Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@Purg-Derren oh well, if it's such a requested feature, might as well re-add it :) I'll just make sure there's some documentation about how to undo it in case of accidents.

@PlayingKarrde the current organization was actually introduced only a few weeks ago (see the discussion starting here). The main points for the decision were the performance (raw speed) of deciding which game does an asset file belong to, avoiding corner cases in asset file naming and easiness of moving all assets of a game together.

As for the current scrapers, they all seem to have their own arrangement and generate ES2 files, which are actually supported. On the long term though, I'd prefer not being limited by the currently available tools of a different frontend, so I don't mind breaking the convention now and then.

fluffypillow

In other news, Patreon deleted my whole account because apparently I look suspicious (do I?). While I'm resolving the issue, the regular donation link is still available, in case someone is itching to buy me a coffee.

herb_fargus

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

In other news, Patreon deleted my whole account because apparently I look suspicious (do I?)

It's that Hungarian IP address. All those European hackers... Or ol ninty sawr their IP in a screenshot

PlayingKarrde

@Purg-Derren Ah cool thanks for that. Unfortunately I saw it after finishing my AHK script haha... oh well.

In any case, if anyone wants to use my script instead, just run your skraper on your roms, then place this in each folder containing your roms and run it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k4ztd1ewi0x07iu/OrganizeSkraperFiles_PLACE_IN_SAME_FOLDER_AS_ROM_FILES.exe?dl=0

Ideally it would just recursively read each platform folder but I don't really want to spend more time on it right now. Here's the script if anyone else wants to modify it/clean it up:

#NoEnv  ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
; #Warn  ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.
SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%  ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.

;FileSelectFolder, WhichFolder 
Loop, Files, %A_ScriptDir%\media\*, R
{
	MediaFileNameArr := StrSplit(A_LoopFileName, "."A_LoopFileExt)
	MediaName := MediaFileNameArr[1]

	PathArr := StrSplit(A_LoopFileDir, "media\")
	Path := PathArr[2]

	if (Path == "fanart")
	{
		renameTo := "background"
	} 
	else if  (Path == "screenshot")
	{
		renameTo := "screenshot"
	} 
	else if  (Path == "box2dfront")
	{
		renameTo := "boxFront"
	} 
	else if  (Path == "wheel")
	{
		renameTo := "logo"
	} 
	else if  (Path == "steamgrid")
	{
		renameTo := "steamgrid"
	}
	else if  (Path == "videos")
	{
		renameTo := "video"
	}
	else
	{
		renameTo := "skip"
	}

	if (renameTo != "skip")
	{
		FileCreateDir, %A_ScriptDir%\media\%MediaName%
		FileMove, %A_LoopFileLongPath%, %A_ScriptDir%\media\%MediaName%\%renameTo%.%A_LoopFileExt%, 0
	}
}

MsgBox, 0, Complete

I'd recommend making a backup of your folder just in case. Run at your own risk haha (it works fine for me...)

Darksavior

Any theme maker wanting ideas, this would be awesome to have in Pegasus. It's the official nes frontend for the Switch:

PlayingKarrde

@Darksavior If you're talking about the sidebar that's actually how I plan on implementing my collection menu.

SephirothX2004

Is there a way to display only the android apps you want and also how would i add media for them?

fluffypillow

@SephirothX2004 there's no support for these yet. But might come in the future.

PlayingKarrde

I'm getting a lot of performance issues on my theme when trying to implement video also. I've updated my codecs etc and not getting any playback errors in the log so I'm not sure what the issue is other than it just hitching due to trying to load the video into memory each time. Have you had any luck? Do you get hitching on your machine?

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde yes, I've done some measurements on Windows, and with the default theme, the hitching seems to actually happen on the video unloading, ie. when clearing the Video's playlist. I'll need to do some more testing, but so far that's what I see on this PC. However, increasing the delay before starting the video on game select seems to have fixed the issue (I've increased it to 1.5 seconds for testing but I think a few hundred ms should be more than enough).

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow I'm using 300ms for mine but even 1500 doesn't really change anything. I have a video on each delegate tho and I wonder if this has anything to do with it. When loading collections it is very unresponsive until everything has loaded and also there's a lot more hitching when navigating to new rows. Also, I'm not using playlists so I'm not sure that's what it is (at least in my case).

If you want to see what I mean here's my current WIP theme: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3frz1b7ievfqut6/gameOS.zip?dl=0

Also, unrelated but I'm getting tons of this log spam:

libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile

Can't seem to get rid of it. Doesn't affect anything, I just hate log spam haha

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde yes, the delay is caused by the creation of new Video objects for each delegate; creating one takes about 50-85ms, so ~15 of them appearing at once will end up with a visible impact (even without a set source). However, since only one of them will be actually playing content, it's not necessary to create all of them up front, or even create more than one. So as a workaround, you could add a Loader that would load a video player item when the delegate gets selected, and unload its content when deselected, for example.

Also, unrelated but I'm getting tons of this log spam:

Yeah that seem to be frequent among Steam images, but it shouldn't cause actual problems. Blame Valve :)

sunwind

I'd like to get into modding retropie and frontends etc myself, there's just so much to choose from, and I can't figure out how to get that frontend manager working on my existing installation, I went to install experimental packages and it's not there, tried yesterday anyway. am I gonna have to wipe my install and start over with pegasus frontend first, then install things on top of it? what's the 'best' install order etc?

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@PlayingKarrde yes, the delay is caused by the creation of new Video objects for each delegate; creating one takes about 50-85ms, so ~15 of them appearing at once will end up with a visible impact (even without a set source). However, since only one of them will be actually playing content, it's not necessary to create all of them up front, or even create more than one. So as a workaround, you could add a Loader that would load a video player item when the delegate gets selected, and unload its content when deselected, for example.

Yeah I was thinking of something along those lines (and for sure I knew having one mediaplayer per video was a terrible idea haha). I'll look into using a loader as that definitely sounds right. Thanks.

fluffypillow

@sunwind you can just unzip the release for your system somewhere to the SD card then launch it from the terminal. The frontend chooser is not in the RetroPie menu, only the individual frontends, you can get it here instead. The frontend chooser is simply a graphical tool for installing frontends and setting them to run on boot. They are just like any other program, you can install or remove any of them whenever you want.

Purg.Derren

nvm...

fluffypillow

No particularly interesting changes this week, due to local holidays. I do have a long list of pending tasks for the next weeks though, don't worry.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow What do you have on the cards?

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde there are a bunch of short term things like fixing the Steam slowness with the default theme, updating the Flixnet one or supporting Ctrl and co. for key bindings. After that, I'm planning to make some important changes in both the theme Api and the metadata text file format.

For themes, I'd like to change the way sorting and filtering works, and allow the data to appear multiple times with possibly different sorting/filters. In pactice, this means the ability to make a "recently played" list.

For the metadata files, I'd like to unify the format of the collections.txt and metadata.txt, so you wouldn't need to have 2 separate files. There are still some open questions like how to deal with multifile games and game launching in that case. Since it's a visible file format update, I'm trying to be careful about the changes, so there'll certainly be a discussion before it goes live.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow sounds awesome! Keep up the great work!