Announcing Pegasus Frontend

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

Likely possible, though I've never used LaunchBox before. I can't seem to find any documentation about its files either, but if its some structured text file, that could be read.

They use XML as well. Honestly though in the long term I think it would be ideal if Pegasus had it's own way of managing/scraping data. Launchbox is also Windows only and one of the things I really like about Pegasus is that it's cross platform. I think one of the key elements that is holding back pretty much all launchers is their inaccessibility with managing libraries though. Launchers become a power user only thing when really the whole point is to make people's lives easier. ES2 actually does do a decent job (as does OpenEmu on the Mac) but ES2 is limited in what it can scrape and if you want to make and changes beyond adding new roms you have to start editing text files. Not very friendly.

I don't know if you ever do intend to tackle this issue but if so I'd be happy to put together a user flow/set of wireframes for how I have always wanted the experience to be.

Thanks, there are indeed a few interesting things, it seems as if some URLs might have changed on Steam side. Then there's another DirectShow doRender error at the bottom, maybe there's a different video format as well. Did Pegasus crash on exit or just randomly? Can the crash be reproduced with a specific game?

It just exited randomly. I can't reproduce it so I don't think it was game specific. Not a big deal at this point at all.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde Ideas are always welcome; if you put together something, I'll certainly take a look on, but I can't promise to implement it :) I agree that a metadata editor would be nice, and I'd like to add support for it eventually.

As for scraping though, I'm not sure about that yet. A scraper that's available for all the platforms Pegasus is doesn't sound bad, but I'm not sure I have the time and energy to start and maintain yet another free time project. There are a few scrapers already, so some kind of plugin system and integration would be more ideal, but a proper implementation of that looks similarly troublesome, and I wonder how many people would use that anyway. If there ends up a high demand for a scraper, I might start working on it, but right now it's not priority.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow totally agree and you're right, there are options that exist already so it's not that important.

By the way I tracked down the troublesome entries in that gamelist I posted before. I'm not entirely sure what within them is causing it to fail but removing these ones allows it to work. Hopefully this will make it easier to track down the issue.

https://pastebin.com/Rphv2fjU

-edit- actually it looks like these all have 4+ set as their players and this is what's causing it to fail. Removing the + in these entries allows it to parse.

PlayingKarrde

OK, I've made some good progress today. First off I want to say I love working with this launcher. Really, great job @fluffypillow . It's basically everything I've been looking for. I can do everything I wanted and more with this thing and feel like I've barely even scratched the surface. I really do feel like this can be a powerhouse app that puts everything else to shame once it hits full release.

Anyway, here's my progress so far:

Still a long way to go but I'm comfortable enough with the system now that I can make progress a lot faster. Very excited to keep going on this.

Some issues I'm having though:

Having some issues with fonts. I can't seem to get my own fonts to load for whatever reason
Steam backgrounds suck. They have a blue overlay built into them. I went with screenshots here but need a better solution for this. Not too worried about that right now though.
I haven't figured out how to get the selection to move around the grid in a vertical fashion and keep the even spacing yet. If anyone has some advice on this please let me know.
Still haven't figured how to get my own lists into this launcher yet haha

Seya16

Hey,
First of all, big thanks for your work, we can really see the progress and the potential of this software.
Here's my questions :
As an android user, I wanted to know if it's a way to add android games/apps into pegasus and create categories for it. Also if it's possible to use it as a main launcher.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde

-edit- actually it looks like these all have 4+ set as their players and this is what's causing it to fail. Removing the + in these entries allows it to parse.

Thanks! Yeah the + was indeed not handled. Is that even supported by ES?

First off I want to say I love working with this launcher.

That's good to hear :) And nice progress!

Some issues I'm having though:

You might want to take a look in the recent themes that also use custom fonts, like here. In general, you'd use FontLoader somewhere to load the font, then for a Text set the font.family to either the font's name or a FontLoader object's name property.
You mean keeping the selection in the middle row when going up/down? preferredHighlightBegin and End might help with that.
This page might help. If something's unclear just tell me :)

@Seya16 I'm not sure whether Android lets you list the apps as files, however it should be possible to add support for that internally as a data source (like ES2 and such). As for the main launcher, I don't plan to make Pegasus as one, as that'd need me to deal with things like home screens, widgets, app drawers and whatever else a launcher does.

Purg.Derren

I have strange controller issues on android. I tried with usb donge (wifi) or bluetooth controller, in pegasus-frontnend they always double-mapped (analog stick and d-pad) so i always skip 2 menu-entries / games instead of one by one. On Windows (partially same controllers) i have no issue.

Is there a way to "force divide" the left analog stick and the d-pad?

edit: tried on a android streaming box and the fire tv stick 3

sunwind

what's this frontend chooser? is it possible to add this onto an existing retropie installation?

mitu

@sunwind said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

what's this frontend chooser?

It's a game library and launcher, similar to Emulationstation - please read the 1st post and visit the homepage - http://pegasus-frontend.org.

is it possible to add this onto an existing retropie installation?

Yes. There is package you can install from the experimental section.

dudleydes

@sunwind The Frontend chooser is a graphical utility that lets you install the available frontends for RetroPie and select the one you would like as default. It's a neat way of testing the frontends on your system before you commit.

You can install it by following the instructions at the foot of this page: https://github.com/mmatyas/retropie-frontendchooser.

fluffypillow

@Purg-Derren someone has also just reported this issue a few days ago; does it used to work in older releases?

PlayingKarrde

Hey, how can I run as portable on the mac?

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde I think that should be open -a /path/to/Pegasus.app --args --portable

Purg.Derren

@fluffypillow not sure, first version i tried on android was alpha 9-59 i think (had already the problem) ..not sure about pre alpha 9

Also, the strange "super-zoom" effect is still there (all platfroms).
If there are only 3 or less (i beliefe it's max 3 items) games in a collection and you switch ONE collecttion for- or backward and then back again, the entries are "super-sized" - so they partially overlap.
If you go two or more steps for- and then back, then there is no such effect.

fluffypillow

@Purg-Derren

Also, the strange "super-zoom" effect is still there (all platfroms).

Yeah, that's an old bug in the default theme, the entry sizing logic is not 100% correct at the moment, but will get fixed eventually :)

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow

open -a /path/to/Pegasus.app --args --portable

Hmm. It's does open the app but it doesn't create the necessary directories, nor does it read from the folders within the same dir as the app. Although maybe I'm just assuming it should work the same as windows when in reality most things do not haha. I'm basically just trying to make theme development work cross platform but can't seem to get it going on the mac version. If you think it's not quite ready yet I can just stick to the PC one for now.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde yeah Mac apps are quite different from the rest of the releases :) As for portable mode, I've found that apparently local directories don't work for files with the "quarantine" property, which is default for downloaded apps it seems. You should be able to fix that with xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Pegasus.app.

fluffypillow

Weekly update!

macOS releases are now available
- See here for now, will update the main page too in the next days
- Note that support is still experimental due to lack of actual hardware. Bug reports are welcome!
Android: Pegasus can now list and launch other installed apps
- However, no metadata or assets are available yet; this will be improved in the future
- This feature can be turned on/off under Data sources in the Settings menu
- I've also experimented with allowing Pegasus to be set as the main launcher, but personally I've found it a bit too easy to set that accidentally, so I've stick to being a regular app for now
Logging improvements
- Colored output on terminals
- Timestamps in the log file
- General format improvements and fixes
Fixed portable mode
Fixed some Steam URLs not using HTTPS
Fixed some XML reading bugs in the ES2 converter tool
Developers: Moved the default theme to a separate repository

sunwind

@mitu Thank you

PlayingKarrde

So I'm trying to get my collections going and I'm using a third party scraper since I don't want to install emulationstation without portable mode (having to organise my roms where ES2 wants me to is never going to happen) but either the scraper I'm using is adding media to an unusual folder structure or Pegasus is using a strange format. I'm using Skraper.net since it seems the best for people not necessarily using RetroPie (which in this instance I'm not).

Your suggested structure is:

NES/
├─ collections.txt
├─ metadata.txt
├─ Contra (U).zip
└─ media/
   └─ Contra (U)/
      ├─ boxFront.jpg
      ├─ logo.jpg
      └─ video.mp4

But Skraper is doing this:

NES/
├─ collections.txt
├─ metadata.txt
├─Contra (U).zip
└─ media/
   └─ box2front/
        └─ Contra (U).png

Since the scraper doesn't add the links to metadata.txt file this isn't really a solution. I've searched through Skraper to see if I can rearrange things but I can't see to be able to make a configuration similar to the one you are suggesting.

Do you perhaps have a different scraper that you suggest that does indeed scrape media in file structure that Pegasus is looking for?