Jump to content
LaunchBox Community Forums

13.2 Beta Thread


faeran

Recommended Posts

Hi everyone,

LaunchBox 13.2 beta 1 is out now with the following changes:

  • New Feature: RetroAchievements now supports On-the-fly filters, auto-populate playlists, and badges (scanning and hashing your games is mandatory for this functionality to work)
  • New Feature: RetroAchievements scanning option has been added to the Tools menu, and the RetroAchievements integrations section under the LaunchBox options
  • New Feature: Icons in the side bar are now supported (#3 in the 2022 Community Poll). Over 240 brand new, default icons have been commissioned and are instantly usable on the side bar in the default theme (An option to toggle the icons is available under View > Show / Hide > Side Bar Icons). Premium users can customize these icons to their liking by adding their own images to the folder: LaunchBox\Images\Platform Icons
  • Improvement: The hash value of your ROM is now used to determine whether a game supports RetroAchievements functionality
  • Improvement: Box - Spine image type is now available in the Audit window
  • Fixed: Box - Flip functionality when 3D Models are turned off in Big Box
  • Fixed: Rare occurrences where Steam games were mixing achievements from multiple games
  • Fixed: Big Box clock not updating its value in some views for some users
  • Fixed: Multiple instances of MAME opening when caused by the emulator's default running script.

 

Beta 2:

  • Improvement: Origin import has been replaced with an EA import and now works with the new EA App
  • Fixed: RetroAchievement game matching caused by hash casing
  • Fixed: In the Add/Edit Playlist window, pressing the Games tab, in certain situations, would take a considerable time to load the games in an auto-populate playlist
  • Fixed: Some Platform Icons with special symbols were not being named properly by the startup script
  • Fixed: Platform Icons should now scale more elegantly for users with custom DPI settings

 

Beta 3:

  • New Feature: Steam and GOG achievements now support on-the-fly filters, auto-populate playlists, and badges (scanning your games is mandatory for this functionality to work)
  • Improvement: Achievement scanning will now scan for Steam and GOG achievement information
  • Improvement: Steam's last played date and achievement availability info now updates on LaunchBox startup
  • Improvement: LaunchBox now downloads your play time and last played date information for GOG games
  • Improvement: Icon scaling as been tweaked to help with certain scaling percentages and custom themes
  • Fixed: Custom named platforms would not get placed in Platform Categories if missing a Scrape As value

 

Beta 4:

  • Improvement: GOG's play time, last played, and badge information are now updated during startup
  • Fixed: A game containing multiple executables should now import properly using the EA import
  • Fixed: Potential LaunchBox image grid loading issues in certain rare situations

 

Beta 5:

  • Fixed: Rare error when right clicking a GOG imported game
  • Fixed: Image Grid freezing (introduced in beta 4)
  • Translations added

 

If you are testing, there's a few things to note about the above.

RetroAchievements work the same as they did the past. You select a game and it displays your RetroAchievement information. However, it now scans your game file, instead of trying to match your game title, to determine whether it's compatible for earning achievements. The new RetroAchievement features, including badges, on-the-fly filters, and auto-populate playlists will require a one-time scan of your library to work. This scan does take a while to complete for your entire library. The platforms you have, the format they are in, and whether they are compressed or not, can greatly affect the time it takes for the scan to complete (for example, it will take much longer if your files are 7zipped).

The platform icon feature will work for the Default theme. Custom themes will require an update by the author, and users will need to download new versions of the theme.

For theme devs, here's a post with instructions on how to update your theme to support them:

 

  • Like 9
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Your philps one has a + in your platform that doesnt match the image, cant see why the 3DO isnt showing though.

 

List view helped see the problem. There is a space in front of the name. The messed up part is I can't rename it because it says the file already exists but I don't see it.

image.png.67a7618b3002e8f45b0b3ffc118a9d37.png

image.thumb.png.93e6e1902efbe4e3a7739a7ddfb6ed26.png

When I copied the file to another directory the space was already gone. I deleted the original and copied it back. When I removed the trailing space from Philips Videopac, it created a new version without the space. I deleted the other file and added the + in and both work fine now. Something screwy happened for sure. Both platforms have images now.

When I closed out of LB and opened it again, it rebuilt both of the messed up versions.

image.thumb.png.3b0a3e9e96898516e12cc09c23d7ae46.png

image.thumb.png.b9e4758b834ced95c39c0f123207737f.png

Edited by moudrost
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There looks to be a bug with the on-the-fly hashing, where one game will begin extracting multiple times. In my case I have a PS2 game in 7z format. If it hasn't previously been hashed and I select it in the LB interface, a background process is started which extracts it to Metadata\Temp\{GUID}. If I quickly select a different game, and select the same PS2 game again (while the first extraction is still going), LB will begin another hashing process, extracting the game again to another GUID folder. If this is done quickly, there can be upwards of 5 or 6 extraction processes running for the same game, which uses up a chunk of CPU.

I've found zip / 7-zip disc based games (PS1, PS2, etc) don't produce a valid hash and instead are listed as COULDNTFILEHASH in the platform xml file. Do they need to be a certain format?

In instances where the hash fails, can LB fall back to the title matching method?

Edited by fraganator
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, moudrost said:

List view helped see the problem. There is a space in front of the name. The messed up part is I can't rename it because it says the file already exists but I don't see it.

image.png.67a7618b3002e8f45b0b3ffc118a9d37.png

image.thumb.png.93e6e1902efbe4e3a7739a7ddfb6ed26.png

When I copied the file to another directory the space was already gone. I deleted the original and copied it back. When I removed the trailing space from Philips Videopac, it created a new version without the space. I deleted the other file and added the + in and both work fine now. Something screwy happened for sure. Both platforms have images now.

When I closed out of LB and opened it again, it rebuilt both of the messed up versions.

image.thumb.png.3b0a3e9e96898516e12cc09c23d7ae46.png

image.thumb.png.b9e4758b834ced95c39c0f123207737f.png

The 2 Player Games and 4 Player Games icons also have a space at the beggining. Those files gave me a sync error on Onedrive (they can't have a space at the beggining or the end of the file name).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The new sidebar platform icons are really nice - is it possible in the theme to enable pixel snapping for the icons? Depending on window size and the item row, some icons are sharp while others are blurry. For example here's the Sony PlayStation icon, with the original png on the left and how it appears in LaunchBox on the right. It'd be nice to keep them looking sharp and retain their detail.

lb-platform-icon.thumb.png.07c8918756e7ddd242a1c7befe436e8b.png

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, fraganator said:

I've found zip / 7-zip disc based games (PS1, PS2, etc) don't produce a valid hash and instead are listed as COULDNTFILEHASH in the platform xml file. Do they need to be a certain format?

Typically this is caused because the app we use from RetroAchievements fails to read the file properly. This can either be caused by an error in the app, or the file not formatted in a way the app expects. It typically has more to do with the data in the ROM than the file extension from what I've seen.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, fraganator said:

The new sidebar platform icons are really nice - is it possible in the theme to enable pixel snapping for the icons? Depending on window size and the item row, some icons are sharp while others are blurry. For example here's the Sony PlayStation icon, with the original png on the left and how it appears in LaunchBox on the right. It'd be nice to keep them looking sharp and retain their detail.

lb-platform-icon.thumb.png.07c8918756e7ddd242a1c7befe436e8b.png

I think we set scaling to high quality, I know WPF has a more linear scale for pixel art. I'll mess with some settings and see what we can to do to keep the image looking clean.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

Typically this is caused because the app we use from RetroAchievements fails to read the file properly. This can either be caused by an error in the app, or the file not formatted in a way the app expects. It typically has more to do with the data in the ROM than the file extension from what I've seen.

Thanks for the info. I found if the zip was extracted and the cue file imported to LB, the hash is calculated correctly. Similarly if the game is converted to chd and hashed, it works. Maybe the app is picking up a bin file instead of the cue file from the zip.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...