Launchbox 9.0 Change Log

[Lordmonkus]

Version 9.0 - Released November 13, 2018

- New Feature: A new "Auto-Generate Child Playlists" feature is available when right-clicking on platforms in the LaunchBox sidebar while in Platform Categories view; this option allows you to generate child playlists for All Games, Favorites, Genres, Regions, Play Modes, Developers, and/or Publishers and optionally put them in child categories.

- New Feature: The "Clean Up Images" process that is available under the Tools menu in LaunchBox is now called "Clean Up Media" and has been overhauled to support cleaning up videos, manuals, and music as well

- Improvement: LaunchBox performance has been significantly improved when loading up the platform categories list in the sidebar, specifically when dealing with categories and total game counts. Loading the counts is now threaded so they may not show up immediately and will load in the background for large collections.

- Improvement: Items with children are no longer always sorted first in the LaunchBox side bar, which was a bit disorienting now that platform categories are more flexible

- Improvement: Big Box performance has been improved when loading up details for platform categories with many children

- Improvement: Switched the EmuMovies searches to send the file name before the title to improve accuracy (recommended by Circo)

- Improvement: A new ListCache.xml data file has been added that helps keep things running smoothly for collections with thousands of playlists

- Improvement: When adding a new playlist underneath a platform, a line will now automatically be created to filter to only games for that platform when checking the box to make it an auto-populate playlist

- Improvement: When bulk editing the associated emulator for games, LaunchBox will now automatically update the emulator for all additional apps that are also set to use the same emulator as the parent game

- Improvement: Attract mode in Big Box will now always move into or out of views when the number of items highlighted exceeds the total number of items

- Improvement: Performance has been significantly improved while populating the Big Box platform clear logo image cache for platforms, categories, or playlists that do not have default images

- Improvement: Scraping is now improved for no-intro ROMs with tildes (~) in the file names

- Improvement: Big Box alphanumeric indexes will now work properly with favorites-only lists. If no game is found that is not a favorite, Big Box will jump to the first favorited game that starts with that letter instead.

- Improvement: When deleting platforms, categories, or playlists from the sidebar in LaunchBox, warnings have been added to clarify a number of things and reduce confusion

- Improvement: The MAME arcade full-set import process now excludes hacks, prototypes, and bootlegs from the region prioritization process; this helps to ensure that hacks, prototypes, and bootlegs do not end up being used as the default ROM for a game.

- Improvement: Big Box will now use the parent platform's video if no video exists for the selected playlist or category

- Improvement: Big Box will now use the parent platform's background images if no background image exists for the selected playlist or category

- Improvement: When switching between platforms, categories, and playlists in Big Box, if the same video is used, it will no longer restart

- Improvement: Many new default clear logos for genres, play modes, All Games, and Favorites have been added thanks to the community

- Fixed: Generating MAME/Arcade playlists on importing games was still restricted to premium users (previously we removed the premium restriction for playlists)

- Fixed: Launch With in Big Box is now sorted alphabetically

- Fixed: The list type drop down in LaunchBox is now sorted alphabetically

- Fixed: Field drop downs in the LaunchBox playlist editor are now sorted alphabetically

- Fixed: The PluginHelper.DataManager.GetAllParents() plugin method was not working properly

- Fixed: Rare null reference error when loading game details in the sidebar in LaunchBox

- Fixed: Rare data issue with platform categories not showing up

- Fixed: Playlists were sometimes not updating when manually adding games to playlists

- Fixed: Incorrect counts could occasionally display in various places in LaunchBox and/or Big Box; this was previously due to hide games options not always being accounted for in game counts

- Fixed: Auto-populating playlists were sometimes not updating when game metadata changed

- Fixed: Game controllers were not navigating the drop-down lists in the Big Box filters popup

- Fixed: Big Box was still sometimes creating unnecessary/irrelevant empty video folders for playlists

- Fixed: The emulators list when bulk editing games was not sorted alphabetically

- Fixed: Additional applications in the LaunchBox game right-click menu were sometimes using the icon from the game's emulator instead of the icon from the additional application's emulator

- Fixed: Big Box was caching the nested name incorrectly for platform, playlist, and category wheel images; this was resulting in the wrong images showing up in rare cases

- Fixed: Big Box was not properly saving previous selections for deeply nested platforms, categories, and playlists

- Fixed: Big Box was not properly saving previous selected games for categories and playlists

- Fixed: Big Box attract mode was sometimes starting in the previous state (half-way through a spin) if it had previously been cut off

- Fixed: Big Box attract mode was sometimes starting up too quickly after returning from a game

- Fixed: On some very rare occasions, the Big Box update popup could previously cause stability issues

- Fixed: Opening additional apps PDFs was not working properly in Big Box when Big Box was configured to use the internal PDF reader
 

[Jason Carr]

You missed one. Just kidding.

[Kondorito]

Holy ****! That is a long list of trackers! Did not realize all the stuff being done until seeing it now altogether.

Awesome work Jason!

[Jason Carr]

 

[voicesinthedark]

8 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

 

We need keyboard and controller keybind options for selecting a random game in launchbox.next please.

[Jason Carr]

5 minutes ago, voicesinthedark said:

We need keyboard and controller keybind options for selecting a random game in launchbox.next please.

I hear you. It's on my list.

[voicesinthedark]

3 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

I hear you. It's on my list.

you rock, thank you.

[bundangdon]

Great work once again! Launchbox keeps getting better and better

 

[obatu100]

How do we get this update? Usually the update come after the machine has been on for 5 to 10 minutes. The machines have been on for 2 hours. No update. 

[Mute64]

Well not even half way thru a clean up and I'm at 7000+ media files... safe to say I might save a fair bit of space here.

[Kondorito]

6 hours ago, Mute64 said:

Well not even half way thru a clean up and I'm at 7000+ media files... safe to say I might save a fair bit of space here.

I want to run this clean-up tool, but I am afraid I would erase some stuff I want to keep. Haven't passed the first Warning window of it, afraid that it might start just deleting everything it considers not in use. Please let me know after it finishes the above process if it shows you a final warning for the deletion of everything, or if it shows you what is going to be deleted.

[JoeViking245]

4 hours ago, Kondorito said:

I want to run this clean-up tool, but I am afraid I would erase some stuff I want to keep. Haven't passed the first Warning window of it, afraid that it might start just deleting everything it considers not in use. Please let me know after it finishes the above process if it shows you a final warning for the deletion of everything, or if it shows you what is going to be deleted.

Just now running it too.  Not half way and says 38k+ files so far.  BUT... it does say "...files currently being used..".  Not 'files to be [permanently] deleted'.

Also, it seems to go through your entire library.  Not just the platform your in nor only the files/games selected (say, using ctrl+a).

Let you know.. maybe in an hour or so.  lol

[Kondorito]

5 minutes ago, JoeViking245 said:

Just now running it too.  Not half way and says 38k+ files so far.  BUT... it does say "...files currently being used..".  Not 'files to be [permanently] deleted'.

Also, it seems to go through your entire library.  Not just the platform your in nor only the files/games selected (say, using ctrl+a).

Let you know.. maybe in an hour or so.  lol

THANK YOU!

It would be great to be able to do the cleanup by selecting platform, category or playlist, and before doing the perm delete, to show the user what is going to be deleted (or moved to an "Unneeded" folder).

Be waiting for your review Joe!

[JoeViking245]

Well, it [appeared it] finished a little faster than it started.  Looks like several (lol) were removed, but a quick look through the platforms, all seems good!

I knew I had 'extra's but didn't think that many.

Kudos to the LB team!!!

[neil9000]

18 minutes ago, JoeViking245 said:

Just now running it too.  Not half way and says 38k+ files so far.  BUT... it does say "...files currently being used..".  Not 'files to be [permanently] deleted'.

Also, it seems to go through your entire library.  Not just the platform your in nor only the files/games selected (say, using ctrl+a).

Let you know.. maybe in an hour or so.  lol

Yeah, unless its changed since it was images only (which i dont believe it has) then it actually lists the number of items still being used while it is running that. I always thought it was the wrong way around and should be counting the amount of items to be removed, but its not. That number counting up during the scan is what is being kept.

[Kondorito]

6 minutes ago, JoeViking245 said:

Well, it [appeared it] finished a little faster than it started.  Looks like several (lol) were removed, but a quick look through the platforms, all seems good!

I knew I had 'extra's but didn't think that many.

Kudos to the LB team!!!

Thanks for the update.

It would be great for the user to be able to choose either to permanently delete the media, or move it to another folder for manual selection afterwards.

As an example, I have created some boxes, carts and logos that might not be in use at the moment, but I would like to keep for the future.

 

[neil9000]

Just now, Kondorito said:

As an example, I have created some boxes, carts and logos that might not be in use at the moment, but I would like to keep for the future.

Yeah, then in your specific case i advise against using this, unless the images you have but are not using are associated with games. This simply deletes media for games you no longer have in your library. 

[Kondorito]

1 minute ago, neil9000 said:

Yeah, then in your specific case i advise against using this, unless the images you have but are not using are associated with games. This simply deletes media for games you no longer have in your library. 

Yeah, I have been refraining from using this tool, and just deleting duped images whenever I see them while editing games and stuff. I know for a fact that I have A LOT of dupes, because in my first steps in LB when adding systems I checked the boxes to scrape the LB db and Emumovies at the same.

Thank you guys.

[neil9000]

Just now, Kondorito said:

Yeah, I have been refraining from using this tool, and just deleting duped images whenever I see them while editing games and stuff. I know for a fact that I have A LOT of dupes, because in my first steps in LB when adding systems I checked the boxes to scrape the LB db and Emumovies at the same.

Thank you guys.

Yeah, and this tool wont necessarily remove all those anyway. It checks hashs/crc's i believe to identify dupes, and they are often different anyway depending on the service downloaded from. One small difference in the file changes that, so you could easily have 2 identical images, but with different hashes, so they wont be removed as dupes. 

[neil9000]

But at the same time i don't mean to put anyone off, this will do as it says and will likely free some people up a lot of space.