Roadblocks...not sure what to do now.

[Shredder_guitar]

So, I've dived into launchbox for long enough that I feel that I can throw my opinion out about some things without just being Mr. Poo Poo about it and not recieve an enormous amount of pushback simply because of my misunderstandings of how the platform works. I know what I want, I know what I'm trying to achieve and I've either run out of ideas, or what I want is just not feasible and I don't know where to go from here. 

A little backstory...
I've been a Hyperspin OG user since almost it's conception...it's fair to say that I'm pretty set in my ways... I have over 100 systems that I've scoured the internet over the past few decades and I've done it all solo, I've never worked in a group that shares artwork or anything of that nature. It's been all by myself, just finding the best or most complete gamelists and trying to find the roms and artwork on the internet to make those as complete and consistent as possible. I value both of those things along with historical accuracy in high regard. Missing wheel logos, boxart and cart art drives me up the wall. So needless to say, I've spent much time on that. 

I reached a point where I was almost "done done" with hyperspin and I just wasn't going to add anything else, just get things the proper size and maintain it from there. I had run out of desirable tweeks or themes to add to it and it was the way i wanted it for the most part with controllers configured for each system and all. What I was trying to achieve was an authentic experience using bliss-box with the original controllers for each system and every system (yes, all 100+) was just plug n play. 

Launchbox: 
Launchbox existed and I was aware of it, but never hop'd on these forms as I was deep enough into hyperspin not to just change willy nilly. Then Hyperspin 2 came out.... FFS what a shit show. I expressed concerns and was met with 'deal with it or fuck off'...(I'm only slightly paraphrasing, but the admins may as well have said that) ...so naturally, I fucked off. I gave it a shot, it was basically unusable ...and still pretty much is by my standards and so I determined that was not a viable option. But I was still wanting something more stable. A windows update was released which broke HS1 (which has since been fixed)... Launchbox started looking more attractive after that. So I decided to give it an honest college try. 

I started off adding the usual basic systems, NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Gear Etc. I noticed that launchbox was picking up roms that I didn't even know I had... in a way, it felt more complete. There was some mismatching happening with artworks, that had to be manually corrected...not incredibly painful, but it was what it was. 

There's quite a few things about Launchbox that doesn't make sense to me.. Example: Why is Nintendo Game & Watch, Tiger Electronics, and Konami Handheld all considered Nintendo Game & Watch...that makes absolutely no sense logistically...not even a little bit. I've manually corrected it through the use of playlists, But now Nintendo Game & Watch requires additional steps to filter out games that are actually nintendo game and watch...which just shouldn't even be a thing. They are not the same. The same issue exists with Nintendo and Famicom... This one is debatable...but In my mind they are not the same console, but from a database sync perspective, they are treated as the same. Why? It doesn't make any sense as the number of people that also consider these consoles to be seperate...the consensus is overwhelmingly there.  

Automatic folder creation. The folder creation scheme doesn't make much sense, in fact, I find it a little bloated. System images are intermixed with Platform images and media pack images and I almost always have a difficult time determining where the folder I'm looking for is and which one is effecting the thing I want to change. I get that this is trying to be idiot proof, but I find it a bit cumbersome. Each system folder has roughly 35 folders, but only 5-10 of them are used...this should only create a folder in the event  that the folder will be used...not just always, this would reduce complexity overhead, i think. 

Also, I have all my System/Platform videos stored in an area I refer to as a 'Clean Zone' ...Along with my roms, this is an area I want set in stone and only read the data, not alter it. I was frustrated to find out that when pointing a platform video path to a platform folder, creates Marquee/Recordings/Theme/Trailer folders and I have no say or option to turn that off or not make that happen or store those folders in a different place...they HAVE to exist in the platform folder...GRRR. Along with this, Some of the platforms renamed the video files and added a '-01' behind them....why Cant the video files just be read as is just like the rom files are? The rom parsing in itself is phenomenal...apply that same process to the video files. I have the same issue with the image naming and folder structure and how they are region based...but then there are also files that don't have a region that fall outside of the main folder name structure....simply put, IT'S JUST MESSY. I think a better approach would be to NOT have region folders and instead rename and append the region to the filename...much like a movie file name i.e. Super Mario Bros. - World - Nintendo Entertainment System.png or better yet... let the user choose the image filenames based on metadata fields.  

Filters. Filters work mostly ok once you get them dialed in...but there are one-offs that I have yet to figure out how to fix...Example Avengers. What I want are all the avengers games from the arcade and nes and super nes...but Capcom Avengers also appears and that has nothing to do with the comic book characters and I have not been able to successfully exclude that game as it would also exclude the data east version of avengers....so again, mostly works, but has snafus that I haven't been able to fix. 

Launchbox has forced me to put more of the workload on 'the emulator' rather than a 3rd party tool like Rlauncher...I have mixed feelings about this, but overall I can see it as a good thing despite being incredibly painful to reorganize things. Through updating emulators and such I have reduced the number of emulators I use from roughly 30 down to 17 with Mame and Retroarch doing most of the heavy lifting. 

Since a lot of things are automatic in Launchbox, I lose a real sense of what's happening on the backend with how files are read, where they are, what artwork asset is affecting what I'm seeing on the screen, where files are being saved and if they are not overwriting anything else. 

Once set up, Launchbox is a great asset management tool on it's own.

Big Box
I hate it...scrap it. Kidding...sort of. Most themes are visually unappealing and the interface, I don't find very intuitive. I'm having to clear cache to see any changes; which I hate and worst of all.....performance issues. After selecting about 5 different games, the platform gradually slows to a crawl and becomes unusable until I restart it. Seems like it would do well with smaller collections, but not for behemoth libraries like i have. 
What I was wanting in a front end platform is basically hyperspin, but not hyperspin. I like the unified style themes, but there are gaps where I cannot have uniformity and the trade off of having video only  themes is mildly infuriating because I can't just whip a theme out in photoshop and make a zip file, there's a whole other process to making it a video as well....and I'm not that good at making themes. This seems to be the way of things though... I like the video themes because It takes a lot of guesswork out from artist to user, but opens the conversation up for paywalling later...which I am absolutely  going to hate and it would kill my desire to be a part of any gaming community permanently. Greed is a motherfucker. 
Anyway, getting back to the point, what I was wanting was a hyperspin wheel style theme for each platform (unified theme) with metadata text that is unique to each system (this has been the roadblock part for me, example screenshots below). Also, I want the experience to switch to a fullscreen theme whenever a fullscreen theme is present and back to a wheel when it is not...just like the behavior of Hyperspin. This sounds simple, but is proving to be an impossible demand. I have been building an All-in-One theme in the CTC Theme creator, but once it gets to 30 unique themes or so, the program has now become unusable, likely due to the mere size of xaml file that the main menu screen has to be read in order to display anything. 
I did like the idea of being able to switch themes per system, but I first was hoping to achieve consistency with the unified theme as a base, first, before switching things around. 

I am basically at a full stop now because CTC can't handle what I am asking it to do at the scale I am wanting to do it... I have not looking into the issue yet of how to switch to a full screen theme whenever a game theme is present, I've read that it is possible, but requires a direct edit to the XAML files that I haven't done yet. I see no point in continuing If I can't get this solved. 

I have looked into other alternative front ends that are just more lightweight and do not have a hyperspin feel to them at all that I could perhaps use launchbox as a backend tool like Pegasus...but It seems still in the early stages of development as well and not there yet. Not being able to use the loading screen was a deal breaker for me. 
So it seems that since HS2 is basically not developed, and Big box has performance issues and pegasus is also underdeveloped, I am really just kinda stuck with no direction forward. Can someone help to address and work towards solutions for the above concerns for launch/bigbox or suggest a path forward that achieves what I'm  trying to achieve or a better suited front end that works with Launchbox. I am too deep into the ways of launchbox files and configuration handling to just simply change now, so I would much prefer to work with someone on palatable solutions for bigbox if that's even possible. 

Thanks for reading my book. 


 

[C-Beats]

9 hours ago, Shredder_guitar said:

Why is Nintendo Game & Watch, Tiger Electronics, and Konami Handheld all considered Nintendo Game & Watch

Some of these legacy things are because of how we inherited and stood up the original DB that Jason had to rush in when the OG third party one was being removed. It was stood up 1:1 and there was a lot of code both in the DB and in the app that made moving away from it difficult and so the community kinda made what we had work and threw them all together. There has been talks internally about getting the electronic handheld stuff cleaned up but I don't believe a consensus was come to regarding which platforms deserved their own DB record vs a more generic "Electronic Handheld Game" sorta thing.

9 hours ago, Shredder_guitar said:

The folder creation scheme doesn't make much sense, in fact, I find it a little bloated

This is so that people wanting to drag/drop files in places can see the folders and don't have to remember what the exact string is they need to make the folder to work. We have some folders that DON'T auto-pop like this and most people don't even realize that making those does anything, and there always questions about what they have to call it. We find making the folder ahead of time helps eliminate a LOT of confusion to this. The second line of thinking is that this is a front end app, made to help people that don't want to stare at the file system. Let the front end app do it's job of keeping you out of those folders and leave em alone lol.

9 hours ago, Shredder_guitar said:

why Cant the video files just be read as is just like the rom files are?

They can and are, but if we save the file ourselves we append the numerals. This is so that you can have several videos of the same type applied to the same game.

9 hours ago, Shredder_guitar said:

What I want are all the avengers games from the arcade and nes and super nes

Type "Avengers" in the search bar. Select the games you want (Marvel Avenger titles) and then press Ctrl+E. Assign "Avengers" to their series field. Then you can just create a playlist against that value and get what you want. Alternatively you can just right click them after selecting and create a manual playlist and then manually add/remove games from said playlist as desired.

9 hours ago, Shredder_guitar said:

So it seems that since HS2 is basically not developed, and Big box has performance issues and pegasus is also underdeveloped

Playnite is another alternative you could potentially try. Getting emulation set up can be pretty cumbersome in it as it is largely created to be a front end for store front games, it's entirely possible to do though. Their 10ft interface mode is also free so can check it out without having to open the purse strings.

We definitely recognize there is room for improvements in performance in Big Box but in many ways are fighting a LOT of legacy issues both in the ancient codebase (by tech standards) and WPF in general. There a lot going on internally to work on a newer version of LB that will hopefully address a lot of these issues, but our dev team size is pretty miniscule and so it does take quite a bit of time and balance to get it all working without dropping the ball in other areas (like maintaining the current apps). Not saying we are doing it perfectly by ANY means, but we're doing the best we can at the moment.

That being said currently to get the best performance out of BB themes you need to manually create them. The CTC is great WYSIWYG editor but it's pretty far behind in what's possible in LB and the plugins it utilizes to get things done (and general WPF controls/syntax) doesn't always produce the most performant themes. You're trading off ease of creating theme for the performance OF the theme once built. Not saying that you may not experience some performance issues regardless (like the newer Unifieds I don't believe use CTC at all) but it rarely helps.

[Shredder_guitar]

Thank you for the responses and explanation on somethings. I appreciate the additional understanding, I have a slightly different point of view on the approaches to these things though. 

15 hours ago, C-Beats said:

Some of these legacy things are because of how we inherited and stood up the original DB that Jason had to rush in when the OG third party one was being removed. It was stood up 1:1 and there was a lot of code both in the DB and in the app that made moving away from it difficult and so the community kinda made what we had work and threw them all together. There has been talks internally about getting the electronic handheld stuff cleaned up but I don't believe a consensus was come to regarding which platforms deserved their own DB record vs a more generic "Electronic Handheld Game" sorta thing.

I get inheriting things while someone else jumps ship...happened to me in the professional world and it's essentially ruined me in every way possible. So I get it. Moving on..that said, Nintendo Game & Watch as a 'Catch all' solution is the worst possible solution... The Games DB itself is already a mixture of Manufacturers of games AND console types. Is this a 'I don't know how DB's work and I'm not touching it', issue or 'I'm afraid It's a house of cards' issue or is it a 'we can't agree on anything so let's table this and throw it in the backlog never to talk about it again' issue? 
I'm pretty hardlined in seeing that Tiger electronics and Konami Handhelds is not a game & watch console and should be treated as such. https://handheldmuseum.com does a great job of breaking these handhelds out by manufacturer... I wouldn't encourage that ALL handhelds have their own manufacturer at this time because there just simply isn't high quality assets available for all these games, however You could say 'All handhelds go into a Misc category, If a number of high quality assets exist above 10 (or whatever number makes sense), then it's justification for it's own manufacturing category.' Tiger Electronics, and Konami Handhelds would certainly fit that profile....I believe Mattel Electronics and Vtech would also fit that. 

15 hours ago, C-Beats said:

This is so that people wanting to drag/drop files in places can see the folders and don't have to remember what the exact string is they need to make the folder to work. We have some folders that DON'T auto-pop like this and most people don't even realize that making those does anything, and there always questions about what they have to call it. We find making the folder ahead of time helps eliminate a LOT of confusion to this. The second line of thinking is that this is a front end app, made to help people that don't want to stare at the file system. Let the front end app do it's job of keeping you out of those folders and leave em alone lol.

I would propose a lightweight folder structure and within launchbox have a section to enable additional folders as desired, enabling them creates the folder...this would reduce complexity in architecture...significantly in terms of empty folders. The folders created in the platform video folder I wish that I could redirect and not have them auto created at all. 

15 hours ago, C-Beats said:

They can and are, but if we save the file ourselves we append the numerals. This is so that you can have several videos of the same type applied to the same game.

I don't understand why anyone would want or have a need for more than one video of a title...sure there are video themes...but I consider those a different thing than a video snap..which would be of the game itself.

15 hours ago, C-Beats said:

Type "Avengers" in the search bar. Select the games you want (Marvel Avenger titles) and then press Ctrl+E. Assign "Avengers" to their series field. Then you can just create a playlist against that value and get what you want. Alternatively you can just right click them after selecting and create a manual playlist and then manually add/remove games from said playlist as desired.

ok, that might be a solution to this problem, I'll try that and see what comes of it, thank you. 

15 hours ago, C-Beats said:

Playnite is another alternative you could potentially try.

I had a quick look, it looks very similar to launchbox. I have concerns about getting into more complex consoles like teknoparrot and Taito how it would work out. I am basically in search for a more modern feel that ALSO stays true to original consoles in functionality...it's a BIG ask, I'm finding. Because there are things that make complete sense from an end user perspective, that don't make as much sense from a Dev Perspective.  I might give playnight a shot with some simple tasks, but I would rather prefer a front end app that has capabilities to connect to launchbox...similar to HS and RL  or something like pegasus and LB...i.e. the tractor trailer model. Just so I can avoid completely rebuilding. 
*update* 
I downloaded Playnite and gave it a bit of a try... When I think about rebuilding all over again on something I'm negligibly excited about, I literally want to vomit. I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze at this point in the direction of playnite in it's current state. the platform reminds me of the Backend of HS 2 and in comparison HS2 is a bit farther along.

15 hours ago, C-Beats said:

but our dev team size is pretty miniscule

I don't know what tools you use, but I'm a Sr Dev by trade, happy to help if possible... I don't think I would be able to help write code, but I'm an Infra and systems guy all the way. 

15 hours ago, C-Beats said:

That being said currently to get the best performance out of BB themes you need to manually create them.

Agreed that what I want needs to be manually created, I'm sure what I want is possible and can be written far more efficiently directly in XAML, I just don't know how. Is there tools that help with doing this and getting the desired results? CTC is designed in such a way that reading raw values is stored in plain text and is unreadable then output to xaml in a bunch of variables that takes a lot of time to figure out what it's doing. Looking for something I can just plug in a few lines and say 'make it do this' .  I've changed the text before on the unified theme, but when you get into gradients and drop shadows and applying different text styles, it gets complicated. 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Shredder_guitar