importer Flashpoint Importer for Launchers

[SiriusVI]

@oblivioncth

I did some further testing and found two more issues:

1. If the platform names change between Flashpoint versions, then the platforms still have the old name (the platform names are not updated) and also sometimes the platform was imported twice (one with the old name, one with the new name) and the games were scattered between the two platforms. For me, the following platforms were affected (the parts in brackets is what was removed from the platform name in Flashpoint 14):

Babyz (Player)

DX Studio (Player)

GLG (Plugin)

Live Picture (Viewer)

o2c(-Player)

Octree (View)

Petz (Player)

SVF (viewer)

SVG (Viewer)

TCL

Xara (Plugin)

Possible solution: I believe it would be great if you included an option to import a "fresh" version of Flashpoint into Launchbox, meaning that the existing Platforms are not updated, but deleted entirely and then re-imported from scratch. Would something like this be possible?


2. The playlist "Animation Hall of Fame" was imported, but not listed within the Playlist Category your tool creats. All the other playlists were present, however. 

Edited November 4 by SiriusVI

[oblivioncth]

Sorry that I missed your response.

The second issue is obviously a bug that I'll double check.

The first I'm unlikely to act on at the moment, unless I can come up with a particularly clever idea. The issue is that once the name for a Platform/Playlist no longer matches exactly what's in the Flashpoint database, there effectively becomes no way to differentiate previous FP item names from unrelated Platforms/Playlists. The feature you suggested would only work if one is using LB solely for FP, as otherwise any non-FP lists they have would be deleted as well. I could have it try some basic heuristics, like ignoring leading/trailing spaces when looking for a match, but outside of keeping an ever expanding list of "past names" for all Playlists/Platforms (which is a bit silly), there is no surefire way to know that two Platforms/Playlists with different names are actually different versions of the same list. 

Although extremely unlikely, a user could theoretically name their own Playlist/Platform to a "past" name of a FP one and have it errantly picked up as such. Given that one of my priorities is minimizing data loss and disturbance of other user files, I'd rather not throw something in haphazardly. I know it's annoying, but the current advice is to simply delete the old versions manually. I can only hope that FP stops renaming its entries slightly so often XD.

[oblivioncth]

The latest release has fixed the Platform Category issue for Playlists

[smargorps]

I feel dumb like it's just me not able to figure this out, but it seems no matter what options I'm picking, it just isn't working.  I don't realllly need it to, but it would be pretty cool to add the chunk to my giant LB setup.

I have green checkmarks for the directories, which it seems to correctly call me out for when I pick the wrong folders..

 

When I try to do Select All, it seems to not like even the very first one.  'unrecognized token' seems to be the kind of message I get when there is a space in the name?  Does the same when I pick a different individual name with a space.

 

And if I select something that doesn't have a space, I get this, with "no such column"

 

Then it just says it's reverted changes and nothing happens.

I glanced through some of the thread, but maybe I didn't see if this had come up for anyone else.  

Edited November 30 by smargorps

[oblivioncth]

17 minutes ago, smargorps said:

I feel dumb like it's just me not able to figure this out, but it seems no matter what options I'm picking, it just isn't working.  I don't realllly need it to, but it would be pretty cool to add the chunk to my giant LB setup.

I have green checkmarks for the directories, which it seems to correctly call me out for when I pick the wrong folders..

 

When I try to do Select All, it seems to not like even the very first one.  'unrecognized token' seems to be the kind of message I get when there is a space in the name?  Does the same when I pick a different individual name with a space.

 

And if I select something that doesn't have a space, I get this, with "no such column"

 

Then it just says it's reverted changes and nothing happens.

I glanced through some of the thread, but maybe I didn't see if this had come up for anyone else.  

Sorry about this, the last couple releases all rely on some major changes under the hood that clearly have some issues. I more or less know what the issue is based on what you're showing, it's just been a bit tricky to fix the overall issue without breaking something else.

I'll tackle the problem again ASAP and test the tool more extensively before uploading a fix.

[smargorps]

24 minutes ago, oblivioncth said:

Sorry about this, the last couple releases all rely on some major changes under the hood that clearly have some issues. I more or less know what the issue is based on what you're showing, it's just been a bit tricky to fix the overall issue without breaking something else.

I'll tackle the problem again ASAP and test the tool more extensively before uploading a fix.

Oh, no problem on my end, no apologies needed.  Can't be too mad about user tools being worked on as you can.  Totally understand, will just keep an eye out and work on something else in the meantime.  Thank you!

[oblivioncth]

12 hours ago, smargorps said:

Oh, no problem on my end, no apologies needed.  Can't be too mad about user tools being worked on as you can.  Totally understand, will just keep an eye out and work on something else in the meantime.  Thank you!

Ok, luckily it was just a simple oversight. The fix that was supposed to be in 0.8.3.2 didn't actually make it in. Try 0.8.3.3.

[smargorps]

On 12/1/2025 at 5:49 AM, oblivioncth said:

Ok, luckily it was just a simple oversight. The fix that was supposed to be in 0.8.3.2 didn't actually make it in. Try 0.8.3.3.

Sorry for late response; I'm just now getting back to this.  But looks like that did it; everything seems to have imported.   Nearly +200,000 to my LB total.  Insane.

After fiddling with it for too many minutes, I found a mention somewhere that the images won't load unless you've "seen it" it in FP and then import.  Since pages and pages of blank boxes goes against my desire to be able to browse the now almost 250,000 entries that I'm never going to actually get around to playing, I guess I'm going to be saying goodbye to 2.3TB of my available drive space in a few days when Ultimate finishes downloading.  Running the importer off of an Ultimate installation should make all of the images browsable, yeah?

But either way, thank you again for the quick fix on that, even if I wasn't able to get right to it.  I'm sure others appreciated it in the meantime too.

And I guess.. is there anything to keep in mind if I run the importer again with Ultimate?  I'm not about to end up importing a duplicate set of 200k?

Edited 13 hours ago by smargorps

[oblivioncth]

5 hours ago, smargorps said:

Sorry for late response; I'm just now getting back to this.  But looks like that did it; everything seems to have imported.   Nearly +200,000 to my LB total.  Insane.

After fiddling with it for too many minutes, I found a mention somewhere that the images won't load unless you've "seen it" it in FP and then import.  Since pages and pages of blank boxes goes against my desire to be able to browse the now almost 250,000 entries that I'm never going to actually get around to playing, I guess I'm going to be saying goodbye to 2.3TB of my available drive space in a few days when Ultimate finishes downloading.  Running the importer off of an Ultimate installation should make all of the images browsable, yeah?

But either way, thank you again for the quick fix on that, even if I wasn't able to get right to it.  I'm sure others appreciated it in the meantime too.

And I guess.. is there anything to keep in mind if I run the importer again with Ultimate?  I'm not about to end up importing a duplicate set of 200k?

No problem.

Yea, the image thing is unfortunate but there's nothing I can do about it unless I wrote a LB plugin that tries to download the images live, but that's a bit more than I care to do, at least for now.

There is a Force Download Images option in FIL, but it's somewhat slow (for reasons I both do and do not understand) vs scrolling around in Flashpoint, so it's only really useful if you're importing a small subset of games. Even with Flashpoints faster fetch speed, it would take a really long time to download every image if you're going for a full import.

What matters is that the image files exist, so while you can use Ultimate, if you want to save a bit of space you can download just the "Images_x.zip" files from Ultimate and extract them into Infinity if you still want the games themselves to be downloaded on the fly.

As for re-importing, no. Unless I'm forgetting something, there is no way to end up with duplicates (with the exception of the annoyance that sometimes the Flashpoint project renames Platforms or Playlists between releases and if you import later after that happens you'll need to manually delete the one with the old name, see a few posts back). Just make sure you select everything you want again, as it will only attempt to import images based on your selections, so even if you're just trying to get the images added, you need to select everything again and re-import it all.