I so love Delphi over the years for it's simplicity and speed and being a true compiled IDE rather than VS's interpreted runtime. VS will never be able to run as fast as a compiled EXE with all the dependencies built into the EXE, but the tools in WPF and XAML, the GAC, make development pretty easy and transportable. And it is interesting to have a solution that is part VB and part C# and it all works ;)

The development team has actually grown to two people at this point; I haven't announced it but it we have another developer named Jaron Davis helping out. We'd like to be able to hire him full time as soon as we can, but he's currently part time because we need a little bit more income before we can afford it. I'm a firm believer (now more than ever) that all development needs to come from paid work. That said, if you'd like us to keep you in mind for the future @FlightRisk, go ahead and send me your resume.  jason@unbrokensoftware.com :)

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26 minutes ago, Mithrot said:

Hey there- love LB. I have a question regarding LB/LBN. Is there currently a feature-freeze on the "current" LB to help LBN catch-up?

I do not think Jason has made any specific statements on the progression of this, but I would wager he will not spend too much development time on current version of LB. Likely he will get Next up to where the current version is and then anything new will be done in Next. 

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