SNES mini theme

allan.garcia

@ruckage You seems very arrogant to me. No further responses.

allan.garcia

@livefastcyyoung Well. Different from @ruckage I'm not asking for any credit or glory. The repository are public on GitHub and ANYONE can contribute. I just said some messages ago that @ruckage can use everything without even give me credit. I'm just sharing what I believe is good for others. If I didn't make myself clear you can use everything without give any credits. I close my case here.

ruckage

@allan-garcia said in SNES mini theme:

@ruckage Ok. So you're making merchandise to Retropie!?

I don't even know what that means. It's my preferred platform but I get no benefit from people using retropie.

@allan-garcia said in SNES mini theme:

@ruckage Ok. So you're making merchandise to Retropie!?
Why can't people use both?! And why YOU ALONE have to port to Recalbox?! What kind of precious work have to be done exclusively by you!?

People can use whatever platform they like. I created the theme and one reason I personally want to port it is to make sure it's done correctly.
I don't see why me wanting to handle the porting of this is a bad thing, I've put months of work into the theme and I've always been clear on where I stand regarding modifications.

A Former User

@allan-garcia said in SNES mini theme:

@livefastcyyoung Well. Different from @ruckage I'm not asking for any credit or glory.

This is a flat out lie. This is taken directly from the Readme on your Github:

"Theme designed by Ruckage
Version 1.05
(Ported to recalbox by Allan Garcia)
Version 1.05recalbox
03/12/2017
(Ported at 17/09/2018)"

That sure looks like a credit to me.

A Former User

@allan-garcia This isn't an issue of arrogance. It's both a matter of principal and the fact that by allowing random forks, once the theme is updated every fork will be out of date. So many people fork things, lose interest after a month and that's that. By waiting for the official project owner to port it, you are assured that all updates will be done in unison and that you are getting the experience set out by the creator.

What you are doing is selfish, short sighted, and nothing but a means of getting your name out there. Again, if you want to port it for your personal machine, that is fine. You have no right to distribute this project however.

allan.garcia

@livefastcyyoung @ruckage To prevent future whining about this matter I'm taking the repository offline. Best regards.

FlyingTomahawk

Never mind.

ruckage

@allan-garcia
Thank you for taking down the repository, you seem to have taken this very personally which was not the intent. As I originally said I'm flattered that you liked the theme enough that you wanted to port it. And wanting to contribute to help others is admirable but that doesn't change my stance on this.

If the time comes that I no longer wish to continue work on the theme I may change the license but while I'm still actively working on and updating the theme I don't think I'm being unreasonable in asking that modified versions not be shared.
It does seem that the majority of regular users here and on the Recalbox forum are very respectful of anyone who contributes to the respective projects and certainly I don't know of any regular users here who would knowingly step on anyone's toes by creating derivatives of another's theme without getting explicit permission first.

I really don't like this kind of confrontation, it's a real downer.

I'd just like to say thanks to everyone here who shows support for my work, I appreciate it and it does make the effort worthwhile.

p.s thanks @LiveFastCyYoung for sticking up for me.

FlyingTomahawk

@ruckage said in SNES mini theme:

I don't know of any regular users here who would knowingly step on anyone's toes by creating derivatives of another's theme without getting explicit permission first

Guilty as charged! But then again I am no "regular" user :-P
That was long ago and we luckily cleared that. Now I would say we are good buddies, I hope, and I am proud to call you a friend.

ruckage

@flyingtomahawk said in SNES mini theme:

@ruckage said in SNES mini theme:

I don't know of any regular users here who would knowingly step on anyone's toes by creating derivatives of another's theme without getting explicit permission first

Guilty as charged! But then again I am no "regular" user :-P
That was long ago and we luckily cleared that. Now I would say we are good buddies, I hope, and I am proud to call you a friend.

😂 I'd forgotten about that. That was slightly different circumstances as I never released the theme and I think everyone assumed I'd disappeared as I was away for a long while due to ill health. But it was sorted out very quickly with no hard feelings at all, and I absolutely consider you a good friend.

Speaking of 'that theme 😛 I have a wip update to my original NewGen theme that I plan to release at some point, It's layout is slightly modified and it has a few other changes so the 2 themes can happily live side by side. If you don't mind though I may want to borrow your system descriptions to save me having to come up with my own (I'll obviously give you credit for them though if that's okay).

FlyingTomahawk

@ruckage said in SNES mini theme:

Speaking of 'that theme 😛 I have a wip update to my original NewGen theme that I plan to release at some point, It's layout is slightly modified and it has a few other changes so the 2 themes can happily live side by side. If you don't mind though I may want to borrow your system descriptions to save me having to come up with my own (I'll obviously give you credit for them though if that's okay).

You serious!? Oh man I definitely want to see that theme! And I am sure not the only one.
Hell, take what ever you need, no credits necessary at all.
I also don't mind taking down my theme. You say the word and it's done. I have no emotional attachment to it.😉

ruckage

@flyingtomahawk

Thanks, and I'll definitely credit you as I'm sure there was a lot of work put into writing the descriptions (I only had a handful written up and found it quite time consuming). No need to take the Futura theme down, people like it and the new version of NewGen is different enough that people can have a choice then.

hhromic

hi @ruckage !
your themes are really nice, I started using the SNES mini some time ago and love it very much!
suggestion: it is possible to include a "no-meta-no-image" layout as well? I personally don't scrape games and with the "no-meta" layout I still have some space waste with the always-empty image box. Basically it would be just the name of the roms along the screen (like in Carbon).
Thanks a million again!

ruckage

@hhromic said in SNES mini theme:

hi @ruckage !
your themes are really nice, I started using the SNES mini some time ago and love it very much!
suggestion: it is possible to include a "no-meta-no-image" layout as well? I personally don't scrape games and with the "no-meta" layout I still have some space waste with the always-empty image box. Basically it would be just the name of the roms along the screen (like in Carbon).
Thanks a million again!

Thanks, glad you like the theme. A no image version is possible but I'm not sure when I'll add it as I have some changes I need to make first and those wanting a layout without any preview images are probably in the minority.

hhromic

@ruckage no problem at all. I fully understand that we the non-scrappers probably are low-priority :) no rush indeed! I was mostly suggesting for completeness' sake. For me is sufficient that you consider this layout option in your todo list. Looking forward for the upcoming improvements!

ruckage

Just a quick update on the theme. I'm currently in the process of porting over the nes-mini theme to the snes mini theme the aim being that the snes,nes, and famicom mini themes will all be contained within one big customisable theme. It will hopefully be easier maintaining 1 theme rather than 3 separate themes and it will also mean that the Nes-mini theme can benefit from all of the customisation options of the Snes mini theme.

So far I have all the backgrounds ported over, it took a fair amount of work as despite the layouts of the themes being very similar the borders are actually larger on the snes mini theme so I've had to adjust all the backgrounds to take this into account. Likewise the nes borders had to be adjusted to match the taller borders used on the snes theme.

There is still quite a bit to do but its looking good so far and I hope everyone will be happy with this change.

ruckage

Well I've been working on this solidly since my last post and it's been a bit of headache. The first problem I had to overcome was the gamelist art. On the nes-mini theme the gamelist art is different for every system and is part of the background image.

I wanted the gamelist separate to the background so that the snes-mini layout system would work when in nes-mini mode. So I separated out and adjusted all the gamelist art to make it suitable for this theme but then I realised I would actually need 4 copies of each of these as some of the layouts have the gamelist at different widths.
To make life a little easier i made a small program to chop up the gamelist art and create images in the 4 different widths I needed (236 images in total). First major problem solved and the gamelist art is now working perfectly in the theme.

Then came my next problem which I'm currently working on. The text, selector bar, and in some cases metadata window colours are also different for every system. My original idea was to use the system.theme variable to call a corresponding xml file describing the colors - but then I remembered variables don't work in the <include> tags. Doh!

So I have three options it seems:

I can be lazy and just use the same colours for for all systems: not keen on this as I like the different colours and I don't think nes-mini theme users would like it either.
I could probably rework the theme and have a theme folder for every system with all the colour information. This would enable an almost exact reproduction of the nes-mini theme but would be a real pain and would make life very difficult if changes were needed in the future. Not to mention I specifically designed this theme so it wouldn't need individual system folders.
I can generate a set of images for each system with all the label text, selector bar, ratings icons, etc. The only elements that would have to remain the same for each system would be the text in the gamelist and the metadata text. This would result in needing to create another huge batch of images however (472 more images with the current system count). On the plus side it would require minimal changes to the theme xml files.

I think I will probably have to go with option 3, it's not ideal and is a messier solution than I'd really like but its the best of the 3 options I have.

I think I need a break and possibly a drink now as I've been working on this since 7.30 this morning (it's now 21:45). I'll provide an update once I've made some more progress.

A Former User

@ruckage said in SNES mini theme:

I think I need a break and possibly a drink now as I've been working on this since 7.30 this morning (it's now 21:45). I'll provide an update once I've made some more progress.

Just sent you a donation to get a couple drinks. :)

ruckage

@livefastcyyoung
Thanks very much, that's very kind of you 😀 🍻
I'm going to go and watch a good horror film I think and enjoy a nice tipple.

ruckage

After a bit of a break and good nights sleep I came up with an idea. I'm sticking with option 3 as it still seems to currently be the best option but I'm going to automate the process of generating the needed images by encoding the colour information in all my gamemlist art (basically adding a few pixels in the top corner of each image that relate to colours/transparency). I can then adapt the program I made to read this info and generate all the assets in the chosen colours and sorted into folders ready to transfer over to the theme.