8.4-beta-1 Released

[Jason Carr]

On 7/20/2018 at 8:18 AM, shadowfire said:

-It seems that legacy option Theme->Features->Colorize background Fade hasn't been implemented. (Having background art colorized by the theme was a nice feature imo.)

Yeah, good point. Hopefully that'll be a quick add.

On 7/20/2018 at 11:17 AM, PattersonCZ said:

It got little better now but still the gap is huge. (see red arrow) (trying turn off and on options like Align text vertically , only thing changes i have bigger boxes around.

As you can see on picture i use steam banner as cover for games , i set all to zero (too bad i cant insert negative values) with text lines to 2 and aspect ratio 1.00 (with more ratio images are closer but much bigger , notice : images are put to smallest size possible)

 

And now original LB (only difference here is ratio 1:45 but even on 1:00 no gap)

Thank you for suggestions. Maybe in full version it will work more closer to original version

The aspect ratio is exactly what needs changed to remove that gap.

[Jason Carr]

On 7/20/2018 at 11:23 AM, Mr. RetroLust said:

@Jason Carr I see a small translation bug, 'spacing' is in Dutch. If you fixed this one and the right click menu in the left panel it'll be 100% fixed, at least I don't know how it works in the program language, hope you don't have to fix it all for every language  Keep up the amazing work, .Next rules!!!

 

Cool, I'll take a look.

On 7/20/2018 at 11:39 AM, Noppadet said:

Hey @Jason Carr I understand that this is probably low priority because it doesn't affect many of us.

The EmuMovies guys mentioned that the EmuMovies https file download change would be coming pretty soon on LaunchBox. Do you expect this to come in a beta this cycle, or are you expecting afterward? Just trying to figure out my plans.

Thanks.

I'm hoping to have it done soon, but in my latest discussions with Circo there's been some confusion and I still have some significant work to do because I have to go back and change the original EmuMovies client API code and recompile the DLL. I don't think it will make it into the next release, but it is a possibility.

23 hours ago, JamesBond@ge said:

I was going to be a die-hard OG LB klingon, but the thing that tempted me to use Next full time was the clicking of a game icon, or right clicking a game icon and the reaction being almost instantaneous, whereas there was always a slight delay with OG LB.

That's not a criticism of good old OG LB. It is what it is.

Good to hear.

 

[Jason Carr]

20 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Jason with the current beta i am having real trouble getting into the options in .NEXT again. Its the same issue i posted about a few days ago but seemed to go away in the previous beta for the most part. The current beta though it is happening again and on a regular basis. I have had .NEXT crash at least 10 times today while trying to get into options. Its the same as before also, no Launchbox error at all just a generic program not responding after the program freezes and i click somewhere.

Here is a video of what i am talking about.

 

What I'm wondering is if the window will eventually come up if you just let it wait and don't let Windows kill it. The problem is loading up the legacy portion of the Options window; because of the old Windows Forms code, it takes longer to load and can't be "threaded", which means it's a pain to deal with. So instead of killing it, just wait and let it sit there and let me know if it ever comes up.

[Jason Carr]

7 hours ago, Retro808 said:

@Jason Carr The issue I mentioned earlier with Next freezing up on exit from Mame also does it with PC games. Mame was easy fix keeping video on openGL, but still unsure in testing why that affected only Next (OG LB and BigBox did not have the issue). After testing a bunch of pc games I see the issue happening with several pc games. About 18 of the 30 I have installed. A few, if I knock out of fullscreen, work fine and when exiting Next does not freeze up. Most, even that does not help. Still with the pc games only Next has the issue (BigBox and Original do not freeze).

This is probably something that will only affect a few and will be hard to replicate.

Yeah, this sounds like a nasty MS glitch. I'm honestly not sure what we could do about it. I am curious to know if it's come up for anyone else. Does it have anything to do with a resolution change or anything like that?

[Jason Carr]

5 hours ago, cleverest said:

Would it be a simple enough addition/request to accommodate to allow filtering out of the ALL GAMES view any files that end with a certain EXTENSION?  I know LB is not really created for Magazines and Comics, but I do have those in my collection, and would love the option of simply not having them show up in the all games listing...not to mention people who import films..

For example, if they end in .CBR, .CBZ or .PDF
 

Unfortunately this seems like too much of a confusing or a user-specific request. There are other ways to hide games, such as marking them as Hidden or Broken.

[dragon57]

47 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Yeah, it's a more advanced feature anyways, so hopefully people can figure it out by experimentation if they don't understand the verbiage. Setting the aspect ratio at least on a per-platform basis is planned for a future release.

Just the result of spacing settings that make the boxes run out of room for the selection bar.

This is normal behavior for both OG and .Next. If there's no platform selected, it will just resume using whatever the last image group was. It's been this way for a long time, though I agree that there are probably better ways to do it. For the future, I'm thinking of reverting to the default image group instead.

@Jason Carr That was sort of my point, and I should have been more specific. OG DOES seem to save the image group for 'ALL'. I just tried changing 5 different platforms to something different and clicking on ALL after clicking on each of those in turn do not change the setting for 'ALL'.

[Retro808]

28 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Yeah, this sounds like a nasty MS glitch. I'm honestly not sure what we could do about it. I am curious to know if it's come up for anyone else. Does it have anything to do with a resolution change or anything like that?

I think a couple others mentioned it. I know @Suhrvivor was one. 

I have messed with resolution settings in those pc games and it does not affect it. The error still happens. Only thing that does is taking it out of fullscreen. Even then it is not 100%. Maybe 1 out of 10-15 times it freezes Next on exit. Even tried compatibility and DPI options from properties right clicking the .exe and no affect. 

Good thing is I primarily use BigBox so there is no issue there. Just reporting since it is affecting Next. 

[cleverest]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

Unfortunately this seems like too much of a confusing or a user-specific request. There are other ways to hide games, such as marking them as Hidden or Broken.

Jason,

Thanks for responding, but marking stuff hidden doesn’t remove anything from the ALL games list in launchbox...it only hides it in bigbox. I mark all my adult game titles hidden, I don’t really want to mix magazines and game comics into that. I guess this isn’t the product for having anything other than games; even if it’s game related; Darn. ?

 

[cleverest]

 Even though it does support things like music for games, and instruction manuals...

[DOS76]

you can hide games in LB and BB but I don't use All so don't know if it doesn't effect that or not

[spycat]

When you hide a game via it's tickbox option within the Edit Game window it's automatically hidden in BigBox but will still appear in LaunchBox unless the Show Hidden Games option in the View menu is disabled. This applies to All as well as the hidden game's Platform.
 

[cleverest]

2 hours ago, spycat said:

When you hide a game via it's tickbox option within the Edit Game window it's automatically hidden in BigBox but will still appear in LaunchBox unless the Show Hidden Games option in the View menu is disabled. This applies to All as well as the hidden game's Platform.
 

That would be perfect is only hid comics and magazines this way, but I also hide adult game titles, which I DO want to show in the main launchbox view (but not BigBox for when I stream to my TV)

Oh well, thanks for clarifying that though.

[Rod]

On ‎7‎/‎19‎/‎2018 at 8:29 PM, Jason Carr said:

Beta 13 is out now guys with lots of fixes to the custom spacing options for LaunchBox.Next, which should make things more straightforward and obvious, as well as look a bit cleaner. Because of the changes, your LaunchBox.Next custom spacing options will be reset when upgrading to this beta.

@Zombeaver Boxes should be centered vertically now when "Align Text Vertically" is enabled, and it should no longer mess up the spacing if you don't have any text visible.

Hi @Jason Carr,

With the latest beta 13 if I disable/untick "show subline" in Boxes setting and have "text lines to show" at 1, then half of the bottom of the titles get cut off.

With regards to the boxes spacing, there's this one thing that gets in the way of having perfect aesthetics.

The case is the following, for example with my SNES category, they're almost 100% European boxes, and 1 or 2 are Japanese (the tall ones). If I have spacing such that there are say 5 boxes per row, and I have 100 boxes in total, then there are 20 rows, of which in only 1 or 2 rows there's a tall box. Nonetheless .Next takes the height of that 1 or 2 Japanese boxes to space all other rows with the same height. This means that for like 18 rows of boxes there's a huge vertical spacing between the rows. 

I haven't found a remedy or workaround for this. Is there currently?  It's really unpleasant to look at and disturbs the otherwise perfect aesthetics of .Next.

Thanks again for all of the hard work, enjoying .Next every day ?

Edited July 22, 2018 by Rod

[neil9000]

@Rod

You may need to mess with the box width/height slider to get the look you want, here are my settings.

As you can see below i dont have that huge vertical space you are talking about with mixed tall and wide boxes.

And i think it also looks good with just the DVD style boxes as well.

[neil9000]

15 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

What I'm wondering is if the window will eventually come up if you just let it wait and don't let Windows kill it. The problem is loading up the legacy portion of the Options window; because of the old Windows Forms code, it takes longer to load and can't be "threaded", which means it's a pain to deal with. So instead of killing it, just wait and let it sit there and let me know if it ever comes up.

Thanks Jason, unfortunately no if it freezes like that the options window never opens, i have left it for multiple minutes to test and nothing, i always have to end task the program. When the options window does load as normal its almost instant as you would expect it to be. So it either opens immediately on clicking it, or not at all.

Edit:

Also it seems to be instance dependent, if i open next and it allows me into the options i can then go in and out of it as many times as i like with no issues. However if i close and reopen next its a lottery to weather it will work, but if it doesnt it wont everytime i try it, but if it does it will always work. So maybe its something in the loading the program process, if thats even possible?

Edited July 22, 2018 by neil9000

[Retro808]

@Jason Carr Issue in Next with what looks like image cache not completing and not staying. Platforms will show first 12 games then as you scroll you can see them appearing. Eventually they stop appearing and when you scroll back up all the images get removed and you end up only seeing the first 12 games again. Does it for every platform and for all games view. Only happens in next. Windows 10 fully updated and drives all current.

 

[DOS76]

are you getting this issue if you let the cache meter run to the end before you scroll through?

 

[Retro808]

@DOS76 Yes. In some cases when clicking a new platform I dont even see the cache meter run. 

Click on all games the cache meter runs for a bit, finishes, and still same issue. 

[Jason Carr]

On 7/21/2018 at 12:50 PM, dragon57 said:

@Jason Carr That was sort of my point, and I should have been more specific. OG DOES seem to save the image group for 'ALL'. I just tried changing 5 different platforms to something different and clicking on ALL after clicking on each of those in turn do not change the setting for 'ALL'.

Ah, you're right; it looks like I did fix that in OG LaunchBox a while back and forgot that I had changed it. Hopefully I can do the same for .Next.

On 7/21/2018 at 12:54 PM, Retro808 said:

I think a couple others mentioned it. I know @Suhrvivor was one. 

I have messed with resolution settings in those pc games and it does not affect it. The error still happens. Only thing that does is taking it out of fullscreen. Even then it is not 100%. Maybe 1 out of 10-15 times it freezes Next on exit. Even tried compatibility and DPI options from properties right clicking the .exe and no affect. 

Good thing is I primarily use BigBox so there is no issue there. Just reporting since it is affecting Next. 

I'm not certain but I think @Suhrvivor's issues were different, though I could be wrong. Are you still experiencing similar issues @Suhrvivor?

11 hours ago, Rod said:

Hi @Jason Carr,

With the latest beta 13 if I disable/untick "show subline" in Boxes setting and have "text lines to show" at 1, then half of the bottom of the titles get cut off.

With regards to the boxes spacing, there's this one thing that gets in the way of having perfect aesthetics.

The case is the following, for example with my SNES category, they're almost 100% European boxes, and 1 or 2 are Japanese (the tall ones). If I have spacing such that there are say 5 boxes per row, and I have 100 boxes in total, then there are 20 rows, of which in only 1 or 2 rows there's a tall box. Nonetheless .Next takes the height of that 1 or 2 Japanese boxes to space all other rows with the same height. This means that for like 18 rows of boxes there's a huge vertical spacing between the rows. 

I haven't found a remedy or workaround for this. Is there currently?  It's really unpleasant to look at and disturbs the otherwise perfect aesthetics of .Next.

Thanks again for all of the hard work, enjoying .Next every day ?

You should be able to fix any issues with lines being cut off by adjusting the aspect ratio and spacing settings. The vertical space issue always has been an issue, even with OG LaunchBox. We may look to solve that at some point with some trickery, but it's not a new issue; unfortunately there's no good way to solve it. In the future, we might add a platform-specific aspect ratio setting, so that extra space is removed for platforms like SNES (for example), but it still doesn't solve the issue of Japanese vs. NA boxes being different heights.

[Jason Carr]

10 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Thanks Jason, unfortunately no if it freezes like that the options window never opens, i have left it for multiple minutes to test and nothing, i always have to end task the program. When the options window does load as normal its almost instant as you would expect it to be. So it either opens immediately on clicking it, or not at all.

Edit:

Also it seems to be instance dependent, if i open next and it allows me into the options i can then go in and out of it as many times as i like with no issues. However if i close and reopen next its a lottery to weather it will work, but if it doesnt it wont everytime i try it, but if it does it will always work. So maybe its something in the loading the program process, if thats even possible?

Thanks; that helps. All I can figure is that maybe it's a threading issue. I'll do my best to get it figured out.

6 hours ago, Retro808 said:

@Jason Carr Issue in Next with what looks like image cache not completing and not staying. Platforms will show first 12 games then as you scroll you can see them appearing. Eventually they stop appearing and when you scroll back up all the images get removed and you end up only seeing the first 12 games again. Does it for every platform and for all games view. Only happens in next. Windows 10 fully updated and drives all current.

 

This is separate from a caching issue; I have seen it and it's on my list to resolve. For whatever reason on rare occasions with certain size settings the boxes don't display properly. A fix is coming.