moonlight: request for comments and testing

hhromic

Bingo! That's the problem, yes. Your $HOME/RetroPie folder is indeed mounted on a vfat (FAT32) partition instead of the home ext4 partition. Good, we found the cause!
I will think on a solution to keep this scenario happy. I don't want to simply remove the : characters as they are nice for the filesystems that do support them. When I have something I will come back, thanks!

hhromic

@LeSabotageur ok I think I solved it now for you. Can you update your local moonlight scriptmodule patch?

What it is doing now is to check if the rom directory filesystem supports special characters. If this is the case then no mangling is done (for example for ext4 partitions). On the other hand, for these filesystems that do not support special characters (for example for vfat partitions), then these are removed from the config filename. In any case the value given to appin the config is always the full name given in your GFE configuration, so all should work.

Let me know if you can generate your config files now. Thanks for the testing, I would never have noticed this by myself as I don't use vfat partitions for my roms :)

A Former User

@hhromic: Did some more testing, and noticed a slight oddity. When loading The Witcher 3 from the autogenerated .ml file, the controller no longer works. If I load up Steam first, and then The Wither 3 from there, everything works. Let me know if you've got any logs you'd like me to grab / need any other info.

LeSabotageur

@hhromic It worked ! I now see them in my steam folder.
Thanks once more for your help, I'll come back here if I ever have something to report, but in the meantime, I'm gonna enjoy some PC-gaming action in couch mode :)

hhromic

@jml said in moonlight: request for comments and testing:

@hhromic: Did some more testing, and noticed a slight oddity. When loading The Witcher 3 from the autogenerated .ml file, the controller no longer works. If I load up Steam first, and then The Wither 3 from there, everything works. Let me know if you've got any logs you'd like me to grab / need any other info.

Let me understand your issue first. You have two .ml config files like this (maybe you have address in them if you are not using autodiscovery):

A Steam.ml file:

config = /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight/global.conf
app = Steam

And a The Witcher 3.ml file:

config = /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight/global.conf
app = The Witcher 3

Then, when you launch The Witcher 3.ml directly, your controller doesn't work. But if you launch Steam.ml and inside Big Picture Mode you launch the game, it works. Is this the case?

Thanks for testing!

hhromic

@LeSabotageur said in moonlight: request for comments and testing:

@hhromic It worked ! I now see them in my steam folder.
Thanks once more for your help, I'll come back here if I ever have something to report, but in the meantime, I'm gonna enjoy some PC-gaming action in couch mode :)

Great to hear! Yes, go enjoy some game streaming :). If you are also testing Steam Link, it would be very interesting to hear your experiences on both streaming technologies. They work differently internally so is not necessary one is better than the other. Cheers!

A Former User

@hhromic Correct!

pi@retropie:~/RetroPie/roms/steam $ tail -n +1 Steam.ml The\ Witcher\ 3\:\ Wild\ Hunt.ml
==> Steam.ml <==
config = /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight/global.conf
app = Steam

==> The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.ml <==
config = /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight/global.conf
app = The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

hhromic

@jml I see, then is very weird what is happening as both files seem normal. Can you please get the log in /dev/shm/runcommand.log for each case? Just start the session, try the game, close the streaming session and then grab the log.
Also, does this happen only with The Witcher 3? Thanks for testing!

seriously24

Hi,

So I just tried using the script today to redo a full installation of RetroPie 4.4 and Moonlight on Raspberry 3, and gotta say that everything worked like a charm.
The script is installed super-easily, and runs without issue. I got moonlight installed and (some of) my games automatically imported in a breeze. A few improvements/remarks though :

Only bug I am experiencing : I use moonlight to do some Remote Desktop too (using mstsc.exe as an app on available Shield applications), and once I quit it by doing Alt+Ctrl+Shift+Q, and when I go back to my pc, all the controls are messed up. My PC keyboard doesn't work anymore and the mouse buttons are acting weird. Also the sound doesn't work as it stays on "Nvidia Speakers", instead of my "Realtek high Definition" drivers. Maybe some controller mapping that is not correctly refreshed ?
Not sure if it is in the gui config, but it would be great to have a global.conf "autoconfigurator". By that I mean, at the end of the installation, or in the GUI it would be nice to have something where you can say "Ok I want 1920x10806fps" fast and easy. Not critical though since you can do this by editing the conf file manually. But still, would be cool to have.
Finally, one concern about the actual script. I don't know how the moonlight-embedded github is moderated in terms of merges in the default branch, but using it as the source of this script by default might be a quite "ballsy" move, as you may sometimes fetch buggy code. Also, it will make it really hard for anyone using this script to debug their bugs, as they will have no idea which version of moonlight-embedded they have fetched. Keeping an option in the script to compile from last sources known is super cool, and it is really helpful right now as there is no official release of moonlight-embedded to match the current Geforce Experience version. But I don't think it should be the default choice, or at least let people choose if they want the last release known from apt-get (or the last release on the git repo)

But really, awesome work man, it's a really great tool and works perfectly well ! Will surely continue using and keeping an eye on its development.

hhromic

@seriously24 first, thanks for testing! I'm glad the scriptmodule works good for you.

I got moonlight installed and (some of) my games automatically imported in a breeze.

You are having issues when autogenerating the config files for some games? Which ones? Can you describe what happens? Errors?

Only bug I am experiencing : I use moonlight to do some Remote Desktop too (using mstsc.exe as an app on available Shield applications), and once I quit it by doing Alt+Ctrl+Shift+Q, and when I go back to my pc, all the controls are messed up. My PC keyboard doesn't work anymore and the mouse buttons are acting weird. Also the sound doesn't work as it stays on "Nvidia Speakers", instead of my "Realtek high Definition" drivers. Maybe some controller mapping that is not correctly refreshed ?

Good you mention this! I also experience the same issue myself. The problem is that when quitting moonlight like that, it simply finishes the streaming session on its side immediately and terminates. Then, is up to the GFE server to clean-up the host computer and this is not happening gracefully.

To gracefully exit, the moonlight client instead has to send a request to quit packet to the server. This is what the quit option does in moonlight, for example with /opt/retropie/supplementary/moonlight/moonlight.sh quit.

Of course we don't want to be opening a console to write that command every time we want to quit, therefore I created a patch that adds a new key combo (Alt+Ctrl+Shift+X on keyboard or Play+Back+LThumb+RThumb on gamepad) that sends said request from the session. When GFE finishes processing it, including freeing the gamepads and sound redirection, then moonlight gets a remote disconnection and quits gracefully too.
So far my patch is working fine for me here locally, but I wanted to do some more code cleaning before putting into this scriptmodule for testing. So just a bit of patience and you will be able to test it yourself.
I already sent part of the patch to the moonlight repository, and eventually I want to send it entirely. However the maintainer doesn't seem very active so can take a while.

Not sure if it is in the gui config, but it would be great to have a global.conf "autoconfigurator". By that I mean, at the end of the installation, or in the GUI it would be nice to have something where you can say "Ok I want 1920x10806fps" fast and easy. Not critical though since you can do this by editing the conf file manually. But still, would be cool to have.

That is a good idea indeed, I will try to implement it in the GUI somehow, thanks!

Finally, one concern about the actual script. I don't know how the moonlight-embedded github is moderated in terms of merges in the default branch, but using it as the source of this script by default might be a quite "ballsy" move, as you may sometimes fetch buggy code. Also, it will make it really hard for anyone using this script to debug their bugs, as they will have no idea which version of moonlight-embedded they have fetched. Keeping an option in the script to compile from last sources known is super cool, and it is really helpful right now as there is no official release of moonlight-embedded to match the current Geforce Experience version. But I don't think it should be the default choice, or at least let people choose if they want the last release known from apt-get (or the last release on the git repo)

The upstream moonlight-embedded repository doesn't seem very active and I don't see it breaking easily as the maintainer doesn't merge things without reviewing. On the other hand, a lot of scriptmodules in RetroPie are designed to pull stuff from master branches, and things do break from time to time, yes.
I agree with you that this approach is fragile compared to keeping versioned artifacts. However RetroPie maintainers are pretty fast fixing up things and honestly puling from GitHub instead of installing debs is much easier to maintain.
Also, as you probably noticed, the moonlight maintainer seems to not be very active on refrshing the deb packages either, so another reason to pull from source instead. Having said all that, I strongly believe we should keep it like this.

However, If I notice that the moonlight repository starts to get unstable often, I can easily update the scriptmodule to pull from known-to-be-good commit hashes instead of HEAD in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks again for testing and let me know of any issues you experience, the more feedback the more we can iron issues!

seriously24

@hhromic said in moonlight: request for comments and testing:

You are having issues when autogenerating the config files for some games? Which ones? Can you describe what happens? Errors?

I didn't get any errors or anything, I just don't understand the list of games it imported. On the Geforce Experience interface, the "discover games" button finds no more than 5 games, when your script finds 10ish. Though, I have 25-30 games installed on Steam. For example, Hotline Miami 2 was imported correctly, but Dragon Ball FighterZ wasn't.
It's not really a big deal, as I can add them manually the same way I added the Remote Desktop app, I just don't understand how it works :)

So far my patch is working fine for me here locally, but I wanted to do some more code cleaning before putting into this scriptmodule for testing. So just a bit of patience and you will be able to test it yourself.
I already sent part of the patch to the moonlight repository, and eventually I want to send it entirely. However the maintainer doesn't seem very active so can take a while.

Be sure that I can't wait to see and use it.

By playing a bit today with Retropie and Moonlight, testing things and stuff, I saw that the games in the Steam menu in Emulation Station are only added, never removed. I modified the name of my "Remote Desktop" app in the Geforce Experience, but it only got added as a new game when I relaunched a new "autodiscover of games" through the GUI. Is this on purpose ?

Finally, I got a bit overconfident about all this and tried to use my HORI Real Arcade Pro N on the RetroPie, and it surprisingly was recognized, but only as a Generic Xbox Controller. The input configuration and jstest works amazingly well, but on moonlight I get really messed up controls. My "R2" button becomes start button and things like this. Any advice on how I could investigate this further ? Or maybe an idea about how/why it fails ?

Edit : Doing some research on moonlight-embedded github, it looks like it uses a default mapping file which probably doesn't work for the stick, recognized as an Xbox controller. Will try to use the -mapping or a custom gamecontrollerdb.txt

Edit2 : It worked with a custom-made game controllerdb.txt. Tricky part was to find the GUID of the joystick, but it now works like a charm with this workaround.

hhromic

@seriously24 thanks for all the testing! sorry for the late response, I've been a bit busy nowadays.

I didn't get any errors or anything, I just don't understand the list of games it imported. On the Geforce Experience interface, the "discover games" button finds no more than 5 games, when your script finds 10ish. Though, I have 25-30 games installed on Steam. For example, Hotline Miami 2 was imported correctly, but Dragon Ball FighterZ wasn't.

It's not really a big deal, as I can add them manually the same way I added the Remote Desktop app, I just don't understand how it works :)

It is very simple actually. The script uses moonlight's list command to fetch available games from the host computer. Note that these games are the ones configured in GFE, not Steam. GFE should add supported games automatically and expose them to moonlight. That's all concerning the script.
If the script is adding games that are not in GFE's user interface, then there is something weird indeed. Just for debugging, can you execute:

/opt/retropie/supplementary/moonlight/moonlight.sh list

And verify the list you obtain there is the same list generated by the script? If the list doesn't match your installed games in GFE, then you have a further issue on the host computer. If the list doesn't match the generated games, please post the list here so I can take a look. Thanks.

Be sure that I can't wait to see and use it.

I will add it soon to the current script for you to test. Will update this topic when is there. Thanks for the patience!

By playing a bit today with Retropie and Moonlight, testing things and stuff, I saw that the games in the Steam menu in Emulation Station are only added, never removed. I modified the name of my "Remote Desktop" app in the Geforce Experience, but it only got added as a new game when I relaunched a new "autodiscover of games" through the GUI. Is this on purpose ?

Yes, this is on purpose. The reason is that users might have done customisations to these config files, hence it is best to not blindly overwrite them or delete them on game refreshes. Therefore, the game discovery mechanism only adds new games and does not change any existing config file. Currently, if you want to do a complete re-sync, you should manually delete all the files in the steam rom folder.
However I understand your use case too. Perhaps I can add a GUI option to do this so you don't need to get a console or external computer to do this. Will think about it.

Edit : Doing some research on moonlight-embedded github, it looks like it uses a default mapping file which probably doesn't work for the stick, recognized as an Xbox controller. Will try to use the -mapping or a custom gamecontrollerdb.txt
Edit2 : It worked with a custom-made game controllerdb.txt. Tricky part was to find the GUID of the joystick, but it now works like a charm with this workaround.

Yes, exactly. It uses a default shipped controller mappings file. This script installs it under /opt/retropie/supplementary/moonlight/share folder. However, I don't recommend changing that file because it will be re-installed on updates.

Instead, the recommended way is to create your own custom controller mappings file (as you already did) and place it somewhere handy (for example in /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight and then reference it in the global.conf file that is also in that recommended folder using the mapping option. When doing this, please use the full path to the mappings file in the option, even if the global conf file and the mapping are in the same directory.

Using this approach, all your autogenerated game files (current and future) will benefit from this configuration automatically as every config file loads the global conf by default.

Thanks for all the feedback and the testing! I will think about the suggestions and incorporate them in the next update. Happy game streaming!

LeSabotageur

I have a general question about moonlight : how can I prevent any controller plugged to the pi of being used ? As told earlier, I'm using VirtualHere and too often moonlight maps a controller on the pi, therefore screwing up my configuration. I've not found a reliable solution yet (commenting *.dll files in the Gamestream folder doesn't work), so I'm wondering if anyone here knows ?

hhromic

@LeSabotageur try adding input = /dev/null to /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight/global.conf.
This should make moonlight only use a null device as sole input and therefore should ignore all real controllers connected to your Pi locally.
I haven't tested it myself (not at home at the moment), but I suspect it could work. Please let us know if it worked.

Also, for this option to work, you should be using the autogenerated game config files that include the line config = /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight/global.conf to include the global conf.
As an alternative you can include the input line directly on your config files, but I think the global option makes it easier and more tidy to configure.

Silent

Generally it seems to work flawlessly! Moonlight itself is working OK but until now I've been using a different setup to get it running with RetroPie - that is, a modified retromoonlight. Your approach seems better however, most notably because it actually uses runcommand, unlike retromoonlight.

Two things to note:

Generated filenames still contain : in them, which greatly confuses Windows when previewing roms\steam directory from a network share. Maybe cut them, like retromoonlight does?
Some games listed by Moonlight have ™ (maybe also © or ®) in names and this confuses some other software. Maybe they also could be omitted from filenames.

LeSabotageur

@hhromic sadly, it doesn't work

Executing: /opt/retropie/supplementary/moonlight/moonlight.sh stream -config "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/steam/Steam.ml"
No mapping available for  (00000000000000000000000000000000) on /dev/null
EVIOCGRAB failed with error 25
libevdev error in libevdev_next_event: BUG: device not initialized. call libevdev_set_fd() first
Error: Bad file descriptor

And then it goes back to retropie.
That's not a major issue, though, as I have some workaround for it (Steam allowing to change the order of the controller for instance. That would have been a quality of life improvement :)

seriously24

@LeSabotageur I am no specialist here, but the

No mapping available for  (00000000000000000000000000000000) on /dev/null

awefully looks like something similar than what I had a few posts ago. Have you tried the solution from @hhromic to use a custom controller mapping file ?

@hhromic said in moonlight: request for comments and testing:

Instead, the recommended way is to create your own custom controller mappings file (as you already did) and place it somewhere handy (for example in /opt/retropie/configs/all/moonlight and then reference it in the global.conf file that is also in that recommended folder using the mapping option. When doing this, please use the full path to the mappings file in the option, even if the global conf file and the mapping are in the same directory.

In this custom controller mappings file (source can be found here ) you can try adding a new line with ID 00000000000000000000000000000000, the name of your controller and finally the mappings of the buttons. Since you don't want to use this controller, I guess the mappings don't matter, so just copy the mapping of another controller.
Once the file is ready, to use it simply add a mapping = <yourfile> command in your .ml files.

Hope this helps :)

MightyHandy

@hhromic - this is awesome! Given that there is now a brand new experimental "steam-link" package... would it make more sense to store the ml files under:
/roms/moonlight
In order to eliminate the ambiguity.

Silent

@MightyHandy said in moonlight: request for comments and testing:

@hhromic - this is awesome! Given that there is now a brand new experimental "steam-link" package... would it make more sense to store the ml files under:
/roms/moonlight
In order to eliminate the ambiguity.

I don't agree. By using 'steam' you're playing nice with scrapers and ES themes (lots of them have a 'steam' theme). Moonlight is just an "emulator" used to play those, steam is "platform".

MightyHandy

Tested width, height and FPS options and worked great. Is there a list of other options? You listed examples of app, controller config too. Was gonna check vsync.