ES-DE Genre Filtering Deserves a Touch-Up

[Sidney]

Re: ES Filter by Genre

Hey there!

It's been 7 years since the "Filter Gamelist" option was added to EmulationStation (DE), big thanks to @pjft. And it definitely was a nice implementation and great for use with controllers.

But there is one mayor issue, the fact that it merges genres together into one genre. So if the gamelist.xml is:
<genre>Action, Role-Playing, Platform</genre>

Then the filter option in ES-DE will be:

...

Action, Role-Playing, Platform

...

Instead, it should look like this:

...

Action

Role-Playing

Platform

...

What @pjft said at the time, was that this wasn't needed as ROMs only have one tag. This is not true anymore, "Zelda II: Amida's Curse" on TheGamesDB scraper for example has more, and besides, there are a lot of us that manually edit the gamelist.xml file either with text editors or other tools.

A big reason why I find the ability to add and filter multiple genres so crucial, is because ES-DE does not have any other forms of tags or categories that can be added via the gamelist.xml, making the genre field the only way to add such info. What I like to do is use the genre field as a way to tag the game with stuff like: Japanese Only, 3D, 2D, Voiced, ... In addition to regular genres, what one can also do is prefix the tags with letter to keep them more orderly, like.

<genre>Action, Role-Playing, Platform, T-Japanese Only, T-3D, T-2D</genre>

Which makes it easier to quickly find what one is looking for (T in this context short for tag)

Maybe even @pjft is still around and willing to implement this.

---

Some things to maybe take into account for implementing this:

• As different scraper websites use different ways of separating the genres, I would separate the string into sub strings using the ",", "/" and "|" symbols.

If this gets implemented, I would also be happy update the doc, describing this new functionality.

Thanks in advance for anyone taking on this task,
Sidney

a

[mitu]

That's all very nice, but ES-DE is a different EmulationStation fork than the one used by RetroPie. If you're using ES-DE, then you may want to ask for requets on their site - https://gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de or https://es-de.org/.

[Sidney]

@mitu thanks for the heads up, will do.