filigran Wrote:Ah, ok. Yeah, I did find some results when googling for the error that was related to some other plugins, however not this one. Good to see it's being worked on (or atleast is reported).

• Fix items list bug display under linux (64bit).
  

st graveyard Wrote:Hello Angel,

I'm having a problem. Seems I closed down my XBMC application a bit to fast while saving info in ALA. This is not a good thing to do as my launchers xml was damaged and I lost a lot of info

Anyway, now I'm starting again with the import of my Genesis roms collection. In the last week I found out the the info gathered from moby games is a lot better compared to the one at allgame.com. So since I'm starting now from scratch, creating a new launcher, I want to get the info from mobygames. But guess what, it doesn't seem to work. For none of the games, info is found. The weird thing is, when I do this manually, afterwards, almost for all games in the 1600+ games I have, there is a genesis entry from mobygames.

Is this a bug perhaps?

• add temporary file acces during launcher.xml file write
  
• fix bug for mobygames automatic data scrapper
  

Angelscry Wrote:Version 1.4.4 : This new version of Advanced Launcher, fix a bug occurring with the Mobygames data scraper, during automatic scan. The scrapper was not able to found the game data. It is now fixed. This version also secures the way Advanced Launcher writes into the launcher.xml file. With previous version if a bug or shutdown was occurring during the write process, datas were automatically lost. This new version use a temporary file to write the launchers data.

Changelog :

• add temporary file acces during launcher.xml file write
  
• fix bug for mobygames automatic data scrapper
  

gszx1337 Wrote:What I'm trying to do is have a "GAMES" category on the main menu that when selected brings up Advanced Launcher and shows the list of PC games added to XBMC. I'm not entirely sure how to do this or where to start so I have a couple questions:

1. What directory is the plugin in? I don't remember where it was installed and I can't seem to find it. I tried opening all of the "addon.xml" files in notepad and looking at the addon ids, but I guess I skipped one of the files.

2. Is what I'm trying to do even possible?

gszx1337 Wrote:What I'm trying to do is have a "GAMES" category on the main menu that when selected brings up Advanced Launcher and shows the list of PC games added to XBMC. I'm not entirely sure how to do this or where to start so I have a couple questions:

1. What directory is the plugin in? I don't remember where it was installed and I can't seem to find it. I tried opening all of the "addon.xml" files in notepad and looking at the addon ids, but I guess I skipped one of the files.

2. Is what I'm trying to do even possible?

st graveyard Wrote:I would also like to talk to you again one more time regarding the continouis growt of my XBMC dir. I have now noticed that advanced launcher does use the thumbnails dir of XBMC. When I browse through the dir, I see lot of boxscans and fanart in there from ALA. Also, since the crash yesterday, I added again the genesis collection. and I think the XBMC folder went up another 50 or 80 megs or so.

st graveyard Wrote:I don't know, my HD is big enough, that is no issue, but I was wondering if there is a place out there were you can suggest for a new plugin or an update of the XBMC standard? The thumbnails folder contains subfolders generated, videos and music. And outside these folders we have also "1", "2", "3" ... In these folders I find the ALA stuff.

st graveyard Wrote:There should be a way to clean this up. We need a coder out there who can program this not only for ALA, but also for the standard vid and music sections ... I would like to suggest this to the XBMC community, but don't know where??

Angelscry Wrote:Like I already explain you, it is XBMC which automatically stores thumbnails and fanarts images into its cache directory. I do not have any control of this. Also, the cache is made to quicky display thumbs and fanarts images of movies, music and related info (artist, actors, etc...) you are currently using under XBMC. It aloows to increase the speed when those thumbs and fanarts images are stored into an external/network hard drive for example.

Now 50-80 megs is a really small cache size. Mine is actually 450 megs (I have a lot of movies, musics and games). This cache directory contain the images that are displayed into XBMC, and size of these images depend on their quality. For example an HD fanart image could be hight than 1 megs in size.

I do not really understand your problem. It's like if you wanted to display thumbs, fanarts, but do not want to store them anywhere.

That's again XBMC which store generated addon images here. XBMC do not use a dedicated folder for addons media stuff.

For suggestions you can post your requests here (for XBMC) : http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=9 or here (for a new addon) : http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=26.

st graveyard Wrote:Thanks for the reply, Angel.

I will check those links tonight.

Just to make things clear, to see if we are talking about the same thing here. I'm not talking about the cache dir in the add_on folder for ALA, I'm talking about the thumbnails folder of USERS/ROAMING/XBMC ... (something like that).

80 megs is indeed not much, but what I mean is ... I removed my genesis collection, and added a new launcher and filled this up with the genesis roms, thumbs and fanart. I have done this numerous times in the past (to try things out) and this action makes the XBMC thumbnails folder bigger. Adding a new launcher and filling it up, adds another 80 megs or so to this folder (not the add_on cache folder). And I'm talking about adding the same collection, for the same system, with the same thumbs and fanarts as before...

Now, if this is the way XBMC works, than there is nothing we can do. I don't have any criticism on ALA, don't take this the wrong way.
What I mean is ... My thumbs and fanart for my roms are stored nicely on an external drive. Apart from the launchers xml, and some other inner workings for ALA, I don't see why the XBMC folder should get bigger and bigger, as all of the media is stored on a seperate drive.

The same goes for movies and music. You download a lot of stuff, but in the end, there is only 1 fanart and 1 thumb for a movie or an album used in XBMC. However, the thumbnails folder contains everything that was ever displayed in XBMC, and this is never ever removed currently (the standard cleanup functions in XBMC work like sh*t).

Currently, my XBMC folder has grown to 2.8 giga. And it grows quickly once you start building your rom collection in ALA.

I will check out the links you provided and see if there are other people out there who have the same problem with the standard working of XBMC.

Hope you understand, again, no criticism to the fantastic ALA tool ... I love it and think it is the best plugin for XBMC!

Thanks,
Grave

Angelscry Wrote:No problem... BTW, I can give you a quick an dirty manual way to correct this by your self:

1. close XBMC
   
2. delete all the cache sub-folders containing Advanced Launcher images (normally all unsorted folders named 1, 2, 3, 4, etc...)
   
3. delete the program.db file.
   
4. restart XBMC
   

WARNING: inconvenience of this method is if you have other add-on program that use XBMC cache to store images, these images will be lost.

st graveyard Wrote:But won't I lose thumbs and fanart from the movie, tv shows and Music section?