9.8-beta-1 Released

[AVissie]

@Jason Carr At the moment in the pause menu, like you said it shows controls for arcade that is pulled from EmuMovies, Is it possible have this for othe platforms as well? Showing there controls in the pause menu?

[darreldearth]

3 hours ago, AVissie said:

@Jason Carr At the moment in the pause menu, like you said it shows controls for arcade that is pulled from EmuMovies, Is it possible have this for othe platforms as well? Showing there controls in the pause menu?

I would imagine you could just put the controls in the arcade controls folder for each system, unless you're just saying it looks sloppy to do it that way since the folder is called arcade controls.

[FlightRisk]

5 hours ago, AVissie said:

...it shows controls for arcade that is pulled from EmuMovies, Is it possible have this for othe platforms as well? Showing there controls in the pause menu?

Yes.2 ways to do it. Typing on my phone so can help more later. But you can cut and paste the default pause theme folder and modify it so all the platforms use the arcade.xml renamed as default.xml for your theme, or copy arcade.xml and paste it as many times as you have platforms and name them to match. Then you need the controller graphics in the right folder in each platforms image folder for every game. There may be a tweak needed in the .xml files. I have to think about what the easiest way is and if there are controller graphics for every platform. If not, then you would have to find them and manually copy them to the correctly named folders 

[kmoney]

One feature that I would like to see in the Pause screens is a "View Images" option similar to the one on the game details screen. But the difference from the game details screen View Images option would be, is when you clicked on the View Images option in the Pause menu, it would maybe enter into a sub menu where you could choose which image you wanted to look at vs scrolling through all the images. This would solve the problem as well if you wanted to look at controls information, boxart,maps and etc in your LaunchBox/Images folder for various platforms. I also think this would be a great option for users who would prefer the Pause screen to look less crowded when you first enter the Pause menu with no box or cart images covering the fanart.

[FlightRisk]

RE: Displaying game controls in platforms other than arcade. On my system at least, very few platforms have controls in the images folder. So you emumoves experts can see if they are out there and can be automatically craped. So both methods I mentioned should work. The first is to copy the default them files to another folder, say "showcontrols" and select that in LB/BB. Change default.xaml to include the important bits from arcade.xaml, or just delete default.xaml and copy arcade.xaml and rename it to default.xaml. Not sure at this point if you have to have all your graphics named properly and dumped into your arcade images section or their own.  They either need to be in images/arcade/arcade - controls information or in images/<platform name/arcade - controls information.

The other way is to put graphics in the arcade - controls information for each platform and then in your pause them folder have a <platform name>.xaml for each platform. Then just copy the arcade.xaml file for each platform and rename it to your platform name (sega - 32.xaml, atari 2600.xaml, etc.)

The section in the xaml that looks for the controls images looks like this:

 

<Image Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="2" Source="{Binding SelectedGame.ArcadeControlsInformationImagePath}" VerticalAlignment="Center"
     HorizontalAlignment="Center" RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="HighQuality" Margin="100">
     <Image.Effect>
          <DropShadowEffect BlurRadius="10" Direction="-90" RenderingBias="Quality" ShadowDepth="1" />
     </Image.Effect>
</Image>

 

[e2zippo]

Awesome work @Jason Carr! One question though, and I may have just missed this one, but I can't find a way to bind a controller button to show the pause screen. Ideally this would be the "home" button on my Wii U Pro Controller. 

Is it only available in the keyboard section?

 

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, e2zippo said:

Awesome work @Jason Carr! One question though, and I may have just missed this one, but I can't find a way to bind a controller button to show the pause screen. Ideally this would be the "home" button on my Wii U Pro Controller. 

Is it only available in the keyboard section?

 

Its in the automation section like normal.

 

[e2zippo]

26 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Its in the automation section like normal.

 

My bad, I only looked in Controller Buttons.

I know it's been mentioned, and  there's a reason you can't map the Home button, but I can't remember why?

Also, I can't seem to get Save and Load state to work, at least not in Retroarch or Dolphin.

In Retroarch when I save a state, and then try to load it, it's like it reloads wherever I just paused.

And in Dolphin, nothing happens.

Do I need to configure something to make it work?

And I may have found a bug, whenever I try to save a state, my volume lowers itself to almost mute.

 

Cheers!

[Jason Carr]

On 5/10/2019 at 7:40 PM, sundogak said:

However, having the keyboard automation added to LB would be great because with @Omen's AHK script earlier in the thread, could use the Xbox controller Guide button for LB Pause since Guide button is not currently mappable directly from within BB/LB.

Yeah, I may or may not get to that before the official release, but it is on my list.

On 5/10/2019 at 8:19 PM, ZeSystem said:

@Jason Carr Is there any way to hide a platform from big box platform list?

I move some garbage bin PC games into a special, custom platform, but I'd like to hide them as it is much more to organize them in a separate platform than to have them hidden.

The best you can do currently is to just hide the games themselves.

On 5/11/2019 at 2:14 AM, Stovies said:

Is the option to have pause screen and start-up music choices at some point?  I used to enjoy having arcade ambience playing when a game was paused and a specific tune playing when a game was loading.

I haven't added music options yet. I probably will at some point, but it's not likely to happen before the official release.

On 5/11/2019 at 2:44 AM, ALIE said:

Pause features work great and they just seem to work out fiddling like with Rocket.  Saving and loading the save Stat will that be upgraded to having the option to make multiple and pick from a list. 1 thing I see missing. 

Again, potentially eventually, but it's a challenge to do that with broad emulator support, so it probably won't be happening for the initial release.

[Jason Carr]

On 5/12/2019 at 5:51 AM, kmoney said:

One feature that I would like to see in the Pause screens is a "View Images" option similar to the one on the game details screen. But the difference from the game details screen View Images option would be, is when you clicked on the View Images option in the Pause menu, it would maybe enter into a sub menu where you could choose which image you wanted to look at vs scrolling through all the images. This would solve the problem as well if you wanted to look at controls information, boxart,maps and etc in your LaunchBox/Images folder for various platforms. I also think this would be a great option for users who would prefer the Pause screen to look less crowded when you first enter the Pause menu with no box or cart images covering the fanart.

Yeah, I thought about this. Once again though, I need to stop the scope creep at some point and actually put this feature out, so this probably won't happen before the official release.

22 hours ago, e2zippo said:

My bad, I only looked in Controller Buttons.

I know it's been mentioned, and  there's a reason you can't map the Home button, but I can't remember why?

Also, I can't seem to get Save and Load state to work, at least not in Retroarch or Dolphin.

In Retroarch when I save a state, and then try to load it, it's like it reloads wherever I just paused.

And in Dolphin, nothing happens.

Do I need to configure something to make it work?

And I may have found a bug, whenever I try to save a state, my volume lowers itself to almost mute.

 

Cheers!

Most likely your key bindings are not set up for those functions in Retroarch and Dolphin. Take a look at the scripts when editing those emulators in LaunchBox, and that will show you what the default keys should be, then map the keys.

The volume thing is by design, but it should unmute itself when it's finished. You can turn that off in the main options under Game Pause "Mute During Transitions".

[deliyuerek85]

In the current beta the zoom in and zoom out buttons in the pdf viewer don't work anymore.

[PanteraZombie]

9 minutes ago, deliyuerek85 said:

In the current beta the zoom in and zoom out buttons in the pdf viewer don't work anymore.

I noticed that too, but then I realized it was conflicting with the volume up and down mappings. Not sure if this might be your issue too...

[deliyuerek85]

23 hours ago, PanteraZombie said:

I noticed that too, but then I realized it was conflicting with the volume up and down mappings. Not sure if this might be your issue too...

It's still not working. Neither with keyboard nor with controller.

Edited May 14, 2019 by deliyuerek85

[Jason Carr]

Beta 15 is out now with the following:

• Game-specific settings for pause screens (available under the Startup/Pause tab of the game edit dialog, as well as in bulk edit)
• New themes manager in Big Box for pause themes (though none are available yet and I still need to modify the website to support adding them)
• Fixes for PDF viewer zooming (should be much smoother and faster now, as well as fix the bug that was introduced in the previous beta)
• Fixes for PDF viewer page up and page down (should work properly now)
• Fixes for the updated version of CefSharp (Chromium) not including the proper version of the Visual C++ libraries
• Added the ability to clear keyboard mappings in Big Box by waiting 5 seconds
• Added the ability to clear the pause key setting in LaunchBox with a new button

There's one minor issue still with the PDF zooming, and that is that you have to wait a second or two for the interface to fade away after loading up a PDF before you can zoom. I spent over 8 hours just getting the stupid PDFs to zoom without reloading them, so I'm calling it done for now. The input options for the PDF viewer inside of Chromium are more than a little bit wonky, so it was way more of a hassle than it should have been.

[Retro808]

@Jason Carr Seeing that adding to and removing from playlists that are manual is not updating unless rebooting BigBox. Rolled back to prior beta and the issue is there as well.

[wallmachine]

5 hours ago, Retro808 said:

@Jason Carr Seeing that adding to and removing from playlists that are manual is not updating unless rebooting BigBox. Rolled back to prior beta and the issue is there as well.

for me when rolling back the issue that wasn't present is still present after rolling back, this has happened a few times before and again in this set of releases.

[SpaceMidget75]

8 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

There's one minor issue still with the PDF zooming, and that is that you have to wait a second or two for the interface to fade away after loading up a PDF before you can zoom. I spent over 8 hours just getting the stupid PDFs to zoom without reloading them, so I'm calling it done for now. The input options for the PDF viewer inside of Chromium are more than a little bit wonky, so it was way more of a hassle than it should have been.

Us devs totally feel  your pain Jason and as always thank you for your hard work!

[Jason Carr]

On 5/14/2019 at 6:11 PM, Retro808 said:

@Jason Carr Seeing that adding to and removing from playlists that are manual is not updating unless rebooting BigBox. Rolled back to prior beta and the issue is there as well.

 

On 5/15/2019 at 12:08 AM, wallmachine said:

for me when rolling back the issue that wasn't present is still present after rolling back, this has happened a few times before and again in this set of releases.

I don't think that's a new issue, but it is something I should probably address. On the list.

[Jason Carr]

Beta 16 is out now with the following:

• New exit game AutoHotkey scripts
• New swap disc AutoHotkey scripts
• Redream default pause screen settings with AutoHotkey scripts
• Demul default pause screen settings with AutoHotkey scripts
• PCSX2 default pause screen settings with AutoHotkey scripts
• ScummVM pause screen fixes and settings/scripts

At this point, I'm going to call this beta feature-complete. The only thing left that still needs to be done is to see if I can resolve some pause screen issues with a few troublesome emulators. Hopefully I can figure that stuff out without too much trouble and we can put out the official release early next week.

[Arcanthur]

16 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Beta 16 is out now with the following:

• New exit game AutoHotkey scripts
• New swap disc AutoHotkey scripts
• Redream default pause screen settings with AutoHotkey scripts
• Demul default pause screen settings with AutoHotkey scripts
• PCSX2 default pause screen settings with AutoHotkey scripts
• ScummVM pause screen fixes and settings/scripts

At this point, I'm going to call this beta feature-complete. The only thing left that still needs to be done is to see if I can resolve some pause screen issues with a few troublesome emulators. Hopefully I can figure that stuff out without too much trouble and we can put out the official release early next week.

Hey Jason, could the exit game AutoHotkey scripts be used to run a batch file after the emulator exits?  Otherwise what is the likelihood of having batch editing of "additional apps" being incorporated into the next beta?