Fry Posted October 3, 2020 Share Posted October 3, 2020 I'm working on a plugin/theme for BigBox that I'm calling Eclipse. It's meant to mimic the look and feel of Netflix. It has a random game and a voice recognition feature that I'm excited to add to my cabinet. It's almost ready for release but I'm still tweaking things here and there. I thought I'd post it in case anyone is interested and I can get some feedback on any improvements that others see. One big improvement is just cleaning up the metadata. Grouping games by anything other than platform is a bit messy since there are so many similar variants in genre, series, play mode, etc... I am trying to decide if there's a programmatic solution to this via a mapping utility or if I just want to go clean up the data in my launchbox installation. 7 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MetalRaven Posted August 20, 2021 Share Posted August 20, 2021 (edited) Please finish this plug in!!! Also, will this plugin work per platform? Thanks. Edited August 20, 2021 by MetalRaven Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wallmachine Posted August 20, 2021 Share Posted August 20, 2021 (edited) Yeeeeeeah all on one view! Looks like you worked out how to display horizontal and vertical box art evenly next to each other so they don't all have to inherit a one size doesn't fit all and respects its image size when next to a different sized image. This is so awesome but I feel this type of plugin will need to be heavily maintained when updates are made to bigbox/launchbox? Edited August 20, 2021 by wallmachine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fry Posted August 21, 2021 Author Share Posted August 21, 2021 This project is always in the back of my mind but due to time constraints, I'm not sure when I'll be able to finish it up. If anyone is interested in picking up this project or just reviewing the code, it's out here: https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse It's not great, I was teaching myself .NET and WPF with this project so I'm sure there are tons of best practice violations and better ways to do things. Anyways, if people want to play around with it, I've put out an initial pre-alpha-release with installation instructions over here but please read the warnings! https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse/releases/tag/v0.0.1 Please read the warnings. This only works with LaunchBox version 11.2 and prior. It works great on my laptop and on my powerful gaming PC. I have an older desktop in my arcade cabinet and it doesn't perform so great there so your mileage may vary! I'm going to keep working on it here and there when I get time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fry Posted August 21, 2021 Author Share Posted August 21, 2021 On 8/20/2021 at 2:55 PM, MetalRaven said: will this plugin work per platform? I'm not 100% sure what you mean by work per platform. The default view does group games by platform like this: If you hit esc then you can choose other options to group games by Platform, Genre, Series, Playlist, Play mode, Developer, Publisher, and Release year. On 8/20/2021 at 5:04 PM, wallmachine said: Looks like you worked out how to display horizontal and vertical box art evenly next to each other so they don't all have to inherit a one size doesn't fit all and respects its image size when next to a different sized image. Yeah, it scales the box front images to the height of that row. I mentioned it in the release notes but this takes quite a long time on the initial load of the theme as it makes a copy of the box front images scaled to the right size so that it doesn't hurt performance, trying to scale the images on the fly while you are moving around in the theme. It's a one-time terrible cost which might put most people off of using this theme. On 8/20/2021 at 5:04 PM, wallmachine said: I feel this type of plugin will need to be heavily maintained when updates are made to bigbox/launchbox? Kind of yes and kind of no. As also mentioned in the release notes, it's not working on any version of launch box released in the last year since the update to .net core. I need to get my act together and iron out those issues so it will work on the latest version. That being said, it completely overlays and in a way replaces the default big-box functionality so any updates to LaunchBox/BigBox shouldn't really impact it in any negative way once I'm able to port it to .net core Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MetalRaven Posted August 22, 2021 Share Posted August 22, 2021 so this theme is great, its working perfectly fine. The only issues I've notice is that whenever I make a change in the options menu, all the images on my database re-scale every time. The other issue I've notice, is that "additional apps" doesn't show up when a game is selected even though if the feature is check on in the general options. I have many apps and videos on some of my games, its a shame i can't see this feature when i select those games. This is a great theme, I honestly think you have something great here. If you ever comeback to this I would love to know. This is a great add-on for bigbox. I hope someone someday can add more to this theme. Love the work that you did here, and thank you for sharing it with us. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fry Posted August 22, 2021 Author Share Posted August 22, 2021 That's great, I'm glad it's working well for you! Out of curiosity, about how many games do you have and about how long did it take to scale the images the first time opening it up? Regarding additional apps and settings in the general options, this is true. Almost none of the big box settings are honored for this plug-in because the whole thing is coded from scratch. For videos, would you be looking to launch those in an external video player? What other types of additional apps do you have? It looks like the plug-in interface does have the ability for me to just launch an additional application so I think I could list the out on the game details screen and let you select one to launch from there. You're right, there is a bit of a problem where every time you go into the big-box options and come back, it reloads the plug-in at which time all of the game lists are regenerated and the images for the lists are re-cached. I don't really have control of the fact that the plug-in is getting reloaded, that's what Big Box is doing. I do need to look into options for optimizing the loading process. I have played with it a lot and I don't have any concrete plans for it at the moment but as I get back into this project, I'm sure I can come up with something. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MetalRaven Posted August 22, 2021 Share Posted August 22, 2021 The re-scale image process take about 5 minutes the first time and I think it's mostly because my computer is about 15 yrs+ old. Believe it or not, my old pc can also run some of the newer games.. lol. I believe I could have somewhere around 300 games that r mostly from steam n some old pcs games. The videos I have on some of my old games are videos of when I used to stream (or tries :D) about 4 yrs ago. I have them mostly for my little cousins to view them if they get stuck playing some of my old games. Some games have only 1 video and some other games have 2 or 3 additional videos from other people playing those games in my old stream. I've also added old school strategy guides for some old games I've found on the internet, and these are my additional app for some of my games. I dont have that many, but im still building my library. I'm hoping to someday build my own arcade with new hardware, but for now, I'm trying to improve the software side of it. With that said, thank u again for ur wrk! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fry Posted August 22, 2021 Author Share Posted August 22, 2021 @MetalRaven, would you mind sharing your LaunchBox data folder so I can see how you have some of these additional apps configured? All of the additional apps I use are things that automatically launch in the background when a game is opened or close like xpadder, setting up key mappings for systems that require keyboard input. I'm curious how you have your additional apps setup. Is it launching an external video player application to play your videos and then pointing to the video file with a command line argument? If you wouldn't mind zipping up your data folder (I don't think there should be sensitive information in there?) and sending it to me, that'd be a huge help just so I can understand what you're doing with your additional apps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MetalRaven Posted August 22, 2021 Share Posted August 22, 2021 Yeah man, if it helps u improve this plug in. I'll submit it soon! Thanks for the help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fry Posted October 15, 2021 Author Share Posted October 15, 2021 I've released an update to the plug-in that is now supported on the latest version of launchbox. This update has several bug fixes but is otherwise pretty much the same as the 0.0.1 release that I put out a little while back. You can find it here along with instructions on how to get it installed: https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse/releases/tag/v0.0.2 Now that I've finally ironed out the issues that kept me from working on the latest version of LaunchBox, I'm hoping to add more improvements. Any feedback is welcome! 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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