importer Flashpoint Importer for Launchers

[oblivioncth]

On 5/30/2021 at 6:44 AM, SiriusVI said:

Great to hear =). Will I have to remove my imported platforms and playlists from v.9 or could I just use your tool to "update" the collection?

The tool is designed so that updating is always possible as all the metadata related to starting games is always replaced with each import. Given the size of the collection I will always say there could be unforseen issues, but the idea is to be able to keep using the importer the same way with each version.

The only way this would change is if Flashpoint undergoes a massive overhaul in multiple areas when it comes to the backend.

I did have to make a moderate functional change to the tool for 10, but its not at the scale I'm referring to when it comes to those issues. I could see a small amount of problems on the first release of OFILb for 10 if they slip by me, but as always just let me know if they happen and I'll gladly patch it.

[oblivioncth]

Version 0.4 is up (now with a 32-bit version if anyone still rolls that way).

As always for the first release relative to a new Flashpoint version there may be some minor unforeseen issues as mentioned above.

Definitely let me know if you run into any.

[SiriusVI]

1 hour ago, oblivioncth said:

Version 0.4 is up (now with a 32-bit version if anyone still rolls that way).

As always for the first release relative to a new Flashpoint version there may be some minor unforeseen issues as mentioned above.

Definitely let me know if you run into any.

Great work. I'll try it out ASAP! ?

[SiriusVI]

On 6/5/2021 at 6:03 PM, oblivioncth said:

Version 0.4 is up (now with a 32-bit version if anyone still rolls that way).

As always for the first release relative to a new Flashpoint version there may be some minor unforeseen issues as mentioned above.

Definitely let me know if you run into any.

It seems to have worked perfectly. Had to manually remove some of the older playlists, since Flashpoint reduced its playlists.

A question about the new Tag System. Now I still want to exclude "Adult" games. There are however many other tags that would suggest "Adult" content, such as "sexual violence" and other problematic sounding categories, which I don't want. Do you know how this works? Do apps have multiple tags? Is it enough to just exclude "Adult" games or do I have to go through the list excluding every problematic sounding tag?

Thanks for all your hard work, man!

[oblivioncth]

25 minutes ago, SiriusVI said:

It seems to have worked perfectly. Had to manually remove some of the older playlists, since Flashpoint reduced its playlists.

A question about the new Tag System. Now I still want to exclude "Adult" games. There are however many other tags that would suggest "Adult" content, such as "sexual violence" and other problematic sounding categories, which I don't want. Do you know how this works? Do apps have multiple tags? Is it enough to just exclude "Adult" games or do I have to go through the list excluding every problematic sounding tag?

Thanks for all your hard work, man!

Ah, yea it doesn't remove those because it essentially sees them as non-Flashpoint originating playlists, since at face value it has no way of knowing if its a playlist you made or imported once it's gone from FP. I could include a list of all current and/or previous playlist names, but then there technically is still a pitfall in that if you make a playlist with the same name for a different reason it would be incorrectly removed every time you do an import since it would believe it was an obsolete Flashpoint list. An annoying issue, but as you implied its not a big deal to remove them manually once. I doubt they'll get rid of playlists/platforms that often.

As for the tags, they are a bit of a mess right now due to being freshly implemented and not entirely fleshed out yet. How you use the filter is somewhat explained in the description above: Games can have any number of tags, including none (though I'm not sure there are any that are like this). The way I set up the filter in my tool is that exclusions take priority, which I felt was the most intuitive.

For example, lets say a game has the tags "Sexual Content", "Action", "[Some Specific Franchise"]". If you uncheck "Sexual Content" in the filter and leave everything else selected the game will not be included. Essentially, if a single tag a game/animation has was unchecked in the filter then the game is not imported. The idea is that you may say "I don't want any games that are from the Scooby-Doo franchise" so you uncheck that under the Copyright category and expect to get no Scooby-Doo games regardless of what other tags they may have, since 99% of the time you wouldn't care.

Your use case is the same, as you simply want the adult content games gone, you don't care exactly what kind of adult content they have, what series they're from, etc. You don't need to worry about unchecking things like "Milking" (lol) to make sure they're all gone. Simply uncheck "Adult" under the warning tab and that should take care of most of them. The reason I say this is that there are a number of games that still knowingly haven't been updated to use fleshed out tags yet, and a small few here and there that were gone back over but ended up being improperly tagged. So if you want to really make sure you get like 99% of them you'll also have to uncheck the "LEGACY-Extreme" tag, though this will also cull some titles that are not sexual but simply gore heavy. If you wish to remove anything even remotely dicey then you can uncheck the entire Warning category if you'd like.

The tag names, categories, and tagging accuracy will most likely be much better by the next release of Flashpoint.

[SiriusVI]

3 minutes ago, oblivioncth said:

Ah, yea it doesn't remove those because it essentially sees them as non-Flashpoint originating playlists, since at face value it has no way of knowing if its a playlist you made or imported once it's gone from FP. I could include a list of all current and/or previous playlist names, but then there technically is still a pitfall in that if you make a playlist with the same name for a different reason it would be incorrectly removed every time you do an import since it would believe it was an obsolete Flashpoint list. An annoying issue, but as you implied its not a big deal to remove them manually once. I doubt they'll get rid of playlists/platforms that often.

As for the tags, they are a bit of a mess right now due to being freshly implemented and not entirely fleshed out yet. How you use the filter is somewhat explained in the description above: Games can have any number of tags, including none (though I'm not sure there are any that are like this). The way I set up the filter in my tool is that exclusions take priority, which I felt was the most intuitive.

For example, lets say a game has the tags "Sexual Content", "Action", "[Some Specific Franchise"]". If you uncheck "Sexual Content" in the filter and leave everything else selected the game will not be included. Essentially, if a single tag a game/animation has was unchecked in the filter then the game is not imported. The idea is that you may say "I don't want any games that are from the Scooby-Doo franchise" so you uncheck that under the Copyright category and expect to get no Scooby-Doo games regardless of what other tags they may have, since 99% of the time you wouldn't care.

Your use case is the same, as you simply want the adult content games gone, you don't care exactly what kind of adult content they have, what series they're from, etc. You don't need to worry about unchecking things like "Milking" (lol) to make sure they're all gone. Simply uncheck "Adult" under the warning tab and that should take care of most of them. The reason I say this is that there are a number of games that still knowingly haven't been updated to use fleshed out tags yet, and a small few here and there that were gone back over but ended up being improperly tagged. So if you want to really make sure you get like 99% of them you'll also have to uncheck the "LEGACY-Extreme" tag, though this will also cull some titles that are not sexual but simply gore heavy. If you wish to remove anything even remotely dicey then you can uncheck the entire Warning category if you'd like.

The tag names, categories, and tagging accuracy will most likely be much better by the next release of Flashpoint.

That's all I needed to know. I'm in favor of your method of excluding titles by having the excluded tag taking priority. This makes  a lot of sense. I think I'll be fine with excluding the "Adult" tag. Man... this collections seems to include some seriously f***ed up content right there. Wouldn't want any of that popping up showcasing my LaunchBox setup to friends. Try talking yourself out of that one, haha.

[oblivioncth]

2 hours ago, SiriusVI said:

That's all I needed to know. I'm in favor of your method of excluding titles by having the excluded tag taking priority. This makes  a lot of sense. I think I'll be fine with excluding the "Adult" tag. Man... this collections seems to include some seriously f***ed up content right there. Wouldn't want any of that popping up showcasing my LaunchBox setup to friends. Try talking yourself out of that one, haha.

Haha, I'm a *sort-of* fan of some of the more "extraordinary" as I've always had a bit of what I can only define as an absurdity fetish (not-sexually, just in terms of interest in general) as I find the sheer fact that some of that stuff exists is hilarious. Like... someone went that hardcore making something this crude? Idk it just always made me laugh. But outside of my friends that feel the same... yea that would be awkward as hell.

[SiriusVI]

21 hours ago, oblivioncth said:

Haha, I'm a *sort-of* fan of some of the more "extraordinary" as I've always had a bit of what I can only define as an absurdity fetish (not-sexually, just in terms of interest in general) as I find the sheer fact that some of that stuff exists is hilarious. Like... someone went that hardcore making something this crude? Idk it just always made me laugh. But outside of my friends that feel the same... yea that would be awkward as hell.

Yeah, well I'm a fan of weird stuff, too. And I get what you mean. The fact that someone spend time to think about and make some of this stuff is just mind-boggling. What goes through someone's head when designing this?!

[-McFly-]

is anyone else seeing this error? both lb and fp folders are correct, it seems to be having an issue writing to the data folder. what have i done wrong?

[oblivioncth]

49 minutes ago, Mcfly 2019 said:

is anyone else seeing this error? both lb and fp folders are correct, it seems to be having an issue writing to the data folder. what have i done wrong?

Are you doing an update or is this a brand new import?

If you can send me a zip of your LaunchBox data directory as it is now, even after the import failure, along with a screenshot with the importer configured with the exact settings you used.

Also it will help if you can confirm the version of the tool and Flashpoint.

[-McFly-]

3 hours ago, oblivioncth said:

Are you doing an update or is this a brand new import?

If you can send me a zip of your LaunchBox data directory as it is now, even after the import failure, along with a screenshot with the importer configured with the exact settings you used.

Also it will help if you can confirm the version of the tool and Flashpoint.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

This is a brand new import. I'm going to try this on another computer to see if that helps, the one I'm using now is showing some other errors I need to look at. If it still fails, I'll upload the info you need.

 

Thanks!

[-McFly-]

11 hours ago, oblivioncth said:

Are you doing an update or is this a brand new import?

If you can send me a zip of your LaunchBox data directory as it is now, even after the import failure, along with a screenshot with the importer configured with the exact settings you used.

Also it will help if you can confirm the version of the tool and Flashpoint.

I've figured it out. I ran the importer with a handful of games to test, it worked fine. When I moved all the files from the 'Ultimate' download into place, I moved the old .xml and .obk files created by the test elsewhere, thinking they would start fresh. When I moved them back, it all worked as stated, updating them with the new games. User error!

When I ran Launchbox.exe, it gave me a 'Metadata' error so I re-installed Launchbox and I had to make sure I could still access the Metadata/Temp folder. After that it worked perfectly.

Thanks for this tool, you've saved me a LOT of time!!   ?

[oblivioncth]

I'm glad you figured it out, though I'm slightly confused by the exact order of events (just trying to make sure my tool isn't somehow responsible).

Are you saying you did an initial test with the importer with only a small selection, removed the modified files, and then tried to import again with the whole thing and it failed? Then it worked again after you moved the files created by the test back?

Just trying to ascertain the steps you took.

[-McFly-]

6 hours ago, oblivioncth said:

I'm glad you figured it out, though I'm slightly confused by the exact order of events (just trying to make sure my tool isn't somehow responsible).

Are you saying you did an initial test with the importer with only a small selection, removed the modified files, and then tried to import again with the whole thing and it failed? Then it worked again after you moved the files created by the test back?

Just trying to ascertain the steps you took.

Yes, that's the order of events. This may or not be relevant, but the initial small test was done on another computer - my drives are all external,

[SiriusVI]

Hey @oblivioncth, I get this weird error and Launchbox crashes when I click on the "Flash" platform and on any random game:

Any Idea what this is?

 

 

 

EDIT: Did some testing: This happens with a new Launchbox install as well, so it's not due to my configuration. This didn't happen with Flashpoint 10.0. It happens with the new Version 10.1.

I did get a warning before importing Flashpoint, but I doubt it has anything to do with it (besides, I think the warning is wrong, because I redownloaded the whole Flashpoint 10.1 collection from their homepage, so I'm 100% sure I have 10.1)

 

I think the path might be too long (even though I disabled path length limitation in Windows). The folder names are caused by the regions of the games I believe. A fix might be to disable populating the Flashpoints region metadata in Launchbox.

 

EDIT 2: I'm now fairly certain that the Path Length is the problem. I don't know why this is happening, since I've enabled long paths in Windows 11, but somehow the path length is still restricted:

 

Anyway, I can't be the only one with this problem. And having folders like this "en; es; zh; fr; nl; ko; ru; pl; de; pt; it; da; ja; tr" and longer is kind of pointless in my opinion.

Does anyone know how to fix this issue?

Edited December 24, 2021 by SiriusVI

[oblivioncth]

On 12/23/2021 at 12:27 PM, SiriusVI said:

Hey @oblivioncth, I get this weird error and Launchbox crashes when I click on the "Flash" platform and on any random game:

Any Idea what this is?

 

 

 

EDIT: Did some testing: This happens with a new Launchbox install as well, so it's not due to my configuration. This didn't happen with Flashpoint 10.0. It happens with the new Version 10.1.

I did get a warning before importing Flashpoint, but I doubt it has anything to do with it (besides, I think the warning is wrong, because I redownloaded the whole Flashpoint 10.1 collection from their homepage, so I'm 100% sure I have 10.1)

 

I think the path might be too long (even though I disabled path length limitation in Windows). The folder names are caused by the regions of the games I believe. A fix might be to disable populating the Flashpoints region metadata in Launchbox.

 

EDIT 2: I'm now fairly certain that the Path Length is the problem. I don't know why this is happening, since I've enabled long paths in Windows 11, but somehow the path length is still restricted:

 

Anyway, I can't be the only one with this problem. And having folders like this "en; es; zh; fr; nl; ko; ru; pl; de; pt; it; da; ja; tr" and longer is kind of pointless in my opinion.

Does anyone know how to fix this issue?

I sort of knew this already when you posted, but wanted to do some preliminary investigation just to make sure I wasn't being dumb, but the root of the issue is that one (or more) games in 10.1 have a ridiculously long Language field (which becomes Region for LB) and for whatever reason LB feels the need to create sub-folders in the Image directory that cover all regions you have games for within a given platform, even if there are no images that need to go in those sub-folders yet. The tool doesn't use those folders at all, they get generated on start of LB after an import, which then causes this path length issue. 

Ultimately it would be nice for Jason to enable long-path support with LB, though since it requires enabling a specific setting within Windows for the end-user it isn't the most user friendly anyway. As far as I can tell there is no way to disable this behavior, and even if you could it would probably be global and not per-platform.

Since the languages a game covers isn't the most critical information, I will likely just set an arbitrary limit to how long the Region field can be and truncate it at that point. That or do something else with the original language field.

I prefer to leave as much metadata untouched as possible since that's more proper, but obviously I can't just leave it as is.

[C-Beats]

All the games are global and don't really have a valid region value. You could simply import the Language information into a Custom Field and then wouldn't lose metadata and it wouldn't cause issues by being pushed into the Region field.

[SiriusVI]

36 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

All the games are global and don't really have a valid region value. You could simply import the Language information into a Custom Field and then wouldn't lose metadata and it wouldn't cause issues by being pushed into the Region field.

This does actually sound like a great solution!

[oblivioncth]

54 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

All the games are global and don't really have a valid region value. You could simply import the Language information into a Custom Field and then wouldn't lose metadata and it wouldn't cause issues by being pushed into the Region field.

This is my ideal plan, but it's a tad annoying because if I remember correctly Custom Fields are stored in a separate file and are not part of the platform XML itself. In the end it's not a huge deal but it does require a little more work, though I glanced at using them before and thought I remembered another reason I decided to avoid using them, which is why I was mentioning just truncating the field. 

Either way I'll check them first before resorting to just cutting the field off.

[SiriusVI]

On 12/30/2021 at 5:47 PM, oblivioncth said:

This is my ideal plan, but it's a tad annoying because if I remember correctly Custom Fields are stored in a separate file and are not part of the platform XML itself. In the end it's not a huge deal but it does require a little more work, though I glanced at using them before and thought I remembered another reason I decided to avoid using them, which is why I was mentioning just truncating the field. 

Either way I'll check them first before resorting to just cutting the field off.

Well,

you could have the language field display like this for more than one language:

en, et.al. 

or if you want to leave more languages in:

en; fr; sp, et.al. 

 

You could stell leave the complete region info in the custom fields.