Multiple active frontends?

[jeremy0203]

Would this be something possible to implement? I would like to not have separate installs for both my normal gaming and then pinball stuff. Right now I just have the pinball stuff matching up with my Hyperspin stuff so it still works but I would like to implement some differences between the two which means I would have to go with separate installs. I don't know if there was any way RLUI could "see" which system it is sending the requests/parameters or whatever you would call it as it seems that would probably be the biggest hurdle in enabling it to do that?

Also I was wondering why there is both a default and active frontend selection. Would there be some reason to have those selected to different ones?

 

[brolly]

The active frontend is what tells RLUI from where the system/game info should be read from so you can't have 2 active frontends at same time as that concept doesn't make sense.
Also the whole idea behind RL is to be able to share all your settings between different frontends (there's only 1 set of RL settings which is independent from the frontend you use), this is by design and I don't see what you would like/need to change between frontends.
There's some stuff that can be changed like vertical/horizontal settings, so ultimately it depends on what exactly you mean with "some differences".

 

[jeremy0203]

Well, by having multiple active frontends I mean RLUI sees which frontend is making the call and applies the different settings you have listed under those individual ones.

But yes like you mention one of the things would be orientation. Running some pinball stuff from Hyperspin I would want it to run in a horizontal mode, whereas if launched from a pinball FE I would want it to be vertical. I don't see any way to do that if they are both sharing the settings from my active frontend. As well as some stuff like MAME, if I run from HS I want it all horizontal but I would like to launch some vertical games from mame from a pinball FE and have them rotate.

 

[ghutch92]

If the problem is orientation than perhaps it would be better for rocketlauncher to detect the orientation of the operating system and apply the same orientation to the emulator. If this would be a bad solution then there is always the user functions capability. Rocketlauncher does keep track of the frontend that called it.

 

[jeremy0203]

Is there a way to write a function that would call for the system setup specific to that FE.

It is great that you can setup multiple FEs in RLUI but seems you are kind of limiting it by having the user need to go into it and switch the active one if they wanted to use it across multiple FEs each time..

 

[ghutch92]

RocketLauncher does not use the default or active frontend setting. In fact RocketLauncherUI doesn't even store your last active frontend (It always reverts to the default on startup). So switching active frontends does not have an effect on actually launching your games through a front end.

Hmmm you would need to know the name of the variable in which rocketlauncher stores the name of the front-end so that you can use it in an if-else statement. This variable name should be able to be found in a troubleshooting log before the module code.

Again rocketlauncher does not know what your default and active frontend is when launching a game. This means the default and active frontend stuff only applies to rocketlauncherUI.

 

[jeremy0203]

RLUI holds all the settings. I don't see why it can't pretty much go hey, look I am getting a call from pinballx to use visual pinball so let me use the settings for it that have been set under the pinballx FE instead of the default FEs settings and send that info through RL.

 

[brolly]

RLUI holds all the settings. I don't see why it can't pretty much go hey, look I am getting a call from pinballx to use visual pinball so let me use the settings for it that have been set under the pinballx FE instead of the default FEs settings and send that info through RL.

What you are failing to understand is that there is no such thing as "settings set under pinballx FE" or "default FE settings" there's only one single set of settings which is common to any frontend you are using, so whatever is your currently active frontend the settings files you are writing to are always the same. This is by design as I stated before, if you want different settings across frontends then you need to be using 2 RL setups since you'll require a completely different set of settings files per frontend. And honestly with the auto update feature having multiple RL setups is pretty much painless.

If all you want to do is horizontal/vertical settings that's possible though, you basically only need to type say 1920|1080 for a width setting for instance which reads use 1920 on horizontal screens and 1080 on vertical screens. I think bleasby put some examples about this on some post about PinballX or HyperPin usage with RL.