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Hello, I am sharing a personal project of mine as I think others may also find it beneficial. Its not quite finished, but its already pretty feature packed and would love to hear feedback!  Download link at the bottom

What Is This?

Video Walkthrough! (Sorry my voice is a bit quiet!)

Boxor is a tool to rapidly generate Art (Box Art, Disc Art, Marquee, etc) for your gaming library - designed specifically wtih LaunchBox in mind. With Boxor you can take existing art (such as an empty Game Box template), tell it to use your Clear Logos that LaunchBox already knows about, or Metadata such as Ratings, Title, and Publisher, and have it spit out dozens or thousands of matching art pieces easily and rapidly.
 

What Does It Do?

Features
- LaunchBox mode - Generate a Platforms worth of media all at the click of a button. You can also filter by "Missing Media" to only make box art for games your missing box art, for example.
- Use your existing art stored in LaunchBox to put in existing media
- Use Text and LaunchBox's existing Metadata to write on each image the games Title, Rating, Publisher, and more
- Live Preview - see what it will look like based on a randomly chosen game from that Platform - with that games art and text.
- Single File mode - simply load in a Base image, some Children images and text (think of them as stickers if that helps!), and produce a combined image
- More coming soon!

Examples

As an example use case and one of the reasons I wrote Boxor - I hate seeing missing Art in LaunchBox, and I am personally missing 55 Disc images for my PS3 collection - using this I told it to use my existing Clear Logos, and two text fields (Rating and Publisher) - and had it quickly generate 55 images- 1 per game. I've provided two quick example below. I'm not a graphic designer, but I'm sure it helps give a better idea.
I've designed it so people without any graphical talent - aka ME! - can quickly produce Art even with minimal talent. Its not a full blown image editor like Photoshop, but its not designed to be. I tried to keep it as simple and straight forward as possible.

Whats Next?

Right now I'm missing a few features before I consider it finished:
- File List Mode - after generating a set of images, Boxor also generates a text file. My goal is being able to read that text file in to re-generate art you already created in case your not happy with the results.
- Select a Game - right now you can Preview with a random game, but I'll be adding a way to select an individual game (and optionally generate art only for that image)
- Bug Fixes

Support

Although its not finished, I feel it already is useful in its current state. Feedback would be greatly appreciated below. Once I implement the above features I'll post in the Release topic with the finalized version. Eventually I might consider adding additional features if people are interested - such as 3D Box art.

This app is 100% free, but if you enjoy using this, a small donation to keep me going on this would be greatly appreciated and helpful - I have links in the app itself.

Thank you.

Terence

Download and Change Log

Not sure how multiple file uploads work, but want to make sure 1.0 is still available as it seems pretty stable.  So uploaded them here.  Leaving the original attachment here as well

1.0 Release [Stable] https://www.patreon.com/posts/boxor-1-0-73526980

1.1 Release [Experimental] https://www.patreon.com/posts/boxor-1-1-73527117

- Added a drop down to select the exact game you wish to preview when in LaunchBox mode

- Can now save an individual image instead of an entire platform collection with a new save button (bottom right corner)

- Can move layers "up and down"

- Improved positioning and width/height handling of image layers

- Added Warning when using custom fonts

- Editing an image layer, then cancelling, won't blank out the active image layer

- Lots of additional Bug Fixes

- Some new Bugs (probably anyways..)

LEGO Star Wars The Complete Saga.png

Pain.png

Boxor-150.zip

Edited by Reapman
added 1.1
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Hi Reapman I want to thank you for the fantastic tool you have created, it is really very useful
 
I would like to ask you a question. When adding text, there is a menu that allows you to choose between several fonts, but no matter which one you choose, it always shows the same font.  Is there a way to make it possible to choose another font?
 
I hope I was clear. Excuse my English.
 
Thank you very much
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Hmm that is strange.  It works on my end:

image.png.84decca67b050e8c24dfd4fd83300649.png

You should see "Enter your text here!" or "{GameTitle}" or something like that with the font you picked.

Can I ask you to tell me the following information:

- Is your system set to a language other than English

- What mode select are you using (top left menu)

- What font are you trying to change to?

 

This will help me reproduce the problem so I can fix it, thank you!

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Thank you very much for answering. I am using launchbbox mode

For example, I want to create missing boxes for Nintendo Game boy. I select Nintendo Gameboy and then Missing Box Front

In the screenshot you can see what I mention

image.thumb.png.e382c8caf89fdde710f3725dc14f3158.png
The font I choose is Lazenby Computer Liquid and I choose "Title" so that it generates the titles of the games. In the sample box it is observed that the font is applied but not in the Preview that is shown as a kind of Arial

My system is in Spanish

even choosing a different font (in this case, Astron Boy) the result is the same

image.thumb.png.fdb57a2d51556cd6ee8b9c1c23f19bda.png
I hope it helps

And thank you very much again

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Interesting.... Thank you for the information!  I'll do some investigating on my end and see what I can figure out.  Might take a couple of days.

If you can try generating a single image I'd be curious if the font looks ok in the "final" file or not, but either way that needs to be fixed.

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Ok I think I found the issue, because it is a custom font you need to install it for "All users" - below are some instructions for English on Windows 11 if that helps

I'd recommend first deleting the font (if you click Start, type "Fonts", then go to the font and right click / choose Delete)

Then follow the instructions here for Installing the Font and ensure you do the "All users" option:

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-fonts-on-windows-11


I got that custom font working by following those steps, let me know if it helps.  When done, if you are viewing the Font Properties it should show C:\Windows\Fonts instead of C:\[username]\AppData...\Fonts

 

I'll see about putting a warning in the app for that

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This is brilliant,  I'm suprised there isnt more interest in this as your making it so easy to create missing art with it.

+1 on the 3D box art for me that you said you may add. That would be a godsend for me as i use Unified refried and thats the main feature of it, so at present i am manually making them in photoshop (and trying to create all the Euro boxes for things like the Game Gear) which is taking a while lol.   I think that would be a big job though as the 3D boxes vary quite considerably from platform to platform so the perspective/distortion of the spines especaily would be a challenge.

A little feedback as well, if you dont mind.   At the minute the layers are in the order you first select them so maybe a option to order them ourselves so none get hidden behind each other and add a plus and minus sign next to each adjustment so you can fine tune it instead of typing it in each time.  Other than that, fantastic work 👍

PS.  Here are some of the differences i was taking about with 3D boxart spines.

 2012994611_MortalKombatII-01.thumb.png.2128ef62e980ee363efa9917209d9c72.png  1846283146_TheTypingoftheDead_Overkill-01.thumb.png.431f7abb959b3b93acbfce96c160f93b.png  2107574337_DragonsLair(USA).png.f25b44142e699f79625ef4b2f3b62e0d.png  841121544_NBAJam-01.thumb.png.cec4c57465323de7d30b36acf07d4528.png

Edit: Scrap that -/+ idea i just realised you can click on the circle and use the arrow keys to fine tune 🤦‍♂️

Edited by PaulyC
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Thank you for the kinds words and ideas.  The 3D would be nice - it would then allow me to complete my collection and have every type of image available which would please me greatly.. but the effort to do... like you said it varies a lot, and getting the angles right and easy to work with would be extremely tricky.

I might still consider it, I've taken a break from development as of late for a few personal reasons but have been feeling compelled to get back into it, so might try doing a small release of this, but 3D.. well.. no promises I'm afraid. :(

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On 10/10/2022 at 6:18 AM, Reapman said:

Thank you for the kinds words and ideas.  The 3D would be nice - it would then allow me to complete my collection and have every type of image available which would please me greatly.. but the effort to do... like you said it varies a lot, and getting the angles right and easy to work with would be extremely tricky.

I might still consider it, I've taken a break from development as of late for a few personal reasons but have been feeling compelled to get back into it, so might try doing a small release of this, but 3D.. well.. no promises I'm afraid. :(

Theres no rush on anything, just get yourself right and get back to it when your ready 👍

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On 10/7/2022 at 8:02 PM, Reapman said:

Ok I think I found the issue, because it is a custom font you need to install it for "All users" - below are some instructions for English on Windows 11 if that helps

I'd recommend first deleting the font (if you click Start, type "Fonts", then go to the font and right click / choose Delete)

Then follow the instructions here for Installing the Font and ensure you do the "All users" option:

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-fonts-on-windows-11


I got that custom font working by following those steps, let me know if it helps.  When done, if you are viewing the Font Properties it should show C:\Windows\Fonts instead of C:\[username]\AppData...\Fonts

 

I'll see about putting a warning in the app for that

Thank you a lot. That was the solution. Thank you very much

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Just a heads up, updated the post with version 1.1 - consider it experimental (1.0 is stable)

1.1 Update

- Added a drop down to select the exact game you wish to preview when in LaunchBox mode

- Can now save individual images instead of an entire platform collection with a new save button (bottom right corner)

- Can move layers "up and down" (idea thanks to PaulyC!)

- Improved positioning and width/height handling of image layers

- Added Warning when using custom fonts

- Editing an image layer, then cancelling, won't blank out the active image layer

- Lots of additional Bug Fixes

- Some new Bugs (probably anyways..)

Edited by Reapman
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