Box Spines for horizontal box fronts

[Ritchardo]

Hi guys,

I've been uploading a lot of box spines of late for the Amstrad CPC and I've had a spurt of rejections for box spines that are 'upside down' and the wrong alignment because it "Won't work with the DB" - fact is, they're not and it will!

 

Particularly with the old 8-bit home computers you would occasionally have games released with a horizontal rather than vertical box front alignment.  The way Launchbox is coded, it will automatically detect if the box spine runs vertically or horizontally and it will add the spine accordingly to the 3D image.  For most systems (and most games), this will add a vertical spine on the left and right sides of the 3D box.

 

However, if the spine is running horizontally, it will add the spine to the top and bottom of the 3D image.

 

Therefore, for the box to look the way it did 'back in the day' the box spine has to be in the database as a horizontal spine rather than a vertical one.  Lots of times this will also mean that it is 'upside down' so that the text reads correctly when flipping the box around.

 

Before rejecting spines on the basis that it's the wrong way round etc, have a look at the game box front and ask yourself if it makes sense that the spine is running in that direction.

 

I will attempt to add more detail to the reasons for upload box to try and reduce the risk of this in future (and probably should've done so in the first place as it does look odd particularly if you've no experience of these systems) but this is more of a general information piece in case anyone reading didn't know.

 

 

 

[viritys]

Thanks for this and thanks for adding the explanation. I've been accepting your entries today and I think the first one was where you replaced an existing vertical spine with an upside-down horizontal one, so I was confused and had to look into it. Thanks to your reason, I got it. BTW you might want to add a link to this post to your reason as there's only so much you can write on it. As spines are relatively new addition, they're being populated quite heavily and I've been moderating spines horizontally, vertically, the right way & upside down. I'm sure a lot of these will get rejected or approved for all the wrong reasons. I'm not even blaming the lazy moderators as "it depends" is slightly tough to moderate

Edited March 15, 2023 by viritys
typos and stuff

[Retrofrogg]

This sounds interesting. It will be good when Launchbox has 3D cassette box models so we can use these properly. By the way, I do a lot of CPC box art stuff so we should maybe link up on this at some point.

[Thanatos_Prime]

"The way Launchbox is coded, it will automatically detect if the box spine runs vertically or horizontally and it will add the spine accordingly to the 3D image."

Can I get a citation for this or a confirmation of this? Trying it on my own has not yielded positive results.

[C-Beats]

20 minutes ago, Thanatos_Prime said:

Can I get a citation for this or a confirmation of this? Trying it on my own has not yielded positive results.

Yes, the default box logic looks at the spine image and uses it's dimensions to determine whether it's a top/bottom spine or a left/right spine. If the image height > width then it's left/right, otherwise is top/bottom.

[Thanatos_Prime]

Thank you!