Poll Results

[jayjay]

With retroachievements... Being able to disable it per platform,. Also having rank and score available on any view. I can do this myself with a plugin simple enough. But thought  I'd throw it out there.

[lcolls]

disc swap in pause screens in diskette and cd systems please!

and bezels and we can throw away rocket launcher!

[dragon57]

As long as we can make our own control pics and have them displayed with platforms other than arcade without a lot of special theming and such, I'll be good.

[Lordmonkus]

20 minutes ago, lcolls said:

and bezels and we can throw away rocket launcher!

Unless Jason changed his mind again bezels are not going to be added, it requires way too much work and really hackish stuff to make them work.

[lcolls]

8 minutes ago, Lordmonkus said:

Unless Jason changed his mind again bezels are not going to be added, it requires way too much work and really hackish stuff to make them work.

i only use in old systems because they arent 16:9 is useful... in some moment this will be a priority i hope....

[Lordmonkus]

While I cannot speak for Jason at all and I don't intend to I know he did look into adding bezels but decided against it because of the fact there is no clean way of doing it, it would require very "hackish" methods to implement them and he does not like to do things that way. Retroarch and Mame both handle bezels natively and are the recommended way of having bezels or use RocketLauncher which uses its own "hackish" methods.

[DOS76]

also disc swapping already exists for CD games in pause (or at least for RA) but its similar to the manuals if you don't have a multidisc game it won't show in pause.

[Jason Carr]

12 hours ago, bundangdon said:

@Jason Carr thanks a lot for the info on the latest updates and the recent addition of the pause screens has made Launchbox/Bigbox even better, although it's already been pretty darn good for a long, long while now Really looking forward to the custom default images, as it's been on my personal request list for quite some time. Just wondering (and hoping), will this apply to boxart also?

Yes, I believe box art was the main focus of the custom default images support.

12 hours ago, Codeman said:

Also wasn't pinball support coming before the next poll?

I state in the above post that I plan to tackle pinball support before the next official release, which will also be before the next poll.

12 hours ago, Fry said:

For the controller images, it would be great to have a new image type for theme makers so that custom control mapping images can be displayed without bastardizing the other existing image types.

We already have an image type called "Arcade - Controls Information", so it seems like the only thing we need to do is just remove the Arcade prefix from it. There's currently nothing stopping anyone from using that category for non-arcade games, sans for the naming issue.

12 hours ago, Fry said:

What would be amazing is an app with a database of game controls and the ability to create custom images of a control panel. Then allow users to define the button locations on the control panel image, define mappings of those buttons for each emulator and have the system somehow read game specific button mappings for each emulator and cross reference with this mythical game controls database to generate call outs that could be overlaid on the control panel image specifying each buttons main functions.

I recognize that this would be a huge effort and probably at the far periphery (or maybe way outside) of launch box’s intended scope. It would just be awesome to have an image type that we could show on marquee and pause themes to display control mappings even if those images need to be manually generated for now. 

Yeah, that would be cool to see, but it would be a huge effort and would also require a database of game controls which would have to be manually populated, so unfortunately I don't see that happening soon. Still, we do have that controls information image type that can be used, so we're pretty much there already, sans for the naming issue and maybe a lack of themes.

[Jason Carr]

10 hours ago, jayjay said:

With retroachievements... Being able to disable it per platform,. Also having rank and score available on any view. I can do this myself with a plugin simple enough. But thought  I'd throw it out there.

You mean disabling it on the pause screens? Rank and score makes sense.

9 hours ago, lcolls said:

disc swap in pause screens in diskette and cd systems please!

and bezels and we can throw away rocket launcher!

Disc swap is already available for the pause screens, if you add a script in there for it. We could use more default scripts for it though.

Bezels are not planned and probably won't ever be added, because there's no good way to do it without horrible hacks. Generally, they're just much better done by the emulators themselves, and with Retroarch getting more and more cores all the time, you might as well just use Retroarch's bezels in most cases.

4 hours ago, DOS76 said:

also disc swapping already exists for CD games in pause (or at least for RA) but its similar to the manuals if you don't have a multidisc game it won't show in pause.

It's actually not that smart. It won't hide or show based on whether or not it's a multidisc game; it will show up whenever there's a swap disc script populated for that emulator.

[jayjay]

40 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

You mean disabling it on the pause screens? Rank and score makes sense.

Disabling it on pause and also in BB for platforms that dont use retro achievements. Removing "View Achievements" from my xbox 360 platform is prob the main one id like to remove it from. 

[JaysArcade]

I would also like to be able to disable any thing to do with retro achievements. I'm not knocking anyone that enjoys it, but its not something I am interested in in the slightest. But to be honest, I haven't really noticed it so.....

As far as bezels, I think I am finally at a point to completely ditch rocketlauncher. Between Retroarch and MAME having their own in-emulator bezel support, there are not that many emus that I care enough about having bezels to put myself through that kind of (Rocketlauncher) headache.

[Lordmonkus]

13 minutes ago, JaysArcade said:

I would also like to be able to disable any thing to do with retro achievements. I'm not knocking anyone that enjoys it, but its not something I am interested in in the slightest. But to be honest, I haven't really noticed it so.....

Just don't input any Retro Achievement login info, done.

[JaysArcade]

1 hour ago, Lordmonkus said:

Just don't input any Retro Achievement login info, done.

Maybe that's why I've never noticed it.  

[Fry]

11 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

We already have an image type called "Arcade - Controls Information", so it seems like the only thing we need to do is just remove the Arcade prefix from it. There's currently nothing stopping anyone from using that category for non-arcade games, sans for the naming issue.

Yeah, that would be cool to see, but it would be a huge effort and would also require a database of game controls which would have to be manually populated, so unfortunately I don't see that happening soon. Still, we do have that controls information image type that can be used, so we're pretty much there already, sans for the naming issue and maybe a lack of themes.

That’s awesome, I didn’t know about the arcade controls information image type.

Ya, I reckon on that second part, it would be a spiraling mess of requirements to build an add on that would do that mapping stuff even if the controls database existed and creating that missing controls database would not be trivial at all. I imagine this is a pretty niche feature too. The main reason I think it would be amazing to have it incorporated into launchbox is to harness the amazing user base to come together and generate that missing controls database content. Having it as a part of launchbox would give it more visibility than some of the 3rd party stuff I’ve seen and I could see the community pulling the data together. But it’s totally understandable that the effort would be way bigger than the value, especially with the ability for us to manually make images and use that new image type. I’m super excited to take an image of my control panel and see how it looks on the marquee monitor with some call outs using a custom theme. 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Fry

[dmjohn0x]

On 5/28/2019 at 5:27 PM, Jason Carr said:

Hey all, I have a new email going out with some of this info, but it may take a few days for everyone to get it. Wanted to open up discussion on two of the remaining items from the poll.

First off, controller definitions. On the pause screens we put in a place to display the controller definitions images from EmuMovies for the Arcade platform. These images are available for free from EmuMovies (so you don't need a paid account). For example:

They now display on the pause screens with the default pause theme for the Arcade platform. To be honest, I don't know of a better way to do this than to just use images like this. It would be great if images like this were available for other platforms as well, but I think arcade is the important one because it has all of the different games with different controls. Based on this, I'm considering crossing the "Control Definitions" item off the list. I know there are other things we could add, like Big Box navigation icons and such, but those are so theme-specific that it's probably best to leave up to the theme developers anyways. Thoughts?

The other one to discuss is "Retro Achievements Further Integration". I added the retro achievements list to the pause screens, so you can now view your achievements while the games are running, which technically does cover the item from the poll. There are other things we could do, such as leaderboards and such, but honestly I'm fairly doubtful that there would be much interest in those types of features. I know that the #1 thing that people want is live achievement popups (in the game as you get the achievements), but there are a number of hurdles in the way there that pretty much make that impossible, including a lack of features with the Retro Achievements API. So considering all of that, I'm also considering crossing off the retro achievements item as well. Thoughts?

What I do plan to tackle next are "Custom Default Game Images for Each Platform" and "Proper Support for Pinball", which hopefully will both make it into the next official release. I'm trying to push things forward here, because I believe there are some great items that we can put on the next poll that would probably be more popular than some of these remaining items to tackle. That said, if you have suggestions on either of these two items (or the other two that I'm looking to cross off), I'd love to hear them.

Id vote we not remove Reto Achievements. Its a wanted feature and just because the API doesnt give itself currently to better integration easily doesnt mean its impossible or wont be so later. Has anyone reached out to them?

[Lordmonkus]

2 minutes ago, dmjohn0x said:

Its a wanted feature and just because the API doesnt give itself currently to better integration easily doesnt mean its impossible or wont be so later.

It's not that it would never be implemented, it would just be done when the API gets the stuff required to do it.

2 minutes ago, dmjohn0x said:

Has anyone reached out to them?

Yes, Jason has and back when he did they told him they would do what was needed but I guess that got put on the back burner for them. Jason put the achievement stuff in the last poll with the expectation / hope that the API would be expanded upon.

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, dmjohn0x said:

Id vote we not remove Reto Achievements. Its a wanted feature and just because the API doesnt give itself currently to better integration easily doesnt mean its impossible or wont be so later. Has anyone reached out to them?

Yes, we've spoken to them here on the forums. If they do end up coming forward with a way to implement live notifications, we'll implement it.

[Jason Carr]

The monkey beat me to it.

[dmjohn0x]

Ah, I just know while some people are vocal about not caring or wanting achieves, many people do. It was a selling feature of the 360/ps3 generation. Its important to more than a few people and Id hate to see it just scratched out as impossible and not revisited going forward.

[Jason Carr]

3 minutes ago, dmjohn0x said:

Ah, I just know while some people are vocal about not caring or wanting achieves, many people do. It was a selling feature of the 360/ps3 generation. Its important to more than a few people and Id hate to see it just scratched out as impossible and not revisited going forward.

It'll be revisited when we believe there's something that we can add that generates significant interest. I'm thinking we should probably at least add scores though.