SNES mini theme

ruckage · 19 Sept 2018, 01:54

@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 · 19 Sept 2018, 06:51

@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 · 19 Sept 2018, 10:40

@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 · 19 Sept 2018, 10:48

@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 · 19 Sept 2018, 11:16

@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 · 19 Sept 2018, 11:38

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 · 19 Sept 2018, 13:30

@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 · 19 Sept 2018, 14:21

@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 · 21 Sept 2018, 19:28

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 · 23 Sept 2018, 20:49

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 · 23 Sept 2018, 21:11

@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 · 23 Sept 2018, 21:18

@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 · 24 Sept 2018, 09:19

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.

ruckage · 1 Oct 2018, 12:44

I've updated the theme to a version that now incorporates the full nes-mini theme. I have noticed a minor bug since uploading which I'll fix in the next few days (the background art always shows the European variant regardless of whether a USA style is used).

Additions:

nes_mini backgrounds: All the backgrounds from the nes-mini theme reworked slightly to fit this theme. Can also be used in snes modes.

nes_rich_europe and nes_rich_usa: mimics the original nes-mini theme including the system icons, borders, and system specific game lists. Works best with the nes_mini backgrounds

nes_simple_europe and nes_simple_usa: same as above except the gamelist is the same for all systems. Works well with any background.

New no_meta_g layout: New layout that show only the game list and nothing else (as requested by @hhromic )

'nes_rich_europe' using default layout.

'nes_simple_europe' with 'neon_green' background

The nes styles also support all layout options. ('no_meta_c' layout)

New 'no_meta_g' layout

Carcayu · 1 Oct 2018, 07:19

I don't know if it something related to the snes mini theme or the system, but I have found 2 problems /suggestions :

If in meta the description is short, I mean, like a phrase, then in the theme the description is cut in one line with a "..." at the end.

If in meta it specified multiple player options, like "1-2 players" then it don't show any icon, when It could show, for example, the 2 players icon

ruckage · 1 Oct 2018, 09:14

@carcayu said in SNES mini theme:

I don't know if it something related to the snes mini theme or the system, but I have found 2 problems /suggestions :

Hi @Cacryu, thanks for the feedback. These aren't actually problems with the theme.

If in meta the description is short, I mean, like a phrase, then in the theme the description is cut in one line with a "..." at the end.

This is just the way EmulationStation deals with long text, if it doesn't fit then it has to be truncated. It's not often a problem though in my experience and not something I can do anything about unfortunately.

If in meta it specified multiple player options, like "1-2 players" then it don't show any icon, when It could show, for example, the 2 players icon

This is explained in the '## CUSTOMISATION GUIDE ##' and is caused by your scraped data and not the theme. The icon system relies on the number of players being defined as single digit eg 1,2,3,4 etc.
However sometimes the scraped data for number of player is in the format '1-2' or '1-3' or '1-4' (this format is redundant in most cases). If you want to use the icons then you will need to edit your 'gamelist.xml' file to replace '1-2' with just '2' and '1-3 'with '3' etc. etc. You can use search and replace to do this.
Alternatively if you don't want to edit your gamelist.xml file you can display text instead of the icons for number of player which is one of the options you can set in the config.xml file

hhromic · 1 Oct 2018, 12:44

New no_meta_g layout: New layout that show only the game list and nothing else (as requested by @hhromic )

Thanks a million @ruckage! much appreciated :) And the new improvements are looking really nice!
I will check it out later at night after work. Kudos!

Carcayu · 1 Oct 2018, 15:04

@ruckage Thanks a lot. Anyway, this is not that EmulationStation cuts long words, which is something I understand, but It delete the last words in short description, let say description with 10 words, for example replacing not one long word, but last 5 words with a "...". Anyway, it is clear is something related to the system, not your theme. Thanks a lot!

skj · 1 Oct 2018, 16:11

@ruckage

Is this the new gridview Verizon?

ruckage · 1 Oct 2018, 16:45

@carcayu said in SNES mini theme:

@ruckage Thanks a lot. Anyway, this is not that EmulationStation cuts long words, which is something I understand, but It delete the last words in short description, let say description with 10 words, for example replacing not one long word, but last 5 words with a "...". Anyway, it is clear is something related to the system, not your theme. Thanks a lot!

Ah I see. Regardless it would be down to EmulationStation itself though I've never personally witnessed that happen. If it can be replicated you could report it as a bug on the retropie/emulationstation github.

@skj said in SNES mini theme:

@ruckage

Is this the new gridview Verizon?

No not yet, this is just to add nes-mini support.
Once this version is up and running perfectly I want to get it ported over to recalbox, then I can work on grid view and also add the missing systems.