Pegasus theme development general

fluffypillow

@lilbud I see, I see, so you'd like to create a layout like this and keep the selection in the middle area: https://snag.gy/CGAw4Q.jpg

Looking at the video though, it seems the Switch UI is not actually a carousel. See there are two kinds of this linear layout in Pegasus:

ListView is easier to use but doesn't loop like a carousel (ie. you jump to the beginning/end on the last/first element). This is what the Switch UI uses in the video.
PathView is somewhat more complex but loops like the ES systems view. That's what the Carousel object in the theme uses under the hood.

So in case you'd like to make it exactly like the Switch you could take a look on ListViews too.

For both of them, you can use preferredHighlightBegin and -End to set the range where you want to keep the selection. The actual value depends on the type of the layout:

For ListView, they are in pixels, and mean the left and right edge of the area (like on the image above)
For PathViews, they are in percentage of the whole path, and mean the center point of the leftmost and rightmost item (maybe this animation helps)

SinisterSpatula

Just starting to look into this front end and I have to say it's very very nice. I'm currently looking at getting it working on pi zero and small screen 320x240 Retroflag GPi. I'm just doing small edits to the Game OS theme to try and get it to display on such a tiny screen, and I'm sure I'll run into a lot of small issues because this wasn't the design case for either the front end or the theme. (I love both!). Already I have it looking good and running good, but wondered about the video playing code, it looks like it might be using software video decoding, as I see the pi zero hits 100% cpu whenever video is playing. Is there any way currently to take advantage of hardware video acceleration for playing videos, in a similar way that OMXplayer does?

fluffypillow

@SinisterSpatula installing gstreamer1.0-omx should enable the hardware acceleration, but if I remember correctly it also increased the temperature of the Pi and didn't work well for certain video formats. Support might have got better since then though.

Also if you have some photos or videos, I'd be happy to see Pegasus running on the Retroflag :)

SinisterSpatula

@fluffypillow Awesome, I'll look into that. Does it just start using it automatically, or do I need to change the video playing code to use it somehow? I'm still very much a newbie and learning. I have yet to change the game detail/preview screen but plan to. So far, I think this is looking and running great, and I have much more work to do on it. Here's a video of where I'm at with it currently:

SinisterSpatula

The fork I'm making edit's to (nothing special just commenting stuff out, and changing numbers, etc) is here: https://github.com/SinisterSpatula/gameOS/

PlayingKarrde

I was planning on making a 240p version since I run it on my arcade machine (a new astro city) but never got around to it. Great to see your progress!

I've made some changes locally that I haven't posted yet that I think might interest you when I get around to it since I've done away with the top description section (like you are doing). It's much cleaner but not quite ready to post as I want people to have the option to switch between them. Adding the settings screen is holding me up and I've just been so busy to head into that chunk of work unfortunately.

fluffypillow

@SinisterSpatula Nice! Yes, it should work instantly, if you export GST_DEBUG=omx:4, it should also print some debugging information to the terminal if it's in use.

@PlayingKarrde now that the gamepad support is in a better shape, theme settings support should also come eventually :)

SinisterSpatula

@fluffypillow said in Pegasus theme development general:

gstreamer1.0-omx

I was afraid of this, and it's veering off topic to talk about it, but, on pi Zero, there's an issue when using OMX player where it get's very slow, and it has to do with the audio settings. It appears that the same bug also affects gstreamer1.0-omx. I did some searching about gstreamer but was unable to find any info about changing the audio output device, or how to look at what it is set to. I think the problem is when it sends audio to both analog and HDMI, for some reason it slows it to a crawl. When using the omx-player executable having -o both causes the issue. But I'm stuck as far as how to check for this on gstreamer.

SinisterSpatula

edit: maybe I should be using a scraper that supports pegasus instead, just found: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11826/versatile-c-game-scraper-skyscraper/1236

@fluffypillow is the metadata conversion tool at https://pegasus-frontend.org/tools/convert/ available in source-code form by chance? There's some issue's that I want to try my hand at fixing, and send back my changes to you. It's currently ignoring some image's and doing some things it shouldn't. (making screenshot's into box2dfront, ignoring wheel image, etc. -- maybe this is only issue for scraper.net format files, not sure).

fluffypillow

@SinisterSpatula I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with the inner working of gstreamer, I'm merely an user of it through the video playback engine. Perhaps we could ask the developers what could be the problem?

I'm not yet pleased with the converter site's code enough to publish it, I'd like clean things up and improve testability before that. If you have examples however, or a list of problems I can reproduce, I'd be happy to test them.

SinisterSpatula

I think the skraper.net and conversion tool issues were my fault, disregard :) I went with some defaults that I think are actually wrong and that's what the issue was. I'm going to start using skyscraper anyway as it's much more detailed in the way it handles things, and I'll just go straight to pure pegasus metadata files as I think that's going to give me the best results. For the hardware acceleration for videos, I'm not really sure it's an issue for gstreamer dev's; seems like more of an issue for raspbian linux devs perhaps, since the issue affected both omx-player and gstreamer and we've just been having to workaround it by messing with audio output settings where possible (in ES and in omx-player command lines), and it probably will be found and fixed in a future OS update I'm guessing. Here's a recent pic of the game detail screen, looking quite good. One thing I'm wondering if it's already on your radar: for Game Title text, it would be great to see a dynamic text size (make the text smaller instead of ending with ...) edit: oh! I see, I can do toString().length or similar and set a vpx(value) based on that. :)

Here is a pastebin of my gamelist.xml that skraper.net for windows generated with default settings, if you want to compare it on the conversion tool and see how it's handling it (Image tag is screenshot and not boxfront, thumbnail is wheel image and not currently picked up by the conversion tool, and for some reason skraper.net didn't put any entry for fan art even though it was scraped) https://pastebin.com/MFeMaETb

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xFJSx

Hi, i love this project and already to changed a bit stuff in the pegasus grid theme (volume & video playcount).
But I could not figure how I can change the order of the systems. I already tried by converting my customized es_systems.cfg to a metadata.txt but this didn't do the trick.
Is there a way to change the order?
Thanks in advance.

fluffypillow

@SinisterSpatula just tried the file, I see now what you mean:

<image> tags always default into boxfront, since it can't be deduced what might be on the image
in theory the <thumbnail> is supposed to be a small sized variant of the <image>, and so this tag is not used by Pegasus
there's no (documented) tag for storing fanart in ES XMLs

@xFJSx hi, collections are always sorted by name by default, but you can reorder or filter them on the theme side however you like. You can use either SortFilter for that, or just plain JavaScript sort, eg. api.collections.slice().sort(function(a, b){ ... }).

AndersHP

@SinisterSpatula
Having just finished my own Gameboy build I cannot wait to get away from Emulation Station and onto Pegasus like my arcade cabinet. How far is this theme from being downloadable? Looks great!

SinisterSpatula

@AndersHP It's making leaps and bounds, I'm working on it like a mad man LOL. Currently I'm building a settings screen for it, then I want to make a favorites view, and I think after that I'll be happy with it. Once settings is working, I'll post another up to date video. The grid is now aligned perfectly, the console logo's when switching systems is now full screen and presented longer, the theme settings are going to have highlight color, game description scrolling speed, (oh yeah and the description is scrolling up and down with D-pad now too), toggle wheel art on the game grid, toggle fan art in the background, hopefully a self update function (just a git pull, and that's only if executing bash commands via Qprocess is allowed).

fluffypillow

Before you all start writing overly complex things, please note that theme-specific settings and an auto updater will come eventually to Pegasus :)

SinisterSpatula

Oh for sure! I don't mind really, because it's getting me to learn QML/QT, it's a fun practice exercise, looking forward to the official implementation and removing my old one.

SinisterSpatula

Some progress on my settings screen.

SinisterSpatula

@fluffypillow I'm trying to use the api.memory.get() and api.memory.set() but it does not seem to be doing anything. Here's the code I'm trying (in theme.qml), and then I go look at ~/.config/pegasus-frontend/theme_settings/gameOS.json and it never updates, none of my stored values appear in there. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Maybe I can only pass it actual variables and not values? Nope, that didn't make any difference either. I tried renaming gameOS.json expecting for it to be replaced on the next api.memory.set() but it did not. Really can't figure this out. OKAY! Haha I figured something out I think. It seemed to only work when I switched the theme away from gameOS and back to gameOS. After more testing of it, looks like it does not store the setting from api.memory.set() unless and until you switch theme's away from it and on to a different one. Is there a function I need to call to tell it to write the change to the file immediately? Or it's a bug?

  Component.onCompleted: {
    collectionIndex = api.memory.get('collectionIndex') || 0;
    currentGameIndex = api.memory.get('gameCollIndex' + collectionIndex) || 0;
    gamesettings.favorites = api.memory.get('settingsFavorites') || false;
    gamesettings.highlight = api.memory.get('settingsHighlight') || "#FF9E12";
    gamesettings.scrollSpeed = api.memory.get('settingScrollSpeed') || 300;
    gamesettings.wheelArt = api.memory.get('settingsWheelArt') || true;
    gamesettings.fanArt = api.memory.get('settingsFanArt') || true;
    
    if (!api.memory.has('settingsFavorites')) {api.memory.set('settingsFavorites', false)}
    if (!api.memory.has('settingsHighlight')) {api.memory.set('settingsHighlight', "#FF9E12")}
    if (!api.memory.has('settingScrollSpeed')) {api.memory.set('settingScrollSpeed', 300)}
    if (!api.memory.has('settingsWheelArt')) {api.memory.set('settingsWheelArt', true)}
    if (!api.memory.has('settingsFanArt')) {api.memory.set('settingsFanArt', true)}
  }

fluffypillow

@SinisterSpatula yes, the settings are saved on theme change and when closing Pegasus. Though now that I think about it, it might be better to save on change, like program settings, but it's still interesting that the file is not created for you.

EDIT: Ah yes on some platforms there's a crash on exit (a Qt bug), that might be the cause of it.