8.4-beta-1 Released

[Jason Carr]

3 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

The line is there on purpose to show keyboard focus; however, somehow your custom spacing settings have put it in an odd place. Try adjusting your spacing settings to see what might be causing it.

I just realized that the line is in a strange spot with the default spacing settings (doh). I changed the default spacing settings and forgot to fix the line. So nevermind on figuring that out; I'll fix it. Thanks for pointing it out.

[Omen]

On 8/9/2018 at 12:59 PM, Jason Carr said:

Okay, either there's a performance issue with 50,000-long games lists, or your hardware is showing it's age, or both. It's probably been a while since I've tested .Next with a list of games that long, in all honesty. Can you PM me your Data folder so I can test?

I have a decent size library and I get the same performance issues as cammel when scrolling through all games. Everything is smooth if I scroll through a single category. It hasn't been an issue for me because I never scroll through all games. My specs are:

4790k @4.0 GHz

16 GB Ram

R9 390 8GB

5,400 RPM HDD (maybe this is the issue?)

 

In general LB and BB were very snappy until I hit around 20K then things started slowing down.

Edited August 10, 2018 by Omen

[matchaman]

24 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Ugh. All I can figure is that a driver or Windows update occurred that somehow created a glitch in VLC. Maybe try looking to see what updates were installed recently or if anything was changed. Unfortunately there's not a lot I can do about that particular issue, since it's a VLC bug and it seems to be unique to your machine (it would take me forever to dive into VLC's codebase to try and fix it). I will look to update VLC here soon though, so that may or may not fix the issue.

So here's another reason I completely dislike Windows 10. Random stuff keep changing without any notice and messing with my system's reliability.

I tried to manually update to 3.x but it seems only compatible with 2.x versions. I cross my fingers that a new version including VLC 3.x will fix that.

[Jason Carr]

Beta 19 is out now with the following:

• Fairly massive performance improvements when scrolling boxes, especially with a large amount of games. I managed to eliminate the bloat from the theming engine completely by simply combining all of the boxes into a single view, amongst other performance improvements.
• The double-click glitch on focus should be fixed now; I had to resort to a hack because of what seems to be a .NET glitch, but as long as it works, we should be good from that front.
• The white line for the keyboard focus has been moved to the correct location on the boxes.
• Various issues with video and music sound conflicts have been fixed.

Let me know if anyone experiences any further issues with this beta. The performance improvements were somewhat major changes, so hopefully they don't cause any new issues. Testing is appreciated.

[Lordmonkus]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

Fairly massive performance improvements when scrolling boxes, especially with a large amount of games. I managed to eliminate the bloat from the theming engine completely by simply combining all of the boxes into a single view, amongst other performance improvements.

Even with my stripped down 2200 game setup of LB I noticed a performance boost, it's screaming fast now, practically instant. In fact performance might even be too fast now, on my full setup if I press and hold an arrow key on the keyboard to scroll it will keep scrolling when I let go of the keyboard if I hold it down for a few seconds.

Not sure if this is a new bug or not but I updated my full LB setup and noticed with the default spacing settings the 2nd line of text in the game name is cut off.

[Retrofrogg]

Just updated to Beta 19. Like Monkus I have only added a fraction of my collection to Launchbox so far, though I also noticed a good performance improvement when scrolling through games!

Also, on brief testing this morning, the single-click-run-game bug did not manifest - also great! Hopefully that is it gone now. Will test further later today also.

One strange thing that is happening is that Retroarch doesn't seem to be remembering my video settings at times - I haven't worked out exactly what triggers this however. It remembers them if I save core overrides, quit Retroarch and then load another game. I thought it was to do with restarting Launchbox, though on testing that yesterday Retroarch did remember the settings when I did that. This morning when I opened up Launchbox (PC had not been restarted), Retroarch again reverted back to old video settings. I suspect that this is not to do with Launchbox, though just thought I'd mention it in case.

[kmoney]

I noticed a big performance increase with Beta 19 when scrolling through games and my collection is under 5,000 games. Awesome job!

[neil9000]

5 minutes ago, faydesmee said:

After the update, there is no text on the bars in the main panel. I click Arrange By, it can sort the games, but no text.

Looks just fine for me.

 

[neil9000]

12 minutes ago, faydesmee said:

After the update, there is no text on the bars in the main panel. I click Arrange By, it can sort the games, but no text.

Oh my bad, you mean here right??

@Jason Carr The titles seem to be missing in beta 19, as highlighted in my image here.

 

[neil9000]

Just now, faydesmee said:

Yes. That's right.

Gotcha, i thought you was talking about the View, Arrange by, and Tools menu options at first, apologies.

 

[DOS76]

@Dando you save on exit turned off in RetroArch? That sort of sounds like what your issue may be.

[Retrofrogg]

Thanks DOS76 - I am aware of this feature though have not looked at it in a long time. I will check it as soon as I can and report back! I didn't think that it would be relevant, seeing that I was manually saving core overrides. 

[JamesBond@ge]

Just incase anyone new to LaunchBox, or thinking about buying into LaunchBox, gets the wrong impression about how LaunchBox interacts with RetroArch......I must say to them that LaunchBox will in NO way interfere with your RetroArch settings. It doesn't go anywhere near RetroArch's settings. Even these Beta version's of LaunchBox will not affect RetroArch. All it does is launch your game and your chosen config.

It's normally human error that screws RetroArch's settings as it can be complicated, for some.

Edited August 10, 2018 by JamesBond@ge

[Jason Carr]

Ah, I figured I would miss something with the boxes changes. Beta 20 is out now with a fix for the dividers.

The plan is to let this beta simmer today and over the weekend, and assuming we don't find anything major, we'll make it official on Monday or Tuesday. Thanks all for your testing and feedback. Let me know if anyone experiences any crashes or bugs.

[Omen]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

The plan is to let this beta simmer today and over the weekend, and assuming we don't find anything major, we'll make it official on Monday or Tuesday. Thanks all for your testing and feedback. Let me know if anyone experiences any crashes or bugs.

So far it's very snappy for me, no pauses while scrolling through all games anymore.

[matchaman]

I finally fixed the VLC popup window bug. I did three things at the same time before trying out if the bug is gone (I was pretty sure they wouldn't help).

1) Installed a fresh copy of DirectX redistributable

2) Transcoded all my audio files to plain MP3 (I had several OGG tracks)

3) Downgraded my graphics driver (Intel Iris graphics)

I will later try again using the old tracks in order to exclude the possibility it was caused by Vorbis audio.

Edited August 11, 2018 by matchaman

[Jason Carr]

4 minutes ago, matchaman said:

I finally fixed the VLC popup window bug. I did three things at the same time before trying out if the bug is gone (I was pretty sure they wouldn't help).

1) Installed a fresh copy of DirectX redistributable

2) Transcoded all my audio files to plain MP3 (I had several OGG tracks)

3) Downgraded my graphics driver (Intel Iris graphics)

I will later try again using the old tracks in order to exclude the possibility it was caused by OGG audio.

Nice! Congrats and thanks for the update. If you do end up figuring out which one (or combination) it was, let us know.

[Jason Carr]

Heard from @kmoney that on rare occasions, auto-played videos in .Next were still playing while games were running. Beta 21 is out with some added brute force methods to make sure that video playback is paused. Let me know if anyone still experiences this issue, as I'd like to make sure it's fixed before the official release, planned for Monday or Tuesday.

[Suhrvivor]

Damn, I just updated to 20, give us a break! 

I'm definitely seeing better performance in the crappy AMD A4 CPU laptop I use at work, even while grabbing the images from the cloud.

Good job, Jason with all the updates, first time I see a Launchbox beta passing the 20th version.

Edited August 12, 2018 by Suhrvivor

[bundangdon]

Really impressed with the recent updates to launchbox next! What impresses me the most is how box-images move much more effortlessly and smoothly (while scrolling) than before. Great work once again!