2014-03-24, 21:40
Hello!
First of all, huge thanks Angelscry for all your hard work on Advanced launcher. It is a-ma-zing. Thanks to the Advanced Launcher, I've been able to take XBMC pretty far from it's original use: my aim is to use it as (solely) game-focused very visual database and discovery tool for my (mainly) physical game collection, constantly running on my pc on my game room screen. That means basicly substituting rom launching (mostly) with launching an image that will only display the location of the physical cartridge on the shelf & instructions to select the right channel/system, and besides that only using the PC to launch games that are actual pc games.
Anyway, as I said, my main desire is to be able to "discover" the games via the system, not launch them, meaning I want to be able to list them based on various criteria (genre, system, series), display information etc. First issue I ran into was that besides being able to make searches based on genres (which are, luckily, self-definable), there was no room/field for series tag, which in my opinion is crucial in order to appreciate the history and connections of many many games. From previous discussions I understood it isn't possible/viable though to add a series field to the data, so via a creative use of the language files I repurposed the publisher field to be my series tag. This solution will work great for me especially with the skin I chose, since it doesn't show publisher/"series" info at all, but it's still searchable. Here is where I had my first question:
It's awesome and very supportive for my needs that one can make a launcher from the search string, but is it possible to do a launcher that would, instead of opening a spesific search (e.g. genre "Action") open the search itself, ie. show a list of all the genres? Not wanting to create separate launchers for all the dozens and dozens of series, this would be a great, dynamic solution, but I couldn't so far find how this could be done?
First of all, huge thanks Angelscry for all your hard work on Advanced launcher. It is a-ma-zing. Thanks to the Advanced Launcher, I've been able to take XBMC pretty far from it's original use: my aim is to use it as (solely) game-focused very visual database and discovery tool for my (mainly) physical game collection, constantly running on my pc on my game room screen. That means basicly substituting rom launching (mostly) with launching an image that will only display the location of the physical cartridge on the shelf & instructions to select the right channel/system, and besides that only using the PC to launch games that are actual pc games.
Anyway, as I said, my main desire is to be able to "discover" the games via the system, not launch them, meaning I want to be able to list them based on various criteria (genre, system, series), display information etc. First issue I ran into was that besides being able to make searches based on genres (which are, luckily, self-definable), there was no room/field for series tag, which in my opinion is crucial in order to appreciate the history and connections of many many games. From previous discussions I understood it isn't possible/viable though to add a series field to the data, so via a creative use of the language files I repurposed the publisher field to be my series tag. This solution will work great for me especially with the skin I chose, since it doesn't show publisher/"series" info at all, but it's still searchable. Here is where I had my first question:
It's awesome and very supportive for my needs that one can make a launcher from the search string, but is it possible to do a launcher that would, instead of opening a spesific search (e.g. genre "Action") open the search itself, ie. show a list of all the genres? Not wanting to create separate launchers for all the dozens and dozens of series, this would be a great, dynamic solution, but I couldn't so far find how this could be done?