Jump to content
LaunchBox Community Forums

Play Time / Game Time Tracking. Potential and Posible solution


1bdaniel

Recommended Posts

Hi, its awesome to know in launchbox how many times you played but it would be more detailed if also show how much time you spent on the game. I know i know there's already some topic talking about it, but was concluded as imposible. 

My suggest is take advantage of some emulators logs for runtime like Retroarch with its addition to have runtime logs to show Played Time. so with this launchbox doesnt need to integrate with the game and just take advantage of the tools provided by retroarch in this case the runtime logs ,knowing an emulator will have always direct interaction with the game and so have this opportunities to get the played time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, 1bdaniel said:

Hi, its awesome to know in launchbox how many times you played but it would be more detailed if also show how much time you spent on the game. I know i know there's already some topic talking about it, but was concluded as imposible. 

My suggest is take advantage of some emulators logs for runtime like Retroarch with its addition to have runtime logs to show Played Time. so with this launchbox doesnt need to integrate with the game and just take advantage of the tools provided by retroarch in this case the runtime logs ,knowing an emulator will have always direct interaction with the game and so have this opportunities to get the played time.

The problem with this approach though is that not all emulators will provide that information, and also Launchbox would need to be coded differently for different emulators, and if/when they change things as Retroarch for example often does (they seem to regularly change things for no good rhyme or reason it seems, at least to the end user) then Launchbox would need to be recoded to keep up. That is a huge PITA to keep changing when a emulator does and a hell of a lot of work. It needs to be a global thing that is part of Launchbox that works across all emulators, but that is where the difficulty comes from in tracking things. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I know that it may be irrelevant, it's a feature that seems rather unimportant, but somehow Playnite does it in a universal way. It doesn't matter which emulator you are running, it calculates the time when you start and exit a specific game. I admit that it's not the most accurate method but it works good enough. Honestly, it's one of the few things that I really miss on launchbox and I don't see any interest in it, which makes me sad. Anyway, let's hope that someday it will be implemented in some way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Could it just be possible to use the computer's clock to figure out how long one could be playing for? Launchbox could look at the internal clock once the game starts and once it ends, after some quick calculations, it would figure out the time. Yes there would be the problem of opening up retroarch's menu and having to timer keep ticking, but unless the person stays on that screen for awhile, it would not effect the time too much. I feel like it would be kind of fun seeing how long some of us have played some old games that don't show how long one has been playing for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 6 months later...

i dunno about dead.  i found this thread just now ? 

+1 for a native playtime tracker.  If a community member can slap together a plugin to do it,  i imagine given the wizards who operate under the hood on this guy, something else has to be getting in the way other than "another thread concluding it was impossible" as its obviously not. 

i will take an award for 6 month bumping if one exists though!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...