stigzler

Ok. So the polish stage takes a bit of patience. Tonight, mainly working on code to make CustomLists and GameEx CustomMenus to play nicely together. Problem being, both work on the same file, so had to introduce some kind of system to ensure they synced with each other. In the end, just wrote custom key into to ini structure to indicate which menus written by CL and which by CM. Testing is starting up + pleasantly surprised that you can do a lot of the editing on the fly (that is have GameEx running and edit the lists + games 'live'). Few things left to do like loading bars and reloading the data.db3 on user action to enable you to add favourites in gameex and refresh this in CLists live. Overall, pleased with this one - feels like a tidy little app - better than my usual sprawling monstrous efforts! And hopefully of use!

Buffing up. Attending to the finer details. Working mainly on the custom lists 'browsing' thingy (i use the term loosely): I must thank Active Presenter for making whether it records the cursor of not totally random and unpredictable.

Doesnt it mainly depend on your mobo, bios and os? Do you not leave your server running 24/7? There is a way to do it hans cos I set this up for a pliugin I made. Sadly, I cant remember how I did it and it was hit and miss. Think it uses the same system as wol aa essentially same thing... magic packed via the ethernet to the serever.sorry cant be more help

Whoa. Back out of retirement?

And Boom! Just spit 'n polish now. The chassis, engine and breaks are fine. Not bad for a weekend's coding.

More luck today. However, I did think this'd be a quick project - just mess about with a few GameEx text files - how hard can that be, right? Oh..oh wait... I'm sure I've said that before. Still coming together. Mainly worked on getting CustomLists to knock together CustomMenus - dovetails nicely with CustomMenus.exe + also automates the images process. Scratch vid here: Back tuit.

That's sooo it!

Gawd - an awful day's coding. Totally unenjoyable! Still tomorrow's another day. A lot of the graft is messing around with gui's getting the thing useable - the basic theory/code is really only about 5% of the graft/time/toil. Getting closer to getting the GUI done and hence getting the data entry/manipulation finished: Today's lesson: Separate dataviews bound to the same datatable effect each other - they are not independant of one another. A good, quick separator (e.g. to populate a ComboBox from a datatable): With ListNodesCB .DisplayMember = "Name" .ValueMember = "ID" .DataSource = New DataView(CListDS.Tables("List").DefaultView.ToTable) End With I'm throwing in the towel and getting some shut eye in the hope of smoother running tomorrow.

DataTables, DataViews, DataBindings, DataSets. DataBastards.

Bad hair day. Every little single bit of coding has proven to have been a bbeyatch today. What could go wrong did go wrong and it was like tolerating a petualent child all day. Perseverance..

just a small one on the front. Also made a manual variable control for the back:

If any of you guys are looking to buy/upgrade to a home server, I can totally recommend the Dell T20. Presently £220 after cashback. All you'd need is an OS + some Hard Drives. I've got WHS2011 up and running great on mine. Link: http://www.ebuyer.com/714837-dell-poweredge-t20-3708-xeon-e3-1225v3-3-2-ghz-4gb-ram-1tb-hdd-tower-t20-3708?gclid=Cj0KEQjw9tW5BRDk29KDnqWu4fMBEiQAKj7sp3HV5BN7igUod_SUrI04J5VxqEKQWXB0IhCoTjpjWkEaAu6l8P8HAQ#fo_c=951&fo_k=e29459768663915ead3e07411f482147&fo_s=gplauk?mkwid=sCsFq06mn_dc&pcrid=51482426699&pkw=&pmt= Nice thing is, you can also mod it without breaking the warranty. Presently cramming 8 drives into mine after modding You cold also fit in 2 more 2.5" HDs, but think you'd have to upgrade the PSU. This means you can have 64TB of storage in the box alone + then expand more with esata and usb3 externals. It took me all of a week having it before i had to mod it It's nice to have something solid after the rollercoaster that was HP Mediasmart! Vanilla: Stigified:

One should never live with nagging.

Started working on the GUI to edit the custom lists. I prolly do this the wrong way round, but I find mocking together a gui helps get my head around how it's all gonna gel together. Rough draft, but the .db3>datagrid>edit>.db3 is working very nicely. The key is the Favourites column, which is hidden here. There other nice bonus is you can essentially edit your played/favourited games list.

Ok. Glad. Do me a favour and keep logging on for a while just in case.

Score tonight. Sorted the reading from/writing to the data.db3 file - reads the data into a datatable which can be bound to a datagrid view, which allows editing. The simple class: Imports System.Data.SQLite Public Class DBOps ' Global because you create it in the ImportGEDb3 and use it in the SaveGEDB3 ' Private daImport As SQLiteDataAdapter Public Function ImportGEDb3(Filepath As String) As DataTable Dim dt As New DataTable("Data") daImport = New SQLiteDataAdapter("Select * from Data", "Data Source='" & Filepath & "'") daImport.Fill(dt) ' This is critical, it is the SQLiteCommandBuilder that takes ' ' the SQLiteDataAdapter SELECT statement and builds the required' ' INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE commands.' Dim builder = New SQLiteCommandBuilder(daImport) Return dt End Function Public Sub SaveGEDb3(dt As datatable) If daImport IsNot Nothing Then daImport.Update(dt) End If End Sub End Class Also looked further into the custom menus creation. Appears that you prefix the custom menu number with "32" to get the GameEx page number. E.g. in the CustomMenu above, the "Custom Games List" page is 3201. Still stumped about whether can run ExportToMCE directly from the plugin. Would be a lot better if could, rather than needing the user to choose a list, manually run the refresh, then choose another sub menu to get the list.

I'm afraid I'm going to utter those immortal words "I can't recreate your error." Download the .dll below and recreate it yourself + then post your log (added some additional loggin to help isolate the error) MarqueeMasher.dll

Ah - well this might be good news - errors like this are normally easy to catch. I'll take a look another day - late here. We desperately need to stop Marquee Masher farting, crapping and bumming out....

I should get out more..

OK. Getting somewhere. Can't find a way to have the plugin automatically run ExportToMCE, but tested with manual trigger in GE interface. Video demo'ing the idea: Any ideas around how to do it all in the plugin rather than user having to manual refresh. Maybe I need to come back to it fresher.

Is that the complete MMLog? It seems incomplete. It could be that the plugin crashed. Also post your gameex.log (which will register any plugin crashes). You might have to recreate this scenario as the two logs need to correspond).

Ooooo! Export to MCE seems to refresh the favourites list from the .db3 file! More tinkering.. ...how the hell do you invoke the ExportToMCE function from a plugin?

Still very confusing. Just post your log next time it farts out (as the actress said to the bishop).

I just wanted to snag it: Good day.

Thanks Adultery. Cor - so it's looking quite convoluted. I was initially quite hopeful, as thought I'd figured out a relatively easy way. To outline the theory: Basically the plan was to leverage CustomMenus and the Favourites system. So the plugin configuration would alter the custommenus.ini to reflect groupings of games added to the favourites list: In custommenu.exe - looks like this: The 'item' is basically the favourites list. My idea was to catch GE before it loaded the Favourites page + alter the data.db3 favourite flags to match the games grouped via the plugin. So, for example, if tekken games is selected, flag all tekken games as 1 in the .db3 and the rest to 0. The data.db3 looks like this: However, my plan failed at the first hurdle. Tested altering the .db3 file whilst GE running, and it doesn't alter the 'internal' favourites list. I'm guessing GE loads the faves list from .db3 to memory at startup + then all future add/remove favourites is done in memory until GE quits + then it's saved back to .db3. Thus, you cannot manipulate favourites to give you a different list on-the-fly. Had a look at "App_CMD_Type" - appears to be nothing available to direct GameEx to re-load the favourites list from .db3. Damn shame as the rest shouldn't have been too difficult to code. The only other thing I didn't test was how easy it is to write back to the .db3 file once read (did .db3 reading in another app and was a doddle i think - so writing shouldn't be too difficult). Soooo... any ideas? As it stands the only option is to restart gameex every time you select a new list - which obviously doesn't work! I see App_CMD_Type is essentially an enumerated value. Are there any other values available apart from those listed in the plugin template? Public Enum App_CMD_Type ExitGameEx = 0 ShutdownPC = 1 RestartPC = 2 Minimize = 3 Restore = 4 ShowPicture = 5 ShowWebPage = 6 PlayAudioFile = 7 LoadSnapImage = 8 LoadBackgroundImage = 9 MsgBox = 10 Log = 11 RotateTo0 = 12 RotateTo90 = 13 RotateTo270 = 14 End Enum My guess would be that, frustratingly, there's going to be a single method in the GE code that loads in the favourites from the db3 (and the other data presumably). Sooo.... *whistles* how difficult would it be to code a App_CMD_Type into GE to enable a 'manual' reload of favourites from the db3 file via an AppCmdType call in a plugin?