Feature Request: Script to allow fixed aspect ratio for Box-Arts

[B.P]

Issue: When adding Platforms to launchbox we often face the issue of different kinds of boxart depending on the region they originated from. This results in mismatched overall view on the games when browsing through and creates big empty spaces in between titles.

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Example: To fix this it could be beneficial to add a script that allows a user to set an aspect ratio for a platform and have a script place the unfit boxarts in its center → adding a black box to fill the rest and cover it with the boxart zoomed in with 20% transparency.

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Benefit: Users don’t have to try workarounds like splitting their platforms into regions or find/make new boxarts for foreign titles to fit into the collection. This option should stay optional to prevent riot of those who want it to stay as it is. This Solution is a simple way to fill the gaps without any additional images needed.

[Christian]

Premium users can do this via theming. Will leave open to track interest in an official feature that does this.

[Michael Mullins]

Going to affirm this feature request. The two primary use cases are where multiple platforms are displayed or, as in my case, mixing the Super Famicom (SF) and Super Nintendo (SNES) platforms into one. The aspect ratio of the boxes are very different, compounded by the fact that many SF game boxes chose whether to have a portrait or landscape orientation.

It looks like zooming the game display in LB is bounded by width. So vertical portrait SF boxes extend almost double the height of regular SNES boxes. Landscape SF boxes shrink to within the dictated width, which is fine, but that means their height is also much smaller. I think that’s probably an alright compromise as multiple display features in LB appear to hinge on consistent image width.

A possible small algorithm to address this:
1. Maximum width is maintained to not break LB display.

2. No image will exceed 1/3 the height of the images that are a) constrained by width and b) the tallest images constrained by width.

What that means is that you don’t have the super narrow landscape SF boxes dictating maximum height to all others, but a possible mixture of short (SF landscape), medium (SNES landscape), and tall (SF portrait restricted to 1/3 taller than SNES because SNES is the tallest of the two images width constrained) scaled reasonably with each other.

So a) does that make sense and b) seem like a reasonable image sizing compromise?

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