Play time tracker still don't work

[Kedog]

Hello everyone

The play time tracker still doesn't work for manually added games. It works on Steam and so on, what can I do here?

[AstroBob]

Hi there,

Thanks for the report here, could I please confirm a bit more information to try and understand what is happening here: 

• For which platform does the playtime tracker not work?
• How are you importing those games for the affected platform?
• Does this affect all games imported through this process or only certain ones?

If you can please confirm how to reliably reproduce this I'll run some tests on my ends to see whats up. 

Cheers,

[Kedog]

Hello,

Thank you for your message and sorry for getting back to you so late.

It affects the Windows/PC Games platform. I added this game (Far Cry.exe) manually. Yes, so far it affects all games that I add this way.

[AstroBob]

Hi there, thanks for the update. There are 2 known ways LaunchBox will not track time from a PC game.

1) If the game in question opens some sort of splash screen first before the game, or any other window before the actual game executable. This can sometimes trip up LaunchBox into thinking the application hasn't taken focus, which means it won't start tracking time.

2) If you use the LaunchBox startup screen, and this screen ends before the game has a chance to load, this means LaunchBox can sometimes regain focus before allowing the game to start, resulting in it not tracking time.

Could you confirm if either of those applies to your use case? And if the latter does, can you try disabling LaunchBox's startup screen, and then seeing if it tracks time properly for you?

Cheers

[Kedog]

On 1/22/2025 at 8:44 AM, AstroBob said:

Hi there, thanks for the update. There are 2 known ways LaunchBox will not track time from a PC game.

1) If the game in question opens some sort of splash screen first before the game, or any other window before the actual game executable. This can sometimes trip up LaunchBox into thinking the application hasn't taken focus, which means it won't start tracking time.

2) If you use the LaunchBox startup screen, and this screen ends before the game has a chance to load, this means LaunchBox can sometimes regain focus before allowing the game to start, resulting in it not tracking time.

Could you confirm if either of those applies to your use case? And if the latter does, can you try disabling LaunchBox's startup screen, and then seeing if it tracks time properly for you?

Cheers

i checked both. There is no Splash Screen and i disabled the start-up Screen, but no Improvement. The Play Count "19" seems to be correct.But not the time.

@AstroBob any Ideas?

[Kedog]

I just found out that GOG and Epic don't count either, only Steam is working

[C-Beats]

Steam playtime comes from Steam itself since their data should be more accurate than ours.

[Kedog]

1 hour ago, C-Beats said:

Steam playtime comes from Steam itself since their data should be more accurate than ours.

@C-BeatsOkay, but why doesn't it count with the others? It should count especially with the games that are added manually after starting the exe?

[C-Beats]

There is a known issue with any application that launches a window before launching the game window. We are monitoring the window we open when we start the process so if a game using a loading window or a launcher, it can throw off that tracking logic.

[Kedog]

19 hours ago, C-Beats said:

There is a known issue with any application that launches a window before launching the game window. We are monitoring the window we open when we start the process so if a game using a loading window or a launcher, it can throw off that tracking logic.

@C-BeatsOkay, I understand. Are there any plans for the future that the integration will work similarly to Steam? It would be cool if the play times were correct. Because otherwise you'll keep looking at the original launcher and that's what you want to avoid when you use Launch Box.

Edited February 5 by Kedog

[C-Beats]

3 hours ago, Kedog said:

@C-BeatsOkay, I understand. Are there any plans for the future that the integration will work similarly to Steam? It would be cool if the play times were correct. Because otherwise you'll keep looking at the original launcher and that's what you want to avoid when you use Launch Box.

I personally would like to address it in the near future. That being said I don't really get a say on when things are done. In the future I'd like to be able to add the name of the executable/process to look for in Edit Game so that a user can basically tell LB "hey don't pay attention to that first window, look for THIS one instead". No eta on when a change like that will make it in though.