Scraping Switch Games giving pretty bad issues.

[Fugus]

Using the latest stable build, not the beta. When you update a game, half the time it isn’t giving you access to all the media.

Examples are Sonic Origins, https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/images/163332

When it comes to the front cover, it will automatically download the Japan front cover even though I have my priority for United States as #1 and North America as my #2.

So I try and update it manually to choose the proper one, it says I only have 1 possible image for that front cover and not even trying let me choose between the other options when they even have 2 alternatives that are within my regions I selected.

MegaMan Legacy collection is doing similar with the lack of options as well as
Pokemon Shining Pearl
World of Final Fantasy: Maxima
Star Ocean: First Departure: R

And that is just at a glance. Not sure if there is any issues with any other system because those all seemed to scrape properly but the switch media seems all jacked up where the database on the website will say it has 5 different media options for a certain type for the actual app to say you only have a single one or even none for one of them (Had a fan art option that wouldn’t show up at all with no other front box options in the database at all) and I waiting for a day or two watching one of them and then forcing a database update on my end and trying again before I made this just to see if maybe the media was taking a day or two to filter down to the database file itself.

[brian]

This is most likely due to your game's region, which I’m going to guess is not set. You can test this with Sonic Origins. Edit the game and see what’s filled into your Region field. If it’s blank, add North America to it. Remove the media you already downloaded, then run through the metadata and media wizard and see the results.

What you saw was not LaunchBox downloading the Japanese box, it was downloading the World box, which is incorrectly labeled in this case. World region is supposed to be reserved for a box that was used across the world in any region, so just by having a different Japanese and North American box negates the use of the World region tag.

Basically, what’s happening here is that it will first look for an image that matches your game’s region, but since you don’t have one, it then looks to see if there is a World region’d image, because if there is one then it should apply to any version of the game. If there isn’t one, then it will fall back to your region priorities. There’s also more to the algorithm, but that’s the only part that matters to your particular scenario here.

[Fugus]

I have my regions set as “United States” as my primary with “North America” as my fallback and it isn’t an issue with the other systems as far as I can tell.

And regardless of which region you choose, if you manually select the game and click “Download Media” it typically gives you the option to download them all and even then it doesn’t other options and just the single image I have.

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[Fugus]

And that was of Sonic Origins which has 5 different front box images on the database but only has a single image show up on this.

[brian]

Based on your response it’s clear that I wasn’t very clear with how it works. Let me see if I can try again.

In its very essence the way the entire system works is this.

You import a game from a specific region. Sometimes that region is part of the file name, like: 90 Minutes - European Prime Goal (Europe).7z

If it is part of the file name, we pull that value, and place it into your game’s Region field:

Then, we check the database for any images you’ve requested to download using that region:

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That’s essentially it. It doesn’t actually use your region priorities. You import a Japanese game, we pull the Japanese artwork.

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Where this falls apart is when you import a game and we cannot determine what the game’s region is, or when we don’t have an image for your game’s region, and that is another process altogether. Let’s use Sonic Origins as an example.

Let’s say you import Sonic Origins, and we cannot tell what Region it’s from because it’s not listed in the filename. This would leave the Region field blank like this:

In this scenario, it will search the database for images using the World region. In this scenario, it finds one and downloads it (like I said previously, this image on the database shouldn’t really be there):

Let’s assume that you manually went in and filled out the region field as United States.

It would first search our database for an image that’s tagged with United States. If you check the images for this game on the database, you will notice that there isn’t one. So then, it will try and find one marked with World (since this is assuming that the World region is used correctly. World region is for games that had one box used throughout the whole world). In this scenario it finds that one above and downloads it.

Let’s assume someone removed the World region image for Sonic Origins from our database. Then the way it works is this:

It searches the database for an image tagged with United States and it doesn’t find one, so then it searches the database for an image tagged with the World region and it doesn’t find one. Then, it searches the database using your Region Priorities (here is where your region priorities settings do matter), In your case, it would first search for United States again and not find one, then it will search for North America and find a match and download that image.

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Couple things to keep in mind:

• This only applies to any of the bulk import / media download wizards and does not apply to a game’s manual download of media. That process works completely differently
• This does not apply to EmuMovies media. Their database does not include regionalized versions of images.

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[Fugus]

I have tried manually setting the region, it changed nothing on the end results. And I wasn’t using EmuMovies either, I have a lifetime account for them but I learned its safer to manually import from them since they lack the database system you guys have.

And you can see in the second image where I went ahead and scraped it manually it has “Box-Front(1)” where the client isn’t even seeing the other images and its not doing it for any other system that I noticed but switch.

[brian]

Like I said at the end, none of this is relevant to game specific media downloads. I haven’t yet talked about how that works, but it essentially tries to only show you relevant media to download based on your region.

At this point, I’m not sure what to tell you, I’ve tested this already multiple times using your example games and the logic seems to be working just fine based on what I listed out in this post. Hopefully this post can be used to educate anyone in the future that may need an understanding of the inner workings of the bulk media download wizard logic.

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[Fugus]

Oh well, maybe something corrupted in my client install, will try and redo it and see if it fixes it.

All I know is that it doesn’t matter if I choose an automatic scraping or a manual one and it doesn’t matter if I specify a region or not but those games only want to give a single option to download from the client and ignores the rest. If it works on your end, it has to be something on mine.

Thank you for your time on this.