[PLUGIN] Game Info Plugin

[Krakerman]

Thanks!

[Adultery]

Damn, I opened it just fine, I can see all your emulators in the list. I'm stumped here... :'(

I need some other people to try it out if it's not too much trouble...

[stigzler]

Would do, but my cherished Chinese 7" 2nd display got totaled when installing in my cab - gotta wait till after xmas now before it comes :*(

Dammit - that second display and the gameinfo plugin were gonna be one of my fave "putting it all together" moments

[Adultery]

It's all good.

[stigzler]

btw - see you're playing fez - great choice!!

You seen the documentary which includes the guy who made this? Great throwback to the bedroom developers like Matthew Smith and Jeff Minter.

"Indie Game":

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884/

(on netflix)

[Adultery]

I have indeed seen this movie. The Fez guy was a freak and the Braid guy was a crybaby. I'd hang with the bearded dude on the Super Meat Boy squad though no doubt. :-)

[stigzler]

Heh. Was true Geek Drama. Almost as good as:

The King of Kong

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/

Billy Mitchell is hilarious. Soz Adultery - I shall stop fogging your thread!

[Adultery]

No worries, I've seen that one too. I'm a geek, no doubt. :-)

[Adultery]

1.2.4u5 is now available!

• Added MAME Commander 2 Plugin Co-Op
  This will now look at your MAME Commander 2 settings and act accordingly, the same way it looks for compatibility issues with MAME Commander Lite. This feature can be disabled, and will only run if you have MC2 installed and enabled.
• Bug fix for GameBase integration
  I made an oops when I added GameBase emulators to the list, which was causing the plugin to crash. This has been fixed.
• Code tweaks for SQLite integration
  This will help speed up the process when looking to GameEx's .db3 files for play count and times played data.
• More optimizations for other stuff
  I fixed up some code for GameInfoExtenderViewer, CPanelViewer, and AttractInfoViewer, and also tweaked some old code that was in the configuration form

As always, you can downloaded the beta from the first post, and also the newly updated plugin downloader software, which now supports beta builds of my plugins.

I want to give a shout out to Krakerman, without whom I couldn't have squished the GameBase bug that I almost entirely gave up on. Thanks for your support, and of course, the rigorous testing.

[Tempest]

Congratulations on the bug squash!

[Adultery]

Thanks, Tempest! I'm always glad to squish a bug or two... As long as it's not a roach and it's not in my house!

[stigzler]

1.2.4u3 is out there, if one were so inclined as to play with the new beta. This new revision adds the following:

• New option to add custom fonts to your themes

  This option was in the XML already but wasn't added as a feature until now. You can see the XML layout here if you wanted to add your custom TTF font to the theme you're using.

This is great - lots more customisability now!

Is there any way to increase the font size? Tried this in the settings xml:

<color>FFFFFF</color>

<size>7</size>

<path>Mago/Comfortaa_Regular.ttf</path>

no joy!

[Adultery]

Not yet, but I can probably add that in. :-)

[stigzler]

Brill.

Well Adultery - your plugin was the inspiration for putting a second monitor in my cab. I remember you saying you'd like to see vids of GameInfo in action - made a quick one - low quality, and should have set GameExtender to use custom images, but you can see your fantastic plugin in action:

The Control Panel viewer is proving very useful too! Just a few questions:

Is it possible to alter the transparency of the control panel when activated? That is pre-set it - I'd like it @ 100% opacity so can see it clearly

Is it possible in the ini or something to let the user set the key that brings up the CP (so can map to one of the function buttons on my cab) [Edit] Even better would be a key combo Like Shift and a Key - that'd save me a button assignment!

Lastly (heh - don't ask much do I?) is it possible to set the amount of time it is displayed for?

Great work Adultery - many thanks for a bit(!?) of coding that's made all the difference to my cab.

[Adultery]

Another beta in the works...

Besides fixing some font issues that crept in when I added custom font options, I added a plugin coop for the new DracLabs Game Tagger plugin. When you launch a game, after 30 seconds or so Game Info will download a copy of your gamer tag and display it for 60 seconds on whatever screen you have set for that emulator. Here's a preview:

I also stumbled across a great free weather API in my travels on the interwebz (most of them charge money for this, and this one is free for anyone to use (as many times as you want). I'm adding a weather window to the GameEx menu, which will use customizable weather icons and show the current temperature. I might also add a weather radar map to the viewer, I'm still tinkering around with it. The idea is to suppliment GameEx's current "at a glance" temperature that it already displays with something cool, instead of trying to do the same thing twice... This may be an extended forecast with a map, or who knows what else.

As always, the Game Tagger support is optional, and can be enabled and disabled from the Plugin Co-Op settings in the configuration. The weather setup will also be added into the configuration once that goes live. I'll upload the new beta in a while, we'll see how successful the weather viewer works out to be first.

@stigzler: I'm working on requests 1 and 3. I'm not quite ready to set up user assigned keys yet, that will be a big project as the key detection could already use some work. The other two (specifically the timer, then followed by custom transparency options for all windows) will probably also make the beta when it comes out. Thanks for your support, I hope you like the plugin!

[stigzler]

Brill Adultery - looking forward to the next release. Loving the control panel aspect. This coupled with CPMaker really do help the cab.

Thanks for considering suggestions. On the second - that's no big deal, really, as I'm just using an AHK script to map a button to Shift+Space.

Great to hear the transparency on the CP Panels is gonna be user customisable.

Great job.

[Adultery]

If you're interested, you can download the new beta build from here. Here is a list of what's been changed in the latest beta:

• Added new Plugin Co-Op mode for the forthcoming Game Tagger plugin, which can be enabled and disabled from the plugin configuration
• Fixed font placement issues on several forms that showed up after I added custom font support
• Huge update to routines for Game Visualizer "extra fluff", including:
  • Rewrote the routine that displays the control panel during the game
  • CP viewer now starts and stops cleaner (I will add the fades back in before the official release)
  • Pressing SHIFT+SPACE now hides and/or shows the CP Viewer
  • Rewrote the routine that displays the Hi-Score table
  • Hi-Scores now show and quit cleaner (I will add the fades back in before the official release)
  • Initial groundwork for more plugin co-op
• Started working on the Weather viewer
• Replaced the SQLite dll with the proper .NET FW 2.0 version (You can now safely delete the SQLite.Interop.dll file from the PLUGINS folder if you like, I was using a .NET 3.0 dll in a .NET 2.0 environment before, which worked but wasn't ideal obviously... Especially if you didn't have .NET 3.0 installed. I will have Tom remove the old file and update the other dll when I release the official update, as that was specific to the CPU architecture and isn't needed in earlier framework builds).
• Attract Mode Info viewer got a pretty hefty tune-up
• Cleaned up a LOT of code and removed some redundancies: I have been working hard to make this code as efficient as I can by rewriting several blocks, going through things a class at a time.
• Big optimization update to the Last.FM utility, also added result error logging to the mix
• Lots of other stuff I probably forgot to mention

Still to come before the release is official:

• Hi-Score Snaper Co-Op
• Virtual Drive Loader Co-Op
• I need to fix a layering issue where the MAME controls are on top of the Hi-Score table, which shouldn't be a big deal
• Add a custom skin to the weather viewer and the Game Tagger viewer display
• Custom transparency settings: This will be a section in the configuration menu, probably utilizing sliders for you to make the adjustment to the levels until you find that which suits you
• Finish up the FAQ viewer (which is close, I just get sidetracked too easy I suppose)
• Lots and lots more optimizing (there's a lot of code I need to comb through still)

There will probably be more, this is just what I thought of while I uploaded this. So enough reading, go get it! The preferred method is to use the DracLabs Plugin Downloader Software... Just one button and you're done.

[Krakerman]

Plugin downloader has the date wrong it's 1/06/14 not 1/06/13.

[Adultery]

Were you able to download it?

[GimmeClassics]

Hi-score snapper co-op....what does that co-op part exactly do Adultery ? I really like to know

[Adultery]

That really depends on the plugin. In that instance I'll probably add a camera to the visualizer form and a message in one of the entry fields that says "press such and such combo to take a snapshot of your high score".

[stigzler]

Liking the new CP toggle - just a simple on/off without timed close works well!

[Adultery]

Thanks. :-)

The code was already active, I just forgot to mention the toggle combo before. :-)

[Adultery]

ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE update here! It took me over an hour just to type out the list of new features, and I probably forgot some of them since there have been several betas since I started adding in the new stuff. You can download the new version from here or grab the DracLabs Plugin Downloader.

Needless to say, this is a pretty fabulous set of new stuff to play with. Enjoy!

GAME INFO UPDATED TO 1.2.5

• (CONFIGURATION) Major clean up to both the interface and the code behind the config form
  • Saves are now automatic for both emulator and overall settings so these buttons have been removed
  • Many options have been migrated to the toolstrip to allow more room for more options
  • Screen numbers are now based off the system's enumeration, taking away the need to know anything about Windows assignments
  • Text entries for screens have been replaced by drop down lists
    To configure a screen for the plugin it mst be connected when the configuration is launched
• (PLUGIN) Added new Plugin Co-op options for several DracLabs plugins, which will detect other running plugins and their running state in GameEx
  • Xpadder Co-op now displays an icon on the Game Info Viewer to show if Xpadder is enabled for that game or emulator
  • Mame Commander 2 and Mame Commander Lite bypasses for multiple screen switches have been addded
  • A Game Tagger viewer for the forthcoming Game Tagger Plugin has been added to the In-Game view, which will display your game tag for 30 seconds after you launch the game
• (CONFIGURATION) The ability to disable plugin co-op features on the whole or individually have been added to the toolstrip under MORE>PLUGIN CO-OP SETTINGS
• (PLUGIN) Added new icon images to the Game Info Viewer. Icons include:
  • ​Xpadder is running (if co-op enabled)
  • Xpadder is bypassed (if co-op is enabled)
  • MAME game available in the Hi-Score competition
  • Game in Favorites List
  • Game not yet played
  • Learn more about this feature here.
• (PLUGIN) Code optimizations and fixes for the following features:
  • Game Extender Viewer
  • Attract Mode Info Viewer
  • Hi-Score User Score Table Viewer
  • Control Panel Viewer
• (PLUGIN) Enhanced Steam support
  • The way information is displayed and the type shown in-game is unique to Steam games
  • Added a little finesse to avoid problems with Steam and multiple monitors on slower computers
• (PLUGIN) Full GameBase and GameEx Arcade support
• (CONFIGURATION-XML) Updated XML version to 1.2 which brings the following enhancements:
  • Element cleanup to move CPanel, Custom Text, and Co-op settings into the Settings tree where it should have been in the first place
  • Added new emulator name attribute to game nodes
    The plugin will now scan and check your emulator assignments to ensure the list hasn't been sorted and correct your emulator numbers if it has, which ensures you will not lose your tracking and game data if you make configuration changes
  • The upgrade routine will run silently either when you launch GameEx or the configuration
• (PLUGIN) Fixed SQLite support to use .NET Framework 2.0 instead of 3.0
  You can safely delete the SQLite.Interop.dll file from the PLUGINS folder now, as that was dependant on the architectire of the CPU and is no longer needed to use SQLite features. This file will be removed in future GameEx updates. This also fixes a plugin crash on machines that did not have .NET FW 3.0 installed.
• (PLUGIN) Pressing SHIFT+SPACE now hides and shows the Control Panel Viewer
• (PLUGIN) Pressing SHIFT+TAB now hides all visual elements controlled by Game Info instead of just hiding the Game Info viewer
• (LAST.FM) Last.FM support got a long overdue re-write of some core features, resulting in much greater accuracy. I also added in result logging for bad or inconclusive searches, which will hwlp me correct later issues much quicker
• (PLUGIN) Fixed an issue where the Control Panel was being layered over top of the Hi-Score viewer, making the Hi-Score table impossible to see
• (CONFIGURATION) Added option to set opacity for all viewer windows
  You can change this setting in the Tool Strip under Opacity Settings, simply set the slider to your perferred level
• (PLUGIN) Added custom font options for any Game Info theme, and fixed any display issues this caused
  You can see a sample of the MegaMAME theme.xml here, simply set the path to your TTF font and include it in the theme's folder
• (THEMES) Updated MegaMAME theme with new custom font
• (PLUGIN) Added support for custom Game Tagger Viewer bg image
• (THEMES) Updated MegaMAME theme with new Game Tagger background image

[Tempest]

Ridiculous. (My nephews us that term a lot, I think that it is a good thing)