Noob questions and possible bug/feature requests

[mark007]

Hi all.

I am new to Launchbox and am finding it very exciting to import all of my games and start to see them in Launchbox/Bigbox. I have paid for the lifetime launchbox and emumovies subscription. I want to start to report any issues/bugs/improvements that I notice, so can you advise what is the best way to report these. Should I report bugs in a separate thread per bug, or put them all into a large post as I build up a few. Below are the possible bugs/improvements I have come across in recent days as I import my various roms into Launchbox. I can put them into separate threads/bug reports if necessary. I am also importing some Steam/Epic games also.

Here it goes...

1)  When pressing the pause hotkey when no game is currently playing (eg by mistake or if someone not so familiar with the button layout hits it), the sound still gets muted. Is it possible to detect if there is no game in play, and not go through the pause menu logic if this is the case.

2) When in launchbox, with videos set to auto play when highlighting a game. If a game is highlighted, the video starts playing. If you choose to manually pause the video by clicking on the video, it pauses fine, and then when you focus on another application in Windows and later refocus back on Launchbox, the video unexpectedly restarts/continues playing.

3) For missing artwork, I was experimenting with changing the launchbox Media priorities and for "3D Box Priorities" I had been adding "Box - Front" and "Fanart - Box - Front" as second and third priorities by ticking their checkboxes. When hitting "OK" in the Launchbox options, the current view doesn't seem to update/refresh with the changes. It  takes a few clicks around the UI for it to eventually take effect it seems.

4) I have one Windows game from 'Epic', its "Alien: Isolation: Last Survivor". I have ran "Download Metadata and Media" and have tried to both check and uncheck "Prioritize Epic Games metadata for Epic Games". No media is getting downloaded at all either ways for this game. If I however go in and edit the game manually and click "Download Media", it finds various media from Epic, namely an "Epic Games Background" and an "Epic Games Poster" but unfortunately after I hit download, it does seem to indicate its downloading two files, but after clicking "OK" and going back into the game, it seems to have no media again. I have logged in successfully to Epic using a username/password.

5) When importing my collection of Atari 2600 games, I had alot of file renaming to do which was fine I noticed however that many Atari 2600 games have a large number of alternative names. Launchboxes database only recognized some of them. The others I had to rename to the name thats more familiar to Launchboxes database. I am happy to start contributing to the Launchbox database to add these alternative names, but before I do I wanted to check if there are anything to consider here. Or if theres some way that launchbox could import or reference these existing database for the alternative names, such as the one below for Atari. Searching for any game there, will show all of the alternatives which I thought was great.

http://www.atarimania.com/pgemainsoft.awp?type=G&system=2

I am not sure how it should be approached though in case some of the alternatives had their own artwork, but internally are the very same game.

6) Was it ever considered to use something like an md5 of the rom files themselves as a way to do database matches. This would be fantastic for many rom packs which always seem to require tens/hundreds of files to be renamed in my experience, to perfectly match. Would an md5 be something that could be considered if not already as a primary way to match roms, and fall back to filename matching as secondary if the md5 doesn't find a match.

7) Similar to above, I have reran importing metadata and media on my collection a few times as I fix filenames etc. I have noticed the metadata download takes quite a while with a relatively large game collection, even though I would assume most metadata has not changed since the last time. Is there some way that a similar md5 or 'version' could be given to each metadata object / per game, where if the version/md5 matches what is stored locally, the metadata download can be skipped for that game. This seems to be working well for images, but not so well for metadata in my experience (albeit not as high priority I would assume as there is less data).

8 ) I do some sometimes notice pop-in of art as I scroll through some games. I know there is the concept of a cache and improvements to it have been discussed in many other posts. I just don't know is there anything I can do to avoid it. Is it limited by hard drive read speeds or in any way limited by gpu/texture load speeds. This new machine I have built has one of those WD sn850 drives which at least in benchmarks/sequential read, can read 7GB per second. I am just asking nicely, if there are any further improvements that can be made to avoid the pop in effect. Things that come to mind are

a) Would pre-loading the next and previous X amount of games art into memory mean that even for a fairly quick scroller, they are already in memory. (ie don't wait for me to scoll one page further down to load them in, or one page back for that matter).

b) Would pre-loading the first page or two of art for each "Platform" or maybe "Playlist" mean that if that platform or playlist is clicked, it doesn't go through that loading/pop-in period for a few seconds.

c) If its somehow limited by the random nature of the reads, and not a sequential read bottleneck, would it in any way help if the cache that Launchbox/BigBox uses was stored in some other format that meant we are not reading hundreds/thousands of files, but perhaps just pieces of one larger/cache file. Launchbox would need to read the correct pieces of this file, but it may avoid the random nature of reading thousands of separate files/filenames? I am not sure what the benefit of the existing caching mechanism is if it is just a copy of the same files that would have to be read from disk anyways, just organized into a neater folder? Is it somehow saving on cpu times / disk reads to find the various files to load, as opposed to simply reading all files from the cache directory?

d) Would it be possible to add an option (albeit not usable by all) to try to load as many images into memory as possible. Up to a certain max value perhaps, like how in Photoshop you can set an upper bound to the memory cache. In any machine I build with 64GB of ram, if the use of a huge cache in memory would avoid the pop-in I would be happy to try/use it. Eg dedicate 32/48 GB to the in memory cache if it avoids that pop-in. I guess other less extreme options would be preferred and this might be a last resort to try to avoid it. My cache-lb at the moment is "only" 3GB and cache-bb is "only" 850MB. (EDIT: As I say this, when I start to browse through my various Platforms, I can see each time I click a platform, the cache seems to be then getting built, I can see the progress bar at the top of the LB window. Should the cache not auto build in the background for all views, again to avoid pop in.).

9) As I find some mistakes in the Launchbox DB I am trying to fix them, eg marking some 3D boxes (that are actually 3D carts) as 3D boxes. What I am wondering is if/when those launchbox db modifications are accepted by the administrators, is Launchbox able to then allow me / others to automatically 'fix' their media collection. Ie is it in some way able to recognize that the md5s for some files that are in say the "Box - 3D" folder are now in the "Cart - 3D" folder, so some sort of cleanup may need to be done to remove those originally badly marked images from the "Box - 3D" folder. I guess this would mean the entire community would benefit from fixes people are making to the various media images associated with each game over time.

10) For media downloads and the "Region Priorities", I am not 100% sure on how the logic works. If I want to minimize the amount of downloads of media, is there some way to indicate that I would like images downloaded from the selected regions, in the selected order, but NOT to download from the second/third regions, if the first region had a certain image? Or if I select many regions (to make sure I get media if its missing for the first region) do I always need to wait for media to download from those other regions? I am hoping for the smallest set of local images/media possible and to somehow keep that collection 'clean'. Any suggestions are welcome or would this require new features to keep the media collection as clean/minimal as possible.

11) When showing "3D Boxes" I had noticed a few of my games had "3D Carts" labelled as "3D Boxes" but how I noticed it was quite strange. A few of my games have two images for "3D Boxes", one good one and one bad one that was badly marked. Only when zooming a very specific points in the Launchbox UI would it switch to the second 3D Box image. Other zoom points would show the alternative image. I guess two main questions on this one.

a) What is the logic here as to what image it shows? Is it based on resolution of the images and which image would scale best to the given zoom amount?

b) Is there a way to avoid having that second / alternative image for a given image type, ie only have one "3D Box" for each game, or is it in some way beneficial to have multiple ones. Again I'm thinking of how to have the smallest disk usage possible without losing out on a nice interface.

12) When downloading media, is it sequential, ie one image at a time. I know from my web development days that (especially where a connection has a relatively high latency/ping) downloading content in parallel can really help. I'm thinking of my not so great connection which can be up to 100ms at worst, if I had to download 80,000 images (which is what I'm doing at the moment importing a new platform), If I incurred that 0.1s penalty sequentially it would add up to over 2 hours. If this is confirmed to be the case, is it worth trying to always have some media downloading to try to avoid such latency penalties. Even if it was 2 or 3 at a time, it might mean a lot of these 0.1s penalties can be avoided.

Thank you,

Mark

Edited June 17, 2021 by mark007

[C-Beats]

To report a bug use the Help & Support link at the top of the page and press "Report a Bug". In the same way the same link has a "Request a Feature" link if that is what you want to do. When reporting bugs or features it helps to have one ticket per bug/feature. It helps quite a bit in regard to tracking/voting.

Now to attempt to tackle some of the rest of the post:

1) I'm unsure if this is "working as intended" or not as I've not yet delved into that process. Would report as bug so we can verify and fix if not.
2) This to my knowledge is "working as intended" though I can see the confusion. I'd report this under "Request a feature" and we can see how many people would be interested in that change
3) It SHOULD do this automatically but it does take time for the image cache to build which may be the cause of what you see. You can force items to recache by selecting them and pressing F5 as well (inside of LaunchBox)
4) Not real sure of the top of my head what would cause this. May help to turn on debug logging and see if there any reported errors in the logs causing this
5) I'll defer this one to another member of the community as I am not as well versed in the intricacies of the DB data points
6) This would take far more time and resources to not only track but to match the file and there are SEVERAL different hashes for the same game via ROMs and so it was decided from the start to utilize filename instead
7) We do some checking for image file hash during the download process but it is to vet out whether you already have the file or not. Once in the LaunchBox app you would manually have to reassign any image type information. If you want to overwrite any metadata there is an overwrite functionality in the tool that would do that for you (this will update ALL fields we have information on so if you make a lot of changes be careful with this option)
8) A lot of what you are referring to this post is already built in. If using Big Box when you see this you can help this by force populating all image cache images so that your computer doesn't first have to read the full sized image AND save the scaled image to file before reading the file and using it.
9) There is currently no way to accomplish this, you could request it as a feature though
10) Region priority is used during the import process primarily. When importing multiple region specific roms for the same game LB will prioritize games in that region priority. Region specific images for games should be downloading the region the game has set in it (if it has one)
11) If you have multiple images of the same image type one is picked randomly. If the image is a cached image this random pick ONLY happens when a cache image needs to be generated, after that it will continue to use the cached image
12) All media download (where the provider makes it possible) is downloaded in a multi-threaded manner to help eliminate things like this

[mark007]

Thanks very much for your detailed replies. Some replies below.

 

1) Logged as https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/6139/hotkey-for-activating-pause-menu-mutes
2) Logged as https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/6140/request-option-to-not-resume-videos-in
3) Logged as https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/6141/changing-media-priorities-does-not-take

4) Perfect. I'll turn on debug logging later and reproduce.

5) Cool I'll see does anyone have any comments on this one.

6) Understood.

7) Logged as part of feature request for 9 as https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/6143/feature-request-to-sync-users-library-of

8 ) OK thanks. I'll have a think about this one. I guess from reading other posts, there are a lot of answers relating to manually refreshing a cache, manually populating a cache etc. In my opinion there could be some improvement or extra options that might negate the need for the user to ever need to do this I guess. I guess its some sort of feature request, that might be summarized as adding new options to negate the need for the user to refresh caches/rebuild caches (eg rebuild cache when x y z happens, refresh images when a b c happens).

9) Logged as https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/6143/feature-request-to-sync-users-library-of

10) Understood.

11) I'll experiment with this again. It feels like the random behavior may be whats causing confusion for me as zooming in/out was showing different images for the carts. I could dig further into this or do you think its a simple suggestion to add a feature to disable the random selection, to instead always choose the first one?

12) Understood.

Edited June 18, 2021 by mark007

[C-Beats]

In regard to 11, there is this ticket

[mark007]

Ahh excellent, many thanks.

[Hifihedgehog]

14 hours ago, mark007 said:

1) Logged as https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/6139/hotkey-for-activating-pause-menu-mutes

I will add that I have also experienced this, but I never was sure if this was a feature or a bug. This has occurred on all my LaunchBox builds since the beginning.

Edited June 18, 2021 by Hifihedgehog