Carbon Light

nemo93

no worries. I'm a Debbie Downer remember? :) I'll give another try if you tell me it works smoothly on your side. Perhaps something is messed up on my Pi I didn't know.

Stuttering or not, I love this theme!!!

Rookervik

This is what I'm having to deal with for the extra description room:
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Putting it under the gamelist, or the meta data under the gamelist really breaks the separation of elements. This design would also keep me from using the theme myself since 2/3 of the right of the screen would be empty on my screen, and many others as well.

Personally, I'd prefer to delete all meta data and just keep screenshot. That's all I need to make a decision on whether I want to play a game or not.

Rookervik

(>.>) Me no like

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cyperghost

Changed from Carbon to this one :)
Smooth - Thank you :)

nemo93

I understand why you no like it... It doesn't look good definitely. Let me suggest two last things, then I swear I'll stop bothering you with my metadata/desc!!

possibilty to reduce the gamelist width and to increase "right panel" width so that boxart could remain the same size as it is now + means more room for metadata
if touching gamelist is a no-go any chance to increase width a bit more of the metadata? I found out there are some space that could be used for the text.

is there a way to change the scroll speed btw?

Oh and I've increased the gpu_mem to 384 (256 before) and same outcome... there is stuttering when fading between systems on the carousel and when long name scrolls (sliding is even worse). I've enabled the frame per second and under Carbon I got a solid 60fps constant whereas Luminous gives me 45fps on my pi2. I have 13 systems currently if that makes any difference.

as always many thanks for the time and for the themes!

PokeEngineer

@Rookervik

I actually like this better than the original carbon theme!

Rookervik

@nemo93

Reducing gamelist width will get complaints from most people as game names typically reach the edge of this gamelist as it is. Some end up scrolling. I think even you had something to say about scrolling game names lol. Scrolling speed is not something you can set from a theme.

Width of meta data can be increased some. I left space on the sides so the theme didn't look too compact.

It does sound, to me, that box art is not important to you, so we could make the box art very small and give you the entire right side for meta data. I'll have to see if I can make you a custom XML that is all about meta data. Or help you make your own custom xml. It's not too hard once you understand the percent system of the screen.

And with the changes I have been making, I kinda doubt I will use this theme... and I made it. I'll probably just stick with Pixel since it doesn't show meta data. Yeah, knowing the year and information on games would be nice, I am just too lazy to wait 20 hours for all my games to download the data. Then spend weeks fixing the incorrect information. Screenshots are good enough to showcase my games.

nemo93

hey @Rookervik don't worry and don't waste time for me only. I will for sure survive with my metadata stuff :) I'm enjoying already Luminous and I'll stick with it whatever changes you'll do to it :))) thanks a lot and now as promised I won't add any more comments!

Rookervik

About the speed of the theme... I doubt additional VRAM will increase the speed. The Pi already has enough VRAM to load all the elements. So extra VRAM won't speed anything up. It's just a lot of small elements on the screen.

Kind of funny that ES is built in a way that we can't use a large wallpaper, but you can put a lot of pieces together to make a large wallpaper... but that kills the system because it is so many graphics layered on each other. XD

I suppose I could flatten the wallpaper and just save it as a single 1280x720 wallpaper. Even a 128MB RAM split can load 1 or 2 of those wallpapers. Then there would only be 2 elements on the screen... the wallpaper, and the system logo. Could make things faster. Worth trying out I guess. :-)

Flavor

I saw the look of this one, and I had to try it.

As an aside, it really threw me off, because it didn't have its own directory in the ZIP, and I had to clean it all up, make its own "luminous" directory, and then unpack inside of that.

On to the real issue why I'm here: I'm looking for a theme that will be good on a small LCD (320x240). I want something very nice and clean, and Luminous seems to be just that. The problem I run into with all the themes so far is readability. I seem to like Zoid the best at the moment, but Luminous is very promising.

For the small LCD, the top priority is readability. Some themes use a crazy font or crazy colors. Dark text on a light background seems the best. Big box art without all the metadata is better (as the metadata is just taking up screen real-estate). Larger fonts would be even better, but I don't know if that's easy to implement or not.

Is there a good way to accommodate these issues into Luminous, or is there an easy way for me to hack/mod a theme to have the same look/feel but with high-contrast text with a better (maybe larger) font?

Rookervik

@Flavor There really aren't any themes that work real well on very small screens. I've been asked to make a small theme, but I haven't made it very far on it yet.

The main things you need is larger font size. Which can be achieved in the main xml file pretty easily.

Pixel works ok on small screens so long as you don't scrape data. That way you are presented with the "basic" game list with only system logo and game list...

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Otherwise, I suppose I should go ahead and work on the small screen theme. Do you have any suggestions when working on that one?

My idea for my Sega Nomad Raspberry Pi Zero was to have a massive screenshot, a couple lines of game name, and just the system title at the top. Like this:
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Flavor

@Rookervik Thanks for the quick reply. Maybe this idea of an small LCD-specific theme should be its own topic, as I don't want to hijack this one.

The Pixel theme is a good one for just about everything besides text. I don't prefer the dark background with light text, and the highlighted (currently selected) text is tough (on pretty much all themes, really).

I like your idea of the big screenshot (or box art) with just a little text. I do also like to see a list of game names, so I know what's available. I wonder if there's a good way to combine these.

Currently, the themes that show metadata (rating, release date, publisher, etc) don't seem to show the game name. They just highlight the game name (in the list of games) in a negative color scheme.

What if you had the list in one pane and the screenshot/boxart with a LARGE version of the game name (maybe multiple lines) in the other pane. This would be like your Streets of Rage II mockup, but that would just be one pane with the list next to it.

I do get your point about the Pixel theme without the scraped data. That makes it more readable. However, I do really like the boxart, because it gives a larger representation of the game where a player doesn't need to rely on the theme text font/color.

Rookervik

Sadly, and I really wish this was possible (I will add it to Zigurana's post about ES updates), you cannot put the game name anywhere on the screen other than the gamelist. I really really wish we could have the game name available as a theme element, buuuuut there's no way to add it to the theme.

Splitting the screen in half and having text on one side and pictures on the other will, in my opinion, be very hard to read. It depends on if your screen is truly 320x240 digital, or 320x240 composite where the chip actually scales a larger image down (thus making things a little easier to read)

In this example, it cuts off the text of most games -_-

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I'll make a post about a low-rez theme in the main Themes section.

Flavor

@Rookervik Here are some shots of my current testing setup.

I know the photos aren't top quality, but you can see the difference in readability. Pixel is pretty bad. The other 2 are readable with the black text on the light background being the best.

Rookervik

Yeah, looks like your display is digital. Mine is composite. So the chip scaled the image and made it a lot more readable than that. But I'd still rather have a digital display. Much more crisp.

We already know Meta-data has to go. There's no way you can read it on a small display, and there's no room for it.

You're right, the light background seems much more readable with dark text over it. Still, the text needs to be bigger.

Maybe keep the light theme, increase the gamelist width to fill more than half the screen and increase the font size , then squeeze the box art on the other side.

I can also hide the help text at the bottom. It's really really small on all the displays. Should also be able to make it a larger font if it's needed.

Pixel could work if the font was changed and increased in size. That's as easy as dropping a new font in the /art folder and editing the pixel.xml to use 0.3 or 0.32 or so font size on the game list.

Flavor

@Rookervik I actually have both a digital and a composite. I'm working with the digital one now, as I think it'll ultimately be better. I do like the "just works" aspect of the composite screen, though. :)

I do agree that Pixel has a nice layout and that its main downfall (for this) is the text font/color/size. I tried editing the XML, but it didn't seem to help. Maybe I did something wrong. I think the fontSize was set to 0.033 before I messed with it. If you have a pixel.xml for me to try, that'd be cool.

Is there a way to show the currently selected game in a way other than highlighting the whole line and changing the colors? I have yet to see any of the themes show the selected game in a very readable way. The most high contrast way to show the list would be white bkg with black text. Then, instead of recoloring the selected game, could it just draw a box around it, put an arrow in front of it, bold it, double its font size, etc?

Rookervik

@Flavor Go ahead and post more Low Resolution suggestions over in the thread for Low Resolution...
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2700/low-resolution-theme

Rookervik

Hmm, wondering if I can try something? What would happen if I removed the Meta Data names? Such as: "Released:, Developer:, Genre:," ? Would that be too confusing? So instead of this:

Released: 01/15/1997
Genre: Role Playing
Developer: Nintendo

It would look like this:

01/15/1997
Role Playing
Nintendo

This would make adjusting the elements WAY easier. And also anyone without meta data would see nothing, rather than a bunch of meta data names and no information.

Flavor

@Rookervik said in Carbon Light:

01/15/1997
Role Playing
Nintendo

This would make adjusting the elements WAY easier. And also anyone without meta data would see nothing, rather than a bunch of meta data names and no information.

I like that idea a lot, actually. I don't think it would be confusing. What else would those things mean? In some cases, I could see the developer being slightly confusing.

01/15/1997
Role Playing
RARE

"I know plenty of people that own that game. It's not rare. It's pretty common." :P

Rookervik

@Flavor I'm working on it right now. Positioning the meta data is so hard. Each element is formatted a little differently, so you can't just line them all up and give them the same Y and X positioning. You have to tweak each one. -_- Also, you can't give them justification... such as: right, center, left... like you can in some of the other tags. This is another reason meta data sucks a-hole.