[Feature Request] Launcher GUI

[Darthagnon]

General GUI suggestion/feature request:

Would it be possible to add more to the launcher GUI, possibly something like this?

(Source, click on the "Old version" spoiler dropdown)

I use the context-menu launcher on the taskbar icon, but I don't find the Ctrl+L launcher search bar super useful at the moment because it's not a global shortctut, and not useful for browsing a list of games.

GBM already has the tech built-in to display extracted game EXE icons, names, paths and playtime data (as in the current GBM main GUI showing "last played game"). Was wondering if maybe the current main GUI could stay more-or-less the same, but have a scrollable sidebar with the gamelist added (as above), with the Ctrl+L search bar at the top of the GUI to filter the gamelist. By default it could show last-played or "no game detected" screen, but clicking on a name in the sidebar could populate the main view with the info that is currently displayed once you finish playing a game. Add a "Play" launch button to the main view, to (re)launch the current game, and you've got a full launcher to rival Steam and Playnite.

[MikeMaximus]

I do like this idea.

The GUI features for the launcher are pretty rough as I was concentrating more on functionality for this initial release. I was also wary about making large GUI changes to support it, as I wasn't sure how it was going to be received. I always get annoyed when I'm using an app for one purpose, then the developers add new features and try to force them on me when I don't want them. This is why I always make new GBM features not directly related to saved game backups disabled and hidden by default.

I'll think about it and see what I can come up with. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Darthagnon]

Glad you like it.

I really do appreciate what you say about developers messing around with features and GUI and stuff; I still haven't forgotten how beautiful Chromium used to be, then Google took a steaming dump on it and called it "Material™", or what Valve has done lately with Steam.

Personally, though, in this case, I feel it would be an improvement with no downsides, as one thing I always struggled about with other launchers (e.g. PlayNite) is "Why would I import my games, just to have them in a UI?" With GBM, I import all my games so as to have backups of their saves, so a simple, playable UI to display the (already imported) games would be big icing on the cake!

Here's a quick mockup I did in Paint.NET of what I imagined:

A key advantage of this over just using the "Game setup" screen to launch games is it isn't editable and doesn't have lots of buttons. Once setup, just one or two clicks to launch any imported game.

[MikeMaximus]

The Game Manager has become so busy, even without the launcher it would be logical to do this and move some of the most used features directly onto the main window. I could make the side bar collapsible as well so it can still be a minimal interface.

[Darthagnon]

After you mentioned the busyness of the Game Manager, I had a think, and drew up another mockup for possible simplification (simple, and expanded with comments versions attached). EDIT: I merged the Monitor Only and Monitor this game buttons into Automatically backup, as that was roughly what I understood from the documentation. I haven't really used these checkboxes, though, as I want all games that I add to GBM to be monitored and backed up (the reason I use GBM), and I never really understood them.

[MikeMaximus]

Thanks for the suggestions!

• The "OS" field is mainly for Linux users because they can use Windows and Linux native configurations. Using tags for that would be too unreliable. Maybe I could hide this in Windows, but it would still need to be placed somewhere.

• "Monitor this Game" allows you to setup a backup configuration, but prevent it from automatically detected. This was added so you could have some configurations that were manual backup only. It's suppose it could be removed now that configurations can be setup with an empty process field, which accomplishes the same thing.

• "Monitor Only" configurations allow GBM to track the time and sessions of games that don't have anything to backup. Such as MMOs or CCGs.

• I actually did the icon suggestion this morning in commit f56288b. 😄 Icons will now be cached and displayed where appropriate after a game has been detected for at least one session.

• The "Backup Information" section has always been the mess I keep putting off fixing. Clickable text links and smaller buttons is probably the way to go. I also like the checkmark to replace Mark as Restored.

[Darthagnon]

Thank you so much for the explanations! I'll add those to the offline manual when I next update it (probably for the next release of GBM). I noticed the icon commit, and I was thinking "Wow, that's fast!" 😄 guess we were thinking on the same wavelength. I can try forking and taking a look at the source later this week, see if I can figure out anything to help (uncertain, as I've only tinkered with C# in the past).

• ✅ = White Heavy Checkmark Emoji, or, how my PC renders Unicode checkmark U+2705
• ❌= Cross Mark Emoji, or, how my PC renders Unicode U+274C
  They might render differently on other systems, e.g. type it into Notepad and it's a B&W Win7 emoji; been tinkering with SymWin C# source code, and I've found some older emojis, like these, are accepted by certain types of code, whereas a lot of newer emojis are flat-out rejected

[MikeMaximus]

I started tinkering yesterday and ended up doing an entire pass of a new GUI on the main form.

How's it looking? The left and right panels can be resized, they will resize properly with the form, and the game panel can be collapsed. In general it behaves exactly as it did before, except you can now directly access some of the most commonly used features without accessing the Game Manager.

It's currently functional on the v125 branch, but it'll be very buggy until I push another pass later today.

[Darthagnon]

That is looking beautiful! Thank you so much! ❤ Thank you for making a dream come true!

Three things I thought I'd mention:

1. Would it be possible for the Play button glyph to be green?
2. (not sure about this one) And/or possibly separate from the other buttons, e.g. Top Right, after Game Title? or maybe it's just the right-alignment of the buttons, and the left alignment of everything else that feels a little odd.
3. Edit glyph - pencil on notepad rather than just notepad? Suggests editing more.

[MikeMaximus]

I'm just using icons from a nice royalty free pack, those are the best matches I could find. I agree about the button placements, it doesn't look good. I've been playing with different layouts, I'll post another screenshot when I decide on something final.

[Darthagnon]

Not sure if GitHub compresses uploads (otherwise, I'll try a pull request later this week). Did a quick edit (hue + contrast adjustment for Play button, pencil from Icons8 resized really tiny and overlayed on the Edit notepad) - thought they might look a bit nicer like this? Restore = Red, as it is potentially destructive

[MikeMaximus]

It looks like the icons retained their quality. They look great, thank you.

Here is what it's currently looking like.

[Darthagnon]

Loosely related question: Does the search function index tags? Or can it be made to?

[MikeMaximus]

The game manager and main window currently do not support tags in the search/quick filter, but they really should. I'll do that.

[Darthagnon]

Thank you so much!

[MikeMaximus]

Tags are now included in the quick filter/search. Unfortunately this has caused various performance hits due to tags needed to be loaded completely, instead of on demand. I'll have to see if it can be optimized by reducing the need to completely reload lists.

[MikeMaximus]

I've rewritten the way quick filters are applied, instead of changing how tag data is loaded. So now you can search by tag and it actually seems to perform a little better. 😮

[Darthagnon]

Because GitHub nests posts and makes them difficult to see, here's a new one.

Game Manager simplification

I tried to implement something like the layout I prototyped above. Please find attached the edited files and Windows Emoji PNG files (from Emojipedia). I didn't do a pull request, as I was unable to get it to build on my PC (and hence, it is untested).

What I did:

• Attempted a workaround such that the Backup File and Restore Path fields should highlight text in blue and underline it, with hand cursor on hover with a tooltip, but the whole boxes are "buttons" that borrow the Open Path functions of the current buttons.
• Removed the "Monitor this game" checkbox, since I understood it was deprecated. Tried (probably unsuccessfully) to add hint text to the Process Field "Leave blank to disable auto monitoring"
• Put small buttons with Delete backup (❌), Mark as Restored (✅) and Import Save (📁folder, should use the blue folder icon already in GBM??) next to the fields in Backup Information. I wanted to add the coloured glyphs, but couldn't figure out how, so I left it with the B&W Unicode glyphs, and have attached the coloured versions as 24px PNGs. I was thinking it would be better merging the "Delete Backup" and "Import Save" buttons into one with a dropdown (e.g. like Link), but the subroutine for the Delete button was more complex than the others, so I decided I'd better not mess with it.
• Renamed "Backup File:" to Backup: button, and "Restore Path:" to Restore:, and made them into "Restore" and "Backup" buttons. Renamed so that their titles can mean both "This next field relates to Backup/Restore", but simultaneously mean "Click Here to Backup/Restore". Not 100% sure this is a good change though, without testing.
• Repositioned Launch Options, Save and Cancel

Here are the files (probably don't need frmGameManager.resx, but it was reported as changed by Git, so I included it just in case)
Changed Files.zip

[MikeMaximus]

Any progress on the v3 icons @Darthagnon?

I don't want to seem pushy, I'm just currently updating the manual for v125 and would like to use screenshots that include the final recoloured icons.

[Darthagnon]

Please forgive me for the delay; I've been having trouble accessing my computer. I'll upload them here tomorrow, 29/01/2021.

[Darthagnon]

WIP post (I'll upload the full zip here once done, as well as icons as I do them, as I'm not sure when I'll be called away from my PC):

Darker save icon (Amazing how much difference an IPS display makes - on the other PC I was using, the garish pink of v2 looked normal):
frmMain_working
CRC32: f92bc34a, 1.77kb

24px supersampling (paint.net "max quality") resize of the above for multisave icon:
Multi_save
CRC32: be589596, 866 bytes

"Link" icon - outlined, so it stands out more (took ages, had to deconstruct the original):
frmGameManager_Link
CRC32: 6a135032, 1.22kb

Cancel icons:
frmMain_Cancel_Small

Multi_Cancel

Multi_Delete

[Darthagnon]

Here's the ZIP with all the edited icons (including the ones from the previous post), and the Paint.NET PDN project files, as well as a TXT explaining the adjustments I made (might be useful for reference for future edits if more icons are added).

v3.zip

Have a nice weekend!

[MikeMaximus]

Thanks for your work on this. They look great!

[MikeMaximus]

I haven't posted any updates for a few weeks, but work continues on v125. I've applied some the UI changes to the entire app, and the Main Form and Game Manager have evolved to look much better than the examples posted above. I'm at the stage of tweaking, testing and fixing issues.

A mostly up to date list of changes is always available in the update branch:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MikeMaximus/gbm/v125/GBM/readme.txt

I also tried to port GBM to the new and shiny .NET 5, which has some features I'm interested in. The porting process actually went better than I thought it would, but still failed in the end. It builds, but always crashes out on the first line of code that does anything. Due to the vagueness of the exception(s) being thrown I can't even figure out what's making it crash, which is extremely frustrating. 😡

[Darthagnon]

I've built "pre-release" binaries from the source that I'm using at the moment; while more recent builds (maybe due to .NET 5? I didn't have it installed) don't work for me, with debug errors, some older commits work stable enough for me. I'm currently using:

• I use this one at the moment: GBM_v1.25beta1 pre-release, commit d9de90a (last version before tabs)
• GBM_v1.25beta2 pre-release, commit 88a9d79 (also builds and works, has early implementation of tabs)
• GBM_v1.25beta3 pre-release, commit 9baf186
  • Last commit that builds and works (next commit, "Added ability to detect games with window title", and later, doesn't work yet when I build at home)

[MikeMaximus]

Unfortunately this will happen when following an in-development branch because of how GBM applies database upgrades between versions. It's crashing because the database is missing a new table column that was added in that commit, that column needs to be added manually to any database already flagged as v125.

This is a risk of actively using an in-development branch, worse things could also happen. 😨 I recommend making extra backups of your gbm.s3db files as well before trying any in-development version.

Easy Fix - You'll lose the changes made since using an in-development build

1. Restore the automatically labelled v124 backups (gbm.s3db.v124.bak), in both your Backup folder and in %LOCALAPPDATA%\gbm.
2. Build and run the latest commit, GBM will make new backups when it re-runs the upgrade.
3. This has the positive side effect of helping me test the database upgrade routine during development.

Note - This won't affect existing backup files, but GBM may no longer list them or give warnings because checksums no longer match the database.

Difficult Fix - You won't lose any changes, but requires knowledge of SQL and tools

1. Look at the diff of mgrSQLite.vb in the commit that started crashing to see what database changes were made.
2. Manually apply the database changes from mgrSQLite.vb using a tool such as DB Browser for SQLite.
3. This might not always be straightforward, but it usually is.

v125 is still using .NET 4.0, I didn't push any commits of the .NET 5 disaster.