Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde yes, I've just updated the Qt libs, but perhaps that introduced some new issues. Could you try out this build? @TimBroddin this might also relate to the gamepad handling, could you also test if the problem happens with this version too (if you're on Windows, but I think I can provide builds for other platforms)?

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@PlayingKarrde yes, I've just updated the Qt libs, but perhaps that introduced some new issues. Could you try out this build?

Yep this build seems to be working. Thanks!

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde interesting, thanks. I wonder if the issue happens on other platforms too, would you be able to test it on Mac?

I've also just marked the version before these changes as Alpha 12, in case of further surprises.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow Latest alpha hangs at 0 games loaded on MacOS. The Alpha12 Stable works.

I'm also getting a ton of these errors on Windows now:

2019-07-31T11:15:39 [w] Game 'Pilotwings' does not belong to any collections, ignored

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde hm that's even more weird, as I've just remembered I've forgot to update Qt for the Mac builds. Nothing else has been changed in the code. What's going on, hmmm...

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde could you try these four builds (1, 2, 3, 4)? They are the same code for Mac/Windows, but with older and newer Qt versions.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow
1 - crashes on change item
2 - works ok
3 - had slow startup but works ok (i suspect the slow startup was due to dropbox smart sync on my mac)
4 - crashes at startup after finding games

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde I see, thanks, it does seems related to Qt then. I'll revert to the older version for now.

TimBroddin

@fluffypillow I'm on Ubuntu 19.04. Can I compile it myself from git?

fluffypillow

@TimBroddin Sure, you can follow this guide for building.

muldjord

Hi @fluffypillow and everyone, Pegasus is looking good!
I'm currently working on Pegasus frontend support in Skyscraper. It's still unreleased but working well so far:

It's on the Skyscraper master branch already, so feel free to test it out if you'd like. It is using the native Pegasus game list format exported to the metadata.pegasus.txt file for each system.
To get a good look for the artwork, I've used the following artwork.xml configuration for Skyscraper:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<artwork>
  <output type="screenshot" width="640"/>
  <output type="cover" width="640" height="480">
    <layer resource="cover" height="480" align="center" valign="middle">
      <gamebox side="wheel" rotate="90"/>
    </layer>
  </output>
  <output type="wheel" height="200"/>
</artwork>

All that's needed to generate game lists for Pegasus if you already have your games cached in Skyscraper, will be to simply copy the above xml into your ~/.skyscraper/artwork.xml file and run Skyscraper -p <PLATFORM> -f pegasus and it'll work through all roms for that platform and generate a game list compatible with Pegasus. Please also remember to disable the EmulationStation linking and add the different metadata.pegasus.txt files to Pegasus afterwards (they are located in the roms/<PLATFORM> folders after generation is complete).

Just wanted to let you know that this is coming. If you have feedback specific to testing of this, please provide it in the Skyscraper thread.

fluffypillow

@muldjord Wonderful, will try it! Also feel free to mention if you run into any issues regarding the metadata files or Pegasus :)

muldjord

@fluffypillow It's been a breeze so far. It's well-documented. :)

fluffypillow

Also the long night has ended, and I'm now bachk with a weekly update:

Last week's release is now marked as Alpha 12 (just in case something goes wrong)
Added support for reloading the game list without restarting Pegasus (a popup will ask you when the relevant settings are changed)
Added initial support for data source options:
- There is no UI for it yet in the menu, but you can set options in the settings.txt file by adding them to the file manually
- It is now possible to set the location of LaunchBox using providers.launchbox.installdir (eg. providers.launchbox.installdir: C:/path/to/LaunchBox)
- It is now possible to change the directory of GOG games on Linux or even adding more than one. You can use providers.gog.directories, which is a list of directories, eg:
```
providers.gog.directories:
  /home/username/GOG Games
  /media/123456/My Gog Games
  /some/path/A Game's Directory
```
LaunchBox: fixed absolute paths to emulators
Minor optimizations

Also experimented with updating Qt, but in the end it didn't turn out well so this was reverted. I've also fixed the issue that releases for some platforms got delayed by a few minutes when a new version got released.

PS. As for next week, I plan to work on improving the gamepad support.

fluffypillow

@msheehan79 sorry for the late reply! I was thinking about the multiple launch commands, but actually it's a bit more complicated. When the games are sorted by collections, launching by the collection's command would feel logical. The problem occurs when they are on their own: for example a theme could sort all existing games by eg. play time, without any regard to collections. There's no clear way to decide the launch command to use in such case. Maybe a command choosing dialog could be added, like when selecting multiple files, but that also has its own problems...

scmandias

@fluffypillow I was hoping you could help me out. I have been using your es2 simple theme as a template to work on my own theme. One area where I feel completely lost with is the carousel. I would like to make a carousel of boxFronts that have no spacing and scroll horizontally. I tried using the code from the CollectionsView.qml and the Carousel.qml but due to the box art being different dimensions I get different spacing. I feel like I need to code the Path in the Carousel.qml differently but not sure how. I can make NES boxFronts with no space yet GBA spaces differently s does SNES. Any suggestions? I appreciate the help.

fluffypillow

@scmandias yeah the es2 theme has several moving parts, it might not be the easiest for learning. Hope I can write write more guides soon.

To put it simply, a PathView is a line with a fixed length on which a specified number of items is spread over evenly. If you want them to have varying distances, or the number of items varies often, this might not what you want. A bit outdated, but this guide has some animations showing how it works.

If the carousel style of looping is not strictly required (ie. when the last element is reached, it will scroll back to the first item), then an alternative could be a ListView. This simply puts the items right next to each other, optionally with a specified spacing. You can then play with the preferred highlight settings to position the selection.

fluffypillow

Weekly update! This week there have been several LaunchBox related fixes (thanks @ecleese for testing), and a few smaller updates:

LaunchBox updates:
- Fixed handling of absolute paths when looking for games and emulators
- Fixed command line argument handling of emulators
- Fixed working directory handling when launching games
- Fixed missing assets for games with special haracters in their title
- Added video and music detection support
- Improved asset searching performance
Fixed APT repository releases being outdated
Started working on gamepad handling improvements (expect this to take a while)

PlayingKarrde

How does launchbox support handle multi disc games? I had a quick try of the launchbox addition but was getting a lot of missing assets (probably related to one of your fixes above) but also my multi-disc games weren't being found as multi.

Launchbox support addition is no question great though. I'll probably stick with native support for now since I've put a lot of time into those collections, but I'm definitely keeping my eye on it since keeping an updated and curated collection with the current method is a bit tiring (I've been thinking about maybe building a standalone file handler but so limited time..).

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde ah wasn't aware there's multi disc support in LaunchBox, if you can provide example files (or the whole Data directory of LB), I'd be happy to look into it. Feel free to open issues on GitHub, also for any problems you might notice.

I've been thinking about maybe building a standalone file handler

If everything ends up working correctly, I think support could be added to the metadata converter site too, eventually.