importer Flashpoint Importer for Launchers

[oblivioncth]

19 hours ago, oblivioncth said:

I might be forgetting a few other changes that would be needed in other XML files. If you have the time I'd just redo the import once again with the latest upload.

You should probably also delete the Player-Produced Perlis XML, and then run LB to let it clean out everything related to it in order to make sure the old one doesn't stick around since the filename will be different and it won't see them as the same playlist.

Ok hold on, there might still be an issue. Investigating.

@SiriusVI Turns out that LB seems to be enforcing some changes to playlist file names that I don't believe it was in the past. That, or it wasn't an issue previously because there weren't any playlists with the right name to make the issue apparent. So it keeps tweaking the file names after an import, causing the mismatch (I kind of already said this in my initial post on the issue, but the problem affected things more broadly than I thought.

So, I still would delete those two playlists, since they seem to have names with the issue. Then, try out this build and let me know if that fixes the issue for you with a re-import. I did more through testing and things appear to be in order now after the changes that went into it.

Obligatory "backup your files first".

[SiriusVI]

6 hours ago, oblivioncth said:

@SiriusVI Turns out that LB seems to be enforcing some changes to playlist file names that I don't believe it was in the past. That, or it wasn't an issue previously because there weren't any playlists with the right name to make the issue apparent. So it keeps tweaking the file names after an import, causing the mismatch (I kind of already said this in my initial post on the issue, but the problem affected things more broadly than I thought.

So, I still would delete those two playlists, since they seem to have names with the issue. Then, try out this build and let me know if that fixes the issue for you with a re-import. I did more through testing and things appear to be in order now after the changes that went into it.

Obligatory "backup your files first".

I restored my backup before I used the v13 importer for the first time and did a fresh import with your new build. It seems to have worked perfectly now. Thx!

[oblivioncth]

4 minutes ago, SiriusVI said:

I restored my backup before I used the v13 importer for the first time and did a fresh import with your new build. It seems to have worked perfectly now. Thx!

Cool. Thanks for testing. Third time's the charm I guess.

[Morthux]

I installed everything, downloaded the games I wanted, and imported the playlist succesfully. Every game appears in LaunchBox, images include. But when I open the game it says:

 

The download(s) could not be completed.

The download(s) failed to complete succesfully.

Specific:

- [https://download.unstable.life/gib-roms/Games/7465f109-77a4-f52b-5b95-773d6d219d04-1695494786792.zip]

Error: Error transferring https://download.unstable.life/gib-roms/Games/7465f109-77a4-f52b-5b95-773d6d219d04-1695494786792.zip - server replied:

Edited October 11, 2024 by Morthux

[oblivioncth]

17 minutes ago, Morthux said:

I installed everything, downloaded the games I wanted, and imported the playlist succesfully. Every game appears in LaunchBox, images include. But when I open the game it says:

 

The download(s) could not be completed.

The download(s) failed to complete succesfully.

Specific:

- [https://download.unstable.life/gib-roms/Games/7465f109-77a4-f52b-5b95-773d6d219d04-1695494786792.zip]

Error: Error transferring https://download.unstable.life/gib-roms/Games/7465f109-77a4-f52b-5b95-773d6d219d04-1695494786792.zip - server replied:

Sorry about that. There was an oversight in CLIFp (the tool within FIL that lets you actually run the games) that could cause this. I fixed it a bit back, but forget to publish a update to FIL that was bundled with that new version.

I've done so now. Just run the new version, but instead of doing an import, use the tools menu and select the "Deploy CLIFp" option in order to update your CLIFp version.

Then you should be good to go.
 

[SiriusVI]

@oblivioncthFlashpoint Ultimate 14 is out and it has an experimental launcher. The description on Discord reads:

Experimental Launcher (Optional)
Separately we are including an experimental launcher which allows loading of images and gamezips directly out of Ultimate packaged zips. Do not extract your GameData and Images zips, and instead copy / symlink them into Flashpoint Ultimate/Data/ArchiveData/ (e.g Flashpoint Ultimate/Data/ArchiveData/GameData_1.zip). This is available in ExperimentalLauncher.7z and must be extracted last. It requires Win 10 x64 or above. This will not load Ultimate 13 zips.

I'm not entirely sure how this works, but it seems that game data won't need to be extracted which is great for saving disk space and time. It's also always a challenge extracting a 2TB file. You essentially need over 4TB of free space.

But this means that image files also won't get extracted, so importing them into Launchbox with your importer tool might be a challenge. Do you know of any way to make this work?

Edited Saturday at 10:43 AM by SiriusVI

[oblivioncth]

7 hours ago, SiriusVI said:

@oblivioncthFlashpoint Ultimate 14 is out and it has an experimental launcher. The description on Discord reads:

Experimental Launcher (Optional)
Separately we are including an experimental launcher which allows loading of images and gamezips directly out of Ultimate packaged zips. Do not extract your GameData and Images zips, and instead copy / symlink them into Flashpoint Ultimate/Data/ArchiveData/ (e.g Flashpoint Ultimate/Data/ArchiveData/GameData_1.zip). This is available in ExperimentalLauncher.7z and must be extracted last. It requires Win 10 x64 or above. This will not load Ultimate 13 zips.

I'm not entirely sure how this works, but it seems that game data won't need to be extracted which is great for saving disk space and time. It's also always a challenge extracting a 2TB file. You essentially need over 4TB of free space.

But this means that image files also won't get extracted, so importing them into Launchbox with your importer tool might be a challenge. Do you know of any way to make this work?

Playing the games seems somewhat straight forward, they just get extracted from the archive zip on the fly (though I need to check more of their code to see how they handle the fact there are multiple ZIPs).

The images are... a problem. From what I can tell by looking briefly, the Launcher streams the images directly from the ZIP in that mode, though it doesn't even really matter as obviously CLIFp isn't run by just looking at the images, so I can have no influence over image access between when you initially run FIL and when a game is started. The stock launcher is special, since it has all of these mechanisms to load images from different sources on the fly, which of course LaunchBox, nor any of the other supported launchers do. Outside of plugin, which I feel like is beyond the scope of this project and would only work for LB (and I actually have no idea if the plugin-API supports altering how images are loaded), these other launchers just expect to load an image from disk, and that's that.

Without creating some other somewhat convoluted application that tried to somehow hijack loading the file from disk (it would probably require implementing a virtual file system, which requires a driver on Windows, or at the very least an app running in the background at all times), which again would be pretty nuts, the only thing I can think of is making it so FIL supports extracting the images during import using the "Copy" mode, but then you overall end up using even more space, because then the images are both there in the ZIP and copied somewhere else, vs just extracting them and then using Link. 

I figure this isn't the end of the world though as all of the images are already in JPG/PNG format which don't further compress well, so the size difference between the Ultimate zip for images extracted vs not is almost 0. Plus, the image zips aren't that big in the end and at least for now there's only two, so they don't take that long to extract.

So tl;dr, it's unlikely I can do much about the image zips, though it shouldn't be a big deal to just extract those. I can, when I get to it, add support for loading games from the Game zips, which should save a lot of time/effort since they're far larger. Those don't really save space either as the games within them are already zipped themselves, but still it would save the hassle of extracting them.

Edited Saturday at 06:18 PM by oblivioncth

[SiriusVI]

@oblivioncthAhhh yes, the images are in their own .zip file. This is great actually. So (after you did your magic modifying your impoerter), we'd be able to load games with this experimental Launcher, keeping all the files zipped, but still importing the images, after extracting  only those. Correct?

By the way: I now don't use Symlinks anymore with your launcher, I use the copy function. For some reason, the symlinks kept disappearing from my Launchbox image folders. I believe this has something to do with Flashpoint being on an external drive that is not always connected to my PC. Maybe Launchbox delets symlinks if the source file is not present, idk. Anyway this is not an issue, copying the images works fine.

[oblivioncth]

Yea, you'd only have to extract the images but the games could stay in the Game_x.zip files.

Hmm, I've never had that happen personally, but I've never tried starting Launchbox after removing FP files (deleting or removing an external device), so it may indeed have to do with that.

[oblivioncth]

On 9/6/2025 at 2:26 PM, SiriusVI said:

@oblivioncthAhhh yes, the images are in their own .zip file. This is great actually. So (after you did your magic modifying your impoerter), we'd be able to load games with this experimental Launcher, keeping all the files zipped, but still importing the images, after extracting  only those. Correct?

By the way: I now don't use Symlinks anymore with your launcher, I use the copy function. For some reason, the symlinks kept disappearing from my Launchbox image folders. I believe this has something to do with Flashpoint being on an external drive that is not always connected to my PC. Maybe Launchbox delets symlinks if the source file is not present, idk. Anyway this is not an issue, copying the images works fine.

Alright, more guinea pig time XD. https://github.com/oblivioncth/CLIFp/actions/runs/17571628676 (Windows static is what you want of course)

Even if its suboptimal, I figured i'd just throw something together that should work. I haven't finished downloading Ultimate yet, so if you can be bothered, please try starting a game with this build with Ultimate setup such that none of the Game_X.zip files have been extracted, and are instead placed in the 'ArchiveData' folder as the Discord message you referenced instructs. In theory, it should pull the correct game out of there and then run it.

Whether it works or not, I'd appreciate it if you could upload the log after trying.

Edited Tuesday at 04:23 AM by oblivioncth

[SiriusVI]

@oblivioncthI haven't downloaded it, yet, either. I'm happy to give you feedback once I get around to it.

[oblivioncth]

56 minutes ago, SiriusVI said:

@oblivioncthI haven't downloaded it, yet, either. I'm happy to give you feedback once I get around to it.

Ah NP. Well at least you didn't potentially waste time extracting the zips when you might not need to.