RetroPie forum home
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Home
    • Docs
    • Register
    • Login

    Carbon Theme Suggestions

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Projects and Themes
    themes carbon
    252 Posts 41 Posters 173.6k Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • mattrixkM
      mattrixk @Rookervik
      last edited by

      @Rookervik That's great news. Speaking of your Pixel theme, I've been plugging away at it, and I have something to show:

      img

      I'm contemplating making the top images smaller so you can see the background around them, or maybe moving the console image to the top-middle and making the description go full width.

      As you can see I'm using all of your graphics, except for the borders. I tried creating my own backgrounds, but they just don't look as good as yours.

      The Detailed view is still very much WIP:

      img

      The basic placement of everything is where it should be, now it's just tweaking metadata placement, making room for Kid-Friendly icons and recreating your background with the larger squares.

      Also for some reason I'm completely unable to get the gamelist to be lowercase, even though I have forceUppercase set to 0.

      Once it's all done and ready for use I'll be making a post for it so others can download it.

      My ES themes: MetaPixel | Spare | Io | Indent

      RookervikR 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • qraygQ
        qrayg @Rookervik
        last edited by qrayg

        @Rookervik

        Awesome. I love creating realistic vector art. Here's a PS Vita I made for the OpenEmu community... 100% vector:

        http://i.imgur.com/QvLLVUn.png


        http://qrayg.com

        RookervikR 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • qraygQ
          qrayg @Rookervik
          last edited by

          @Rookervik said in Carbon Theme Suggestions:

          Please think of releasing your theme for the community to use. More choices is always better.

          This will probably not happen. I renamed all of the themes to scope them, pcengine is now nec-turbografx and I added a nec-tuboduo for CD based games since they should not be merged... every system has been scoped and logically named along with my rom folders so everything is consistent and appeases my OCD. So even if I did release it, it would not be usable unless people edited their es_systems.cfg to point to the scoped theme/rom folder names. I also do not want themes for PC, Apple, Amiga, etc. so I removed them. I just want home console emulation so my theme just supports what I need.


          http://qrayg.com

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • RookervikR
            Rookervik Global Moderator @mattrixk
            last edited by Rookervik

            @mattrixk That's looking pretty slick! I hope the extra graphics on the system select don't end up going over the 128MB vram barrier. Still looks very neat!

            You you might need to check several places for capitalization. ES loads the pixel.xml and each theme.xml from the system folders. The theme.xml will take priority so if the theme.xml has uppercase in the gamelist, it will overwrite the pixel.xml.

            PS. Love those box art/screenshot combos!

            mattrixkM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • RookervikR
              Rookervik Global Moderator @qrayg
              last edited by

              @qrayg That, sir, is very pretty! Sounds like you have your hands full in the other communities. :D

              I've also been thinking about the icons for the retropie menu. I'll probably try a set of "modern" icons and submit them to the devs. See if they like em. Just have to find a way to get them seen on both light and dark backgrounds, and not conflict with other themes' designs too much.

              qraygQ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • qraygQ
                qrayg @Rookervik
                last edited by

                @Rookervik Here's an example of simple clean icons (can be exported to vector too) that work on both light and dark backgrounds. http://i.imgur.com/Q3Xso7h.png

                I just whipped this up in a matter of seconds. If we really spent some time on it we could make some high quality flat-ish icons that would work nice for any color scheme. This example uses transparency so it blends in with whatever color scheme is active.


                http://qrayg.com

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • RookervikR
                  Rookervik Global Moderator
                  last edited by Rookervik

                  Yeah those look nice. Transparency works fine in ES. Don't necessarily need the shadows. Seem like badges. Yeah I can make a series of those. Or something similar. They'll end up looking similar in scope to what Pipplware already has.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • RookervikR
                    Rookervik Global Moderator
                    last edited by

                    "I just whipped this up in a matter of [dozens of minutes]." Like, 4 dozen minutes. LOL. So many ways to go. Dunno to go with outline, no outline, dark accents, light accents. They all look about the same. I've never been a fan of the mac-style icons. But they do seem quite popular these days. "Less is more." Even Windows 8/10 has gone the modern route.

                    undefined

                    qraygQ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • mattrixkM
                      mattrixk @Rookervik
                      last edited by

                      @Rookervik said in Carbon Theme Suggestions:

                      That's looking pretty slick! I hope the extra graphics on the system select don't end up going over the 128MB vram barrier. Still looks very neat!

                      Thanks @Rookervik. I don't really know how the VRAM works, but so far the whole theme weighs in at 175KB (including all images), but I've only done MegaDrive and SNES so far. I won't be doing all the available systems, just the ones that I use, but it shouldn't be too hard for others to add their own.

                      PS. Love those box art/screenshot combos!

                      I got them from @ruckage on the old PetRockBlog forum here. They are fantastic but It's unfortunate he only has them for SNES, MegaDrive, arcade and PC Engine. I've been meaning to try reaching out to him to see if he has any others.

                      I've done a bit more on the theme. It's just about ready for me to start putting in the other systems. Now I just need a good name.

                      img

                      My ES themes: MetaPixel | Spare | Io | Indent

                      AliendonA 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • AliendonA
                        Aliendon @mattrixk
                        last edited by

                        @mattrixk
                        Good work, i really like, Pixel Theme is my all time favorite theme but ithis one your making is really sweet.

                        mattrixkM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • mattrixkM
                          mattrixk @Aliendon
                          last edited by

                          Thanks @Aliendon.

                          Once it's ready I'll be giving it its own post, and people can download it. Lots of testing to do first though. It may take a while as I don't have much free time.

                          My ES themes: MetaPixel | Spare | Io | Indent

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • qraygQ
                            qrayg @Rookervik
                            last edited by

                            @Rookervik said in Carbon Theme Suggestions:

                            I've never been a fan of the mac-style icons. But they do seem quite popular these days. "Less is more." Even Windows 8/10 has gone the modern route.

                            These look nice. My suggestion was just a simple example, I was really thinking that the icons go down more of a Material road.


                            http://qrayg.com

                            lilbudL RookervikR 3 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • lilbudL
                              lilbud @qrayg
                              last edited by

                              @qrayg I have a set of those. I use them for my theme.

                              Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade

                              Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • RookervikR
                                Rookervik Global Moderator @qrayg
                                last edited by

                                @qrayg Holy crap that's some complicated stuff. I like it tho! :D Been working on the icons and little here and there. Wish there was an easier way to paste screenshots than posting to imgur. So I won't bother at the moment. Once I get them all done. Now, off to make dinner for the family! <3

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • RookervikR
                                  Rookervik Global Moderator @qrayg
                                  last edited by

                                  @qrayg Holy crap that's some complicated stuff. I like it tho! :D Been working on the icons and little here and there. Wish there was an easier way to paste screenshots than posting to imgur. So I won't bother at the moment. Once I get them all done. Now, off to make dinner for the family! <3

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • RookervikR
                                    Rookervik Global Moderator
                                    last edited by

                                    Hokay. Didn't follow the rules of the google link, but they did give me some ideas. I'll have to read up on that and see about putting it to practice. I can see the EmulationStation logo is designed by those rules.

                                    Anyway, this is what I have so far. Can't stand massive, 2 color icons, so I added a couple little accents so I still liked them. Now I need to test them out and see how they look. Only logo I didn't recreate by hand was the Raspberry Pi Foundation logo. I stole that SVG and killed the colors. Hope they don't mind. Oh, that last one was my idea of the Run Command. Exobuzz's rocket launch was a WAY better idea. LOL.

                                    undefined

                                    RookervikR 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • RookervikR
                                      Rookervik Global Moderator @Rookervik
                                      last edited by Rookervik

                                      Eh, this stuff looks crappy. I need to replace the old icon frame that the original Carbon had. And SVG loading is SLOOOOW on Pi. Poor little thing. A SVG version of one of these icons weighs in at 97kb and takes a full 1 second to load. A PNG version of the icon weighs in at 20kb and loads instantly.

                                      Makes me wonder if I should just replace all of the SVGs in the theme with PNGs and see if that speeds up the theme. I know Pixel uses no SVGs at all, and it's the fastest theme I've ever used. Luminous and Carbon have almost exclusively SVG and they're quite slow. Hmmm....

                                      Update: Yeah, adding the frame again helps. File was already in there. Must have been removed when I changed all of the meta data position.

                                      undefined

                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • RookervikR
                                        Rookervik Global Moderator
                                        last edited by

                                        Maybe some love for the non-scraped basic view? SVGs may cause memory issues with this. I'd have to test it.

                                        undefined

                                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • B
                                          Belowstupid
                                          last edited by

                                          This post is deleted!
                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • S
                                            sc0tt88
                                            last edited by sc0tt88

                                            I'd really like to upgrade to the newest carbon theme, a lot of the screenshots here look way better than the one on my pi. However...

                                            Would you be able to add more custom logos for other systems? TG16, Supergrafx, Genesis hacks, Snes hacks?

                                            When is it ready? Love the colour changes.

                                            Also... I just updated and not sure if it's the latest version you mention here? But the "Released:" and "Genre:" and "Developer:" etc are left aligned which looks a bit odd. It would look better right aligned so that the colons are aligned

                                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                            • First post
                                              Last post

                                            Contributions to the project are always appreciated, so if you would like to support us with a donation you can do so here.

                                            Hosting provided by Mythic-Beasts. See the Hosting Information page for more information.