How do Playlists work?

[FlightRisk]

This is one of those things I wish there was a manual for. Is there a tutorial anywhere? I want to know technically how a playlist works and what all the options are in the right click "edit" box. Where does it get the names for what is in the list? An XML file? How does it know what to put in what list? What happens if I check and uncheck the "autopopulate" box? Will if refresh my list right then? If I go to the "games" tab and delete the games I don't have, what is it doing behind the scenes? What happens if I delete missing roms in that list and then import games that would have been in that list? And where did all the artwork for the menus come from? Was that in a pack I downloaded? For example, in BigBox, almost every platform is there working. When I select "Williams Classics", all of the wheel art and all of the videos are already there. I assume the videos came when I scraped the platform, but what about the wheel logos? Basically, I want to understand it so I can manage it and not delete something I will need or add things and not notice that they aren't going into the right playlists automatically.

[Lordmonkus]

 

[FlightRisk]

Lordmonkus - Making wishes come true  But what happens if I edit the stock playlists and delete all the roms I don't have now, but add one later? Will it pick it up or do I have to manually add it to the playlist. For example I add a capcom 1 game that I didn't have before? I guess what I am asking is that I don't want to have to track what is a cave game or a cps1 game, I just want it to go into the right playlist.

[Lordmonkus]

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea. I don't use the stock playlists at all. I have my own manual and auto-populated based on meta data playlists.

[FlightRisk]

How does the auto-populated feature work then? 

[Lordmonkus]

You can pick all sorts of different flags to have a list auto populate, things like platform name, favorite and genre. For example you could have a list of all the shooters from the Genesis platform that you have tagged as a favorite. Have a play around with it and see what you can come up with.

[FlightRisk]

Amazing. I shall play. An interesting feature of the playlist, since it is just a different view of the same game and same data, is that you can use it to do a bulk edit on games a lot quicker and with less room for error than the manual selecting each game with perhaps cntrl-click and the bulk edit feature. For example, instead of looking through 2000 games to find all the Vector games like "Tempest", "Star Wars" and "Battle Zone", you just use the auto populate feature of a playlist to put all the games into a "Vector Games" playlist. Then I can right click and select "edit" and bulk edit any field I want for all the games at once, for example to change the emulator. Then if you only used the playlist to perform the bulk edit, you just delete that playlist.

[Retro808]

19 hours ago, FlightRisk said:

Lordmonkus - Making wishes come true  But what happens if I edit the stock playlists and delete all the roms I don't have now, but add one later? Will it pick it up or do I have to manually add it to the playlist. For example I add a capcom 1 game that I didn't have before? I guess what I am asking is that I don't want to have to track what is a cave game or a cps1 game, I just want it to go into the right playlist.

If you remove games or add new games you did not have before the stock generated playlists will update accordingly. Even if you delete a game and then add it back the stock playlist Launchbox generates will add it. So if you take Irem Classics and have Kung-Fu Master installed if you delete it from your arcade platform the playlist will show it now as a missing game. If you add it back it gets put in that playlist. 

Or are you talking about something like editing the XML or editing the playlist and deleting the games showing as missing in the games tab?

[FlightRisk]

You answered the question. I was wondering if a manual "scrape" had to be done or if LB somehow looks and whenever you add a new game, it automatically puts it in any playlists you have activated.

[Joel Cabana]

just wondering if a list of possible Values is available somewhere for auto-generated control type support playlists? ie: control type supports light gun, or control type supports 2 joysticks? what are all the possible values

[C-Beats]

15 hours ago, Joel Cabana said:

just wondering if a list of possible Values is available somewhere for auto-generated control type support playlists? ie: control type supports light gun, or control type supports 2 joysticks? what are all the possible values

Auto-populated playlists can be generated by the controller name or controller group. You can put whatever value you want in as group, the list of ones we do for you is available via it's drop down though.