Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas

jacobfk20

@lilbud It's what I'm currently working on. I am taking my time on it though...

I've noticed that if anyone uses <color> or <padding> with any ninepatch element then your theme will no longer work on the master branch of ES. I added in these theme options and are not available on upstream. I will change the tilegrid_background element to an Image instead of a ninepatch in the next build. It will take ninepatch still, but change Ninepatch to Image for compatibility with the master branch. Image does not do <padding>

I will also start adding MetaData elements to gridview slowly over updates.

jacobfk20

@lilbud Just in case you don't miss it, I posted a debug version of ESG that may give me a little bit more info on what is causing that assertion fail. Here is a link to the file.

lilbud

@jacobfk20 How will it spit out info?

jacobfk20

On both the terminal and the log.

Zigurana

@jacobfk20 said in Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas:

On both the terminal and the log.

Hey, quick question : what is your ES dev work flow like? What IDE & OS are you using for coding, and for building? Sorry to derail your topic like this, but you just seem so damn productive!

jacobfk20

@Zigurana Nothing special. Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015 then I send and compile on a Pi 3 over sftp/ssh. I've also become familiar with most of ES's source over the past couple months and know my way around it. I also really like this project, so I can easily burn an afternoon working on it.

jacobfk20

Alright everyone, sorry for a long wait but I think I finally got this update to almost behave how it should. The list is small-- but there was a lot that had to be done to get these things going.

you can now assign how many columns and rows a grid has and it will try to make the tiles fit inside the size you set.
MetaData should now be accessible (Same names as Detail View)
Gridtile_background is now an <image> for backwards compatibility with upstream. (It's still a ninepatch as well)

Change the grid's rows and column size with
<container name="gridRowsAndColumns"><size>4 2</size></container>
It will default to 4 2 if it is not defined.

As always you can grab it on my drive.

Some thoughts:
I'm sure it sometimes doesn't keep the image's aspect ratio when it resizes the grid tiles. Someone let me know if it looks off to you.
There is a forced padding and I may keep it as it's sort of a fail safe to make sure tiles don't go into each other.
Adding margin will shrink the images. This makes sense because it has to fit the tiles into a smaller space.
Set Gridmod size to 0p in UI settings! This will also be removed in next update.

Again, I haven't had much time to test so I'm not sure if anything is broken or not. A lot had to be changed to make the grid build off of theme defined rows and columns. Please let me know of anything that is broken as soon as you can :)

Thanks guys!

mattrixk

@jacobfk20 That sounds fantastic mate. Well done. I'll hopefully have a chance to check it out tonight.

Will there be (at some point the future) the option of setting different grid sizes (eg: 6x4, 5x3, 4,2) for small, medium, large so the user still has a bit of a choice? I understand you'd want to do lots of testing on just one grid size first before making others, but it seems like it could be an awesome addition (obviously I have no idea how much work it would actually be to implement).

jacobfk20

Next Update. Mostly just minor fixes. Most time was spent on fixing the aspect ratio not being kept on tile scale.

Updated gridview theme help to include changes.
Gridtile color tween now fully works.
Better respect to game art aspect ratio
Better tile resizing to fit within grid size
Grid will resize itself better within its size
Grid rows and columns can now be defined from <small, normal, big>

Get latest build here rpi (arm) and x86 available.

Arcuza

@jacobfk20 Is this to be released and bundled with Retropie soon? I can't wait ;)

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 Looks good so far, I like the flexibility of it all. Working on adapting some themes for testing.

The two things off the top of my head from initial testing are thus:

The game titles need an animation so they can be read (which I know is on your todo list)
For the carbon theme I'm centering the grid but the position of the the container seems to be left aligned (e.g. the boxart will grow off the left side of the screen but will have a gap on the right side of the screen) it would be nice to either have an option in the theme for alignment of the grid containers unless I missed a theming option somewhere for that.

jacobfk20

@herb_fargus GridTile game title's color can be animated with:

<text name="gridtile_text_selected">
    <color>
</text>

I forgot to add it to the GRIDTHEME md. I might also add position to _selected.

Grid alignment is on its way and will probably be in the next update.

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 sorry I didn't mean animated like colour wise, I meant like to scroll so you can read the rest of the title, same for the description text etc.

jacobfk20

@herb_fargus Ah, I see. I'll have to look into that. May add it direct to TextComponent in a separate branch.

jacobfk20

This update is mostly small things towards stability and clean up. It changes how Tiles are aligned so if things aren't appearing correctly for you after updating to this build you may need to remove grid_margin, or change it slightly (It acts more like padding now) If this change breaks your design, especially if beyond repair, please let me know. If you use a negative grid_margin it will be broken and you may want to wait for the next update.

Here is a quick list of noticeable things:

Fixed bottom row tiles disappearing when selected from a diagonal angle.
Grid no longer renders tiles when exiting that system. (this fixes problems where tiles would overlap in other system views)
Folders are now fully functional. @lilbud
Added an icon just for folders
Tiles will now be perfectly aligned inside the specified grid size on both left and right sides. @herb_fargus
Under certain conditions a segfault can be encountered, which is more likely in a system with folders, if a user quick changes a system while moving the cursor and the grid is unloading tile textures. This would throw the loaded texture list off and would cause the dynamic loader to unload textures that don't exist. This has been fully fixed and the main reason this update took so long.

As always there are x86 and arm builds available on my drive.

lilbud

@jacobfk20 Is scrolling titles and descriptions working on grid view? Because nothing will scroll. Could it just be the Material Theme itself?

jacobfk20

@lilbud I have never noticed the description wasn't updating. I'll get that fixed. Title scrolling may be a way off.

pompitousofseth

@jacobfk20 I've been having trouble trying to get your version of emulationstation to work. I have copied your file from your drive, changed the permissions and copied the material.xml file to the material theme folder. Once I load ES it dumps me out the the terminal saying "Segmentation Error" Am I installing this wrong? Do I need to be on the latest RetroPie Install? Do you have instructions on how to exactly install your version? Any help would be great! Thanks!

jacobfk20

@pompitousofseth You didn't need to copy that material theme over. I just put that in there for a one time thing and I will now remove it. Go update your themes, especially material, in the retropie setup script and get the newest versions. If it still crashes on boot then please send me a copy of the es_log so I can see what is happening. located at ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt

pompitousofseth

@jacobfk20 Okay I will give it a try and let you know how it goes. I have to reload a backup first.