13.2 Beta Thread

[spycat]

Just curious if there's any plan for LaunchBox to officially add an option to display platform clear logos in the left sidebar as an alternative to the existing one of platform names with or without the little platform icons?
 

[fraganator]

On 2/14/2023 at 3:50 AM, faeran said:

Beta 2 is out with the following:

• Fixed: Platform Icons should now scale more elegantly for users with custom DPI settings

Looks good here, thanks.

Will there be plugin access to the RetroAchievementsHash and RetroAchievementsId properties in IGame?

Is there an option to disable auto hashing of games when selected in LaunchBox, where they haven't previously been hashed? For platforms (especially disc based ones) where ROMs are in 7z format, every selection begins extracting it to the Metadata\Temp folder. If many different (or the same) games are selected in quick succession, multiple instances of 7z.exe are spawned, using up CPU and slowing LB down:

Also if LaunchBox is closed / killed while these spawned 7z.exe instances are running, they aren't aborted when they probably should be.

[Retrofrogg]

9 hours ago, spycat said:

Just curious if there's any plan for LaunchBox to officially add an option to display platform clear logos in the left sidebar as an alternative to the existing one of platform names with or without the little platform icons?
 

I don't think so,  but you could vote for this as a feature request.

[C-Beats]

13 hours ago, moudrost said:

When LaunchBox scans a platform, does it only scan the 1 game or does it scan all the alternate apps as well? I'm about a day into scanning PS2 now and am having a feeling it is scanning ALL and not just the top level game. If it is the latter, I think I might just abandon at this point. If I have to extract 11,000 7-zip archives I give up. If it is the former maybe I'm close? I don't recall how many games LaunchBox makes out of the 11K but it is a lot less. Any clarification on this would be helpful.

Only the games application path is scanned, we do not hash alternative apps at this time.

[C-Beats]

6 hours ago, fraganator said:

Will there be plugin access to the RetroAchievementsHash and RetroAchievementsId properties in IGame?

I don't have any plans on making those available to the interface as I'm not sure I see the point, but I could be convinced otherwise if you have a use case that makes sense.

[moudrost]

Thanks @C-Beats it finished overnight at some point.

Just a small observation to pass along. I had recently completed creating playlists of games that support RetroAchievements. That involved overriding many games original default to one that specifically would work with that. I had used a full set and ignored all the hack and subsets that are required which most users probably aren't going to have. I tested a clean import of NES against one I had customized and the scan is missing around 100 games. It might be worth considering scanning the alternate apps at some point to indicate which one supports the achievements to avoid confusion. I have looked at a handful of other platforms and it is a pretty similar miss rate. This works pretty good, but there are so many popular games where only one specific version out of 20 that are compatible. Regardless, I would have loved to have this just 1 month ago considering it would have saved me days worth of work.

[C-Beats]

17 minutes ago, moudrost said:

Thanks @C-Beats it finished overnight at some point.

Just a small observation to pass along. I had recently completed creating playlists of games that support RetroAchievements. That involved overriding many games original default to one that specifically would work with that. I had used a full set and ignored all the hack and subsets that are required which most users probably aren't going to have. I tested a clean import of NES against one I had customized and the scan is missing around 100 games. It might be worth considering scanning the alternate apps at some point to indicate which one supports the achievements to avoid confusion. I have looked at a handful of other platforms and it is a pretty similar miss rate. This works pretty good, but there are so many popular games where only one specific version out of 20 that are compatible. Regardless, I would have loved to have this just 1 month ago considering it would have saved me days worth of work.

I think we'd need to find a good way to tell the user, "Hey the achievements we found for this are on THIS app only". We'd also have to address the possibility that people have apps with different RetroAchievement IDs and we'd have to have a way to address that as well

[moudrost]

5 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

I think we'd need to find a good way to tell the user, "Hey the achievements we found for this are on THIS app only". We'd also have to address the possibility that people have apps with different RetroAchievement IDs and we'd have to have a way to address that as well

Personally I would he happy with the achievement icon sitting next to the other version in the sub menu. There would at least be some visibility that though one version doesn't, this one does.

Maybe two versions of your trophy icon. One that indicates the game selected is compatible and another that indicates a version is compatible would be helpful here as well.

[xevious1974]

6 hours ago, C-Beats said:

Only the games application path is scanned, we do not hash alternative apps at this time.

I am a total noob, I know. But this means that only the first game is hashed and not the other versions?

Usually RA uses USA and JAP versions.

I am italian and I have prioritized EUR version...sigh

If I choose "USA first" it'll change all or I have to import again all the roms?

[xevious1974]

4 hours ago, moudrost said:

Personally I would he happy with the achievement icon sitting next to the other version in the sub menu. There would at least be some visibility that though one version doesn't, this one does.

Maybe two versions of your trophy icon. One that indicates the game selected is compatible and another that indicates a version is compatible would be helpful here as well.

be able to choose to prioritize RA version?

-RA version

-EUR

-USA 

-JAPAN

for example

 

[fraganator]

12 hours ago, C-Beats said:

I don't have any plans on making those available to the interface as I'm not sure I see the point, but I could be convinced otherwise if you have a use case that makes sense.

There was mention earlier in the thread of a plugin idea for checking hash results and missing titles, which might be expanded to a more general purpose RA auditing tool. For example being able to clear hashes and have LB rescan (due to updated ROM set, RA hashing fixes, etc).

It might be a useful feature to add to my own caching plugin, so on extraction of 7z files it could calculate and populate the hash during the caching step if it hadn't already been hashed.

Also the RetroAchievements Badge plugin would probably benefit from being able to access the hash / id, so could display a badge if those properties have been set.

(Edit: I see the beta includes RA badges, so this might be kinda moot)

I'll admit I haven't really used RetroAchievements until this beta release, but so far it's kinda cool. There's probably other cases where having plugin access to the RA properties might be useful. That said, I understand if those properties aren't something that should be exposed.

Edited February 16, 2023 by fraganator

[Cineaste]

The switch from Origin to EA App is welcomed, but importing Battlefield 2042 sets an unrelated application path pointing to an xml file:

Quote

E:\Games\EA Desktop\Games\Battlefield 2042\__Installer\installerdata.xml

 

[C-Beats]

10 hours ago, Thornback said:

The switch from Origin to EA App is welcomed, but importing Battlefield 2042 sets an unrelated application path pointing to an xml file:

Is the game installed or no?

[Cineaste]

5 hours ago, C-Beats said:

Is the game installed or no?

It is indeed. I can launch the game just fine within EA App. Although I did rename it from Battlefield 2042 Gold Edition to Battlefield 2042 in Launchbox after import.

Edited February 16, 2023 by Thornback

[C-Beats]

1 minute ago, Thornback said:

It is indeed. I can launch the game just fine within EA App.

Can you PM your platform.xml so I can review?

[Cineaste]

14 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

Can you PM your platform.xml so I can review?

PM sent. Note this is from Launchbox/Data. There is a similar file in Launchbox/Metadata if you need?

[C-Beats]

8 minutes ago, Thornback said:

PM sent. Note this is from Launchbox/Data. There is a similar file in Launchbox/Metadata if you need?

Nope, just from the data folder

[faeran]

Beta 3 is out with the following:

• 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

[Ultra God Azgorath]

Hey guys. So after testing beta 3, I've found 1 thing that may require some attention.

Most RA platforms don't have the Achievements option showing in filters in LB. I have scanned all the cartridge-based platforms' roms for achievements. The only platforms that do show it are Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The rest don't show it. I haven't tested the CD-based RA platforms yet but will test that soon. The "All" platform also shows it too.

 

[C-Beats]

42 minutes ago, Azgorath said:

Hey guys. So after testing beta 3, I've found 1 thing that may require some attention.

Most RA platforms don't have the Achievements option showing in filters in LB. I have scanned all the cartridge-based platforms' roms for achievements. The only platforms that do show it are Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The rest don't show it. I haven't tested the CD-based RA platforms yet but will test that soon. The "All" platform also shows it too.

Do you have any games in that selection that DON'T have achievements? The quick filter will only appear if SOME games have achievements and others don't. If all games DON'T have them, or all games DO the filter doesn't appear.