Startup Screens, Pause Screens, and Bezels Discussions

[JaysArcade]

16 minutes ago, Kondorito said:

 

Wow! Sorry I missed this. I built a virtual Pincab last year and have been so heavily invested in the pinball world that I've neglected to keep up with Launchbox. Glad something like this is moving forward finally! It is very much needed IMHO.

[Kondorito]

1 minute ago, JaysArcade said:

Wow! Sorry I missed this. I built a virtual Pincab last year and have been so heavily invested in the pinball world that I've neglected to keep up with Launchbox. Glad something like this is moving forward finally! It is very much needed IMHO.

@eatkinola is awesome and is making nice progress with his plugin; might even be compatible with Jason's release (they were discussing the best way to deploy both projects aligned).

[Jason Carr]

1 hour ago, Kondorito said:

@eatkinola is awesome and is making nice progress with his plugin; might even be compatible with Jason's release (they were discussing the best way to deploy both projects aligned).

Just to clarify this, we may end up collaborating here at some point, but as of right now we're developing them separately. However, @eatkinola is doing proper fades I believe, while I'm currently focusing on getting startup screens working with exclusive full screen support (I'll be tackling an option for fading into games later).

[Jason Carr]

I did want to update you all as well. Progress is going very well, though I do still have a fairly long list of things to complete. If we're lucky, I'll have a beta out with the initial startup screen functionality by the end of the week.

Keep in mind that the startup screens are completely themeable, so the above is just a placeholder that's in progress for the default theme. Big Box fades into the startup screen and then jumps to the fullscreen game when it's ready.

[Kondorito]

27 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Keep in mind that the startup screens are completely themeable, so the above is just a placeholder that's in progress for the default theme. Big Box fades into the startup screen and then jumps to the fullscreen game when it's ready.

Looking awesome!

Will the 'themeability' be manageable for non coders? (i. e. Typing coordinates and image paths/types in a xaml)

Edited December 4, 2018 by Kondorito

[Jason Carr]

37 minutes ago, Kondorito said:

Looking awesome!

Will the 'themeability' be manageable for non coders? (i. e. Typing coordinates and image paths/types in a xaml)

It uses the exact same themeing engine as everything else. XAML is about as easy to understand as HTML, especially if all you want to do is move things around.

[thatchdog1]

Nice I am getting closer to not using Rocketlauncher

[candre23]

I'm not overly concerned with loading screens, fading, or bezels.  They'd be nice to have, but not if they'll significantly impact performance or delay implementation of the more useful features.

 

Pause screen features, however, would be a huge improvement.  In my ideal setup, the pause screen would display the controller mapping, have a button to bring up the game manual, state save/load buttons, and reset/quit buttons.  It doesn't need to be particularly fancy.  Just having a unified pause menu across all emulators would go a long way to perfecting the bigbox experience.

 

EDIT: I just thought of another nice feature the pause menu could have - an "emulator options" button.  Hitting that button would send the hotkey command to bring up that emulator's settings/config menu.  That would effectively eliminate the need for a keyboard completely, once your system is set up.

Edited December 7, 2018 by candre23

[Jason Carr]

Thank you all. I have the first 9.2 beta out with the beginnings of the startup screens feature:

I am closing this thread now in order to move discussions over there. Please be sure to read the known issues and the planned features sections of the first post before posting. Thanks all.