what about adding a cheevos flag in gamelist.xml ?

meleu

@pjft man, what you did is nothing more than perfect for RetroPie/RetroAchievements users. If it won't be merged I'll find a way to patch your changes into ES code everytime I update it from source.

hansolo77

It's a bummer it looks like project leader is opposed to adding this simple addition. It doesn't do anything to the system for non users. But it adds functionality for those that do, and sets up future-proof for new users.

pjft

@meleu We can always turn your scraper into, rather than adding <achievements> tags, just auto-generate collection files that users can load into their systems. That's probably a saner option rather than patching the code.

@everyone here: let's not get personal. These decisions need to be done, and they're never easy. Nobody likes to be the person saying "no" to people, but in truth, the job of a good product manager is saying "no" most of the time.

If this makes it in, happy days. If it doesn't, happy days as well. We still all have a great platform to enjoy and play with, and a great community to boot.

hansolo77

I'm not taking it personal. I didn't even mention names. :) I was just saying it's a bummer. But I totally agree with what you said. Maybe adding a filter is the wrong way to go. I wasn't fully on board with the flag approach to being with. I think the custom collections approach is a better way to do it. There's really no extra steps involved to get the list. It's on it's own system. With filters, you have to go into a system that has cheevo games in them in the first place, and then customize the sort. But unless a user is willing to do little more work (which would be required anyway with filters too) there is nothing even hinted at in ES that a cheevo "system" is in place.

Sano

Hi guys.
Sorry I wasn't here for a while. I'm really sorry to read all this.

Just an idea I didn't read on the PR : as the main issue with project leaders seems to be the impact on the interface (as well as specificity with retroarch), would it be acceptable to not have any change in the interface without editing for example the '/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/es_settings.cfg' file ?
So there would be no noticeable change for regular users, but advanced/interested users could enable the feature by simply adding a line in a config file, enabling the filter/metadata/whatever ?

hansolo77

Yeah that's where I was getting at with the dedicated Collections gamelist. There is NOTHING in ES that even suggests there is functionality built in for it. Yet, if somebody were inclined, there actually IS functionality. A simple writeup in the RetroPie Docs explaining what you need to do to activate it and use it would be all that's required. Almost like a 'PORT'. It's not necessarily installed by default (although there's no reason not to), and it's there for somebody who wants to use it. A user would still have to scrape their roms, either to have the FLAG or to build a custom Collection. But if the "holding back" is related to having a visible indication inside ES to non-users, then a custom collections method is a good solution because there wouldn't be anything there.

meleu

Guys, there's no reason to feel so down. Jools said: "I haven't made a decision on this, I am just not convinced it is required yet."

So if you guys have good arguments, maybe you can say something. But I've already put some reasons why it would be a good addition here, try to not be repetitive.

robertybob

With all the exciting developments going on in Emulationstation this year, I think it'll be a crying shame if something RetroAchievements-related isn't added. It's such a good idea and one that, if more widely known, would make RetroPie even more attractive to users.

Yes only (some) RetroArch emulators are compatible, however I'm willing to bet that most users spend most of their time on said emulators anyway!

Worst case scenario, would it be possible for your flag to be installable via the RetroPie experimental menu (i.e. rebuilds the stable ES but with the flag added)? If we can have a 3do emulator (which doesn't even really work on a Pi) within the Experimental section, then why not this? It would be used by many more people.

meleu

@robertybob said in what about adding a cheevos flag in gamelist.xml ?:

Worst case scenario, would it be possible for your flag to be installable via the RetroPie experimental menu

If you're talking about a EmulationStation fork only with this feature, EmulationStation development fragmentation is strongly unwanted.

But I'm sure we will find a satisfactory solution for this. Let's just wait a little... ;-)

robertybob

@meleu Not as a separate branch, but a patch that, if Emulationstation was updated, would still be there. ...I suppose when you update ES it deletes the existing installation, rather than installing over the top of it? (I have no idea how it all works)

pjft

@meleu What would you think about the output of your script being custom-collection files? They're just plain text files with the absolute path to the ROMs, one per line, named custom-<name>.cfg, and stored in ~/.emulationstation/collections.

If you were to generate, say, custom-nes achievements.cfg and add it to that folder, the user only needs to go to the collections menu and enable it. You'd have a dedicated system with all NES games with achievement support, in this case.

Just a thought. Might be easier to generate, easier to use, and not depend on any changes to ES, which would alleviate the current concerns in that thread.

@robertybob the concept makes sense, but the patch itself would need to be updated as with any ES developments the code may change in ways that it would render the patch changes incompatible.

meleu

@pjft said in what about adding a cheevos flag in gamelist.xml ?:

@meleu What would you think about the output of your script being custom-collection files? They're just plain text files with the absolute path to the ROMs, one per line, named custom-<name>.cfg, and stored in ~/.emulationstation/collections.

The hascheevos is already able to do such thing, as in this example. But I'll make it easier.

Thanks for the suggestion. ;-)

pjft

@meleu If you output in that format and filename, to that folder, then they'll automatically show up in the "Custom Collections" menu to be enabled. That'll make it easy for the user to immediately have access to a collection in ES filtered with only achievements titles.

EDIT: if you want to go the extra step, though I wouldn't especially encourage it myself, you may then also edit the es_settings.cfg file automatically and add those files to the enabled custom collections list. It's riskier, though, as if something goes wrong ES may stop working :)

hansolo77

That's how I'm doing it. Although I don't have it broken down into individual systems (nes-cheevo, mega drive-cheevo, etc). I just have 1 big system called "Achievements, and all the games are in there. Works great!

meleu

@pjft OK bro, I'm working on hascheevos to make it create the custom collections cfg files. Is there some doc on how to use it? I think I've figured out how to use it based on yours and @cyperghost 's posts, but I can't see any mention to it in ES section of docs.

pjft

@meleu no, I haven't had the chance to document those there yet, apologies.

What I stated is effectively how it works. If you go to the folder and open one of the files you'll understand how it's meant to be fairly quickly.

But let me know if any questions arise, definitely!

cyperghost

@meleu @pjft
Yes all is wrapped up here but indeed there is no docu about the HOW-TO-Use system from ES.

Collections file got structure custom-ANY FILENAME.cfg in path /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/collections

Collections file got structure
$pathtomainrom/$system/$romname
Last character is \n for newline. Look here in MAME 1th anniversary thread

meleu

@cyperghost your posts were from where I learned the most about this feature. ;-)
Thanks for sharing!

cyperghost

@meleu
So you may create RetroAchievements for each system ...
Use your haschevos tool and then compare with user ROMset and write filehit to collection for system....

As every user gots different name for ROM this way via checksum would be the generic usage. As you put a lot of time in the development of the cheevos_scraper it would be just angry to loose the progress.
:D

For retro-gods sake @pjft used a straight system to make the collections work ;) It's very powerfull and it would be just fair to set this ES development as milestone.

meleu

I'm working on that. If you are curious here is what I've done so far: https://github.com/meleu/hascheevos/pull/11

I'm coding away from my RetroPie (cygwin on windows), then I'm currently unable to actually test it. Will try it later.