Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas

dudleydes

You can download the binary that I built earlier this week from my Google Drive. Bear in mind that it does not include commits from the last few days.

A word of warning. The vram issue is not fully fixed as, to make sure that the vram used doesn't get too high, I have had to reduce the file size of my boxart. (240 pixels wide and 24kb in size). They look fine on my 27" 1080p monitor but if you have a large TV, then they may look blocky. You could always make the grid bigger in the theme.

If you do wish to edit the theme, then I advise placing it in /home/pi/.emulationstation/theme.

enigma7

@dudleydes I'm getting big white borders around my box-art unlike in your theme preview. Is there a way to remove them?

dudleydes

@enigma7 Apologies - I had to update the theme with the latest changes.

In the file /home/pi/.emulationstation/theme/es-theme-carbon-master/carbon.xml, if you find and replace ninepatch with image, then restart ES, that should fix it.

radius

Some things I came accross and can't fix myself :

when defining padding in "gridtile_background" the theme is not working anymore so I can't manage to change the padding at all
when defining 0 as height (size) in "gridtile_textRow" it reverts to default value so you can only use 0.01 to minimize it but it's visible, can't disable it :/
plus it looks like changing this messes with the tile height calculation
I tried to add an image for "gridtile_background_selected" to have a shadow effect in non selected state and a border when selected, which involves having one image for each state, I added a path to "gridtile_background_selected" by duplicating the code from "gridtile_background" :
```
  if (elem->has("path")) {
  	setBackgroundPath(elem->get<std::string>("path"));
  	bThemeBackground = true;
  }
```

but it's overlaying the non selected image

when you first launch ES and get into one system the title isn't showing

here's what i managed to do for nes presentation but I still have a problem with sizes, I can't get the one I set to be used, I'm using the automatic one for now :/

alt text

jacobfk20

@radius I've created issues on github so I can keep track of these. Thank you for taking the time to write this out in detail. I will work on fixing these soon.

Have you tried just changing the color of the gridtile_background from faded gray to blue instead of changing the image? such as:

<image name="gridtile_background">
    <color>ACACAC77</color>
</image>
<image name="gridtile_background_selected">
    <color>7777FFEE</color>
</image>

It should tween between the two colors so you don't have to have two different images. This also makes for smoother animations than switching images.

radius

Thanks for your help @jacobfk20, too bad I hardly understand coding enough to help :/
as I couldn't get my mod to work I actually removed it already, the screenshot was taken without the mod, I used the same method you suggested (except my image is blue) :)

enigma7

@dudleydes Fixed. Thanks it looks great!

@jacobfk20 Did you ever upload the compiled version? Sorry I'm not sure where to go for the latest binaries. Thanks.

jacobfk20

@enigma7 yes, it's here.

firewater

@jacobfk20 First of all, I don't own a pi, rather I just discovered this place by googling for recent development on ES, and I'm really surprised at the involvement here for a project I thought was more or less abandoned! Very impressed at this theming section... this whole grid thing is REALLY sweet, and is exactly what I'd like to be running on my end. Now, I can see folks here are hardcore enthusiasts, while I'm not much of a coder, so I hope you can help me getting this to work on Windows... so, I see that you have a fork of ES on your GitHub - is this the version that allows for the grid view, or can this all be achieved with a vanilla ES running this particular theme? If the former, how does the process of compiling works? I'd have to download the fork, then download these .dll you link in the Windows section, put them... where? And then use "CMake" to create an .exe witht he process you describe? And also, for example I see that the FreeType link is not a .dll, so how'd I go about getting that one?

Again my praise at this project and community, thanks for keeping this wonderful minimal frontend alive! Though I do wish the program was slightly more unified (3 to 4 forks of ES make me confused on which one I should use!) and more accessible for non-Pi users just because you do such great work at further improving ES that by this point it feels like it should take over the official "abandoned" build (and thus having it precompiled for Windows, macOS, Linux, etc).

Oh and something else not related to this thread (sorry for so many questions) - I've been trying some of the themes you guys made, and these ones that have a big boxart image output a lackluster image quality-wise because the size is too big, and they look pixelated (as if scaled with MS Paint). So I wonder, is it the build that I'm using, or it happens that ES does not use bilinear (or similar) filter for images?

jacobfk20

@firewater Thank you for the praise but my answers may change your mind :)

Windows Compiling
I currently do not support compiling on windows, even compiling the vanilla ES on windows is challenging itself as is. I'm not sure if there is an up to date guide on windows compiling either, I also couldn't successfully do it on my own. If I took the time I'd be able to do it but with my time restraints I cannot take the time to do so. Another problem is my current up to date branch with gridview has some *nix specific syscalls but again these are only in the network setup part and can easily be removed. I will eventually make a non raspberrypi targeted build that ditches this feature but not right now.

Gridview and above themes
Yes, you need my fork of ES to use these themes. Vanilla will still use them but will ignore all gridview theme elements.

Unification
My fork is too experimental. Too many drastic changes still. When things calm down then it will be more mainline friendly.

Image Scaling
ES, as far as I can tell, just uses SDL's built in image scaling which is just plain ol' nearest neighbor.

With all that said, I really want to help you compile on windows but I myself cant even get vanilla to compile. If anyone in this thread can chip in that would be great. I would love to eventually support windows.

Zigurana

@jacobfk20 @firewater, please have a look here for more info on building ES for windows. @fieldofcows was gracious enough to write down all you need! There are only a few fixes needed to stock ES to get it to compile correctly.
Even I could do it, so give it a try!

firewater

@jacobfk20 Oh no, quite the contrary your response is very encouraging on the future of a non-pi build! Not to mention, the very friendly guide that @Zigurana has linked. Think I will give this a go myself and see how it goes. Hoping the *nix stuff just doesn't work instead of crashing the whole thing down...

And about the image scaling - the fork I had (maybe vanilla too) was downloading smaller images than full resolution due to a width="400" setting. This, plus the nearest neighbour you mention, gave awful results. I disabled this setting and now the images look nice. Antialiasing would be better, but they look presentable as is.

One more thing I gotta ask - the fork I have has a "<string name="ConfigDirectory" value="C:/Users/firewater/.emulationstation" />" line on es_settings.cfg. I assumed changing this value would work, but it doesn't seem to pick up the directory if it's in any other place... I know I can run portable mode on Windows, but I wanna change OS in the future and that wouldn't work there. Am I doing something wrong? And, does your fork support this setting?

jacobfk20

@Zigurana I knew someone had to have taken the time to write up a guide. It looks like monday I'll give it a go and hopefully have windows support finally added. Thank you for linking me to it. I'm sure theme makers will appreciate it too :)

@firewater As I said above-- I'll be attempting to compile my fork on windows on Monday. If you still try before I do tell me about it, fail or not. My fork does not have the setting you're talking about. Which fork are you using? ES usually just looks for the config in HOME_PATH/.emulationstation So if for example you switch to linux it will look in /home/firewater/.emulationstation

firewater

@jacobfk20 I thought I was gonna have lots of free time, but things changed so I will not be able to try to compile anyday soon, so I rest my hopes on you. Thank you very much for doing this, whether you succeed or not. I will await eagerly, and hopefully get to play around with the grid theme someday soon...

This is the fork I'm using. And I hate the default location because I like having that folder clean without apps, or at most have them in the Windows AppData folder. Even if it's hidden, knowing that it's there bothers me haha

Capeman

I just found this post and was fascinated at the progress everyone was making with this awesome fork of ES. Is this something that is going to be integrated into the main RetroPie image in the future? I don't generally use forks of software until they're officially released. Wish I was a coder so I could help, but unfortunately I'm just one of the many hopefuls waiting for more skilled people do their magic, haha.

radius

Re: Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas

Hi,
I've been trying to figure out how to correctly use grid and tile sizes with no great success ^^, I'll be using square artboxes from now on so it'll be easier to maintain except I'll need to customize nearly all the covers, but it looks better in my opinion :)

dudleydes

@radius The issue regarding maintaining aspect ratio of box art was fixed some time ago. I have portrait box art for NES and Megadrive and landscape box art for SNES. Make sure you are using the latest binary which is available earlier on this thread.

The aspect ratio of box art for a system is determined by the image dimensions of the first game. All other box art will appear in the same ratio. In your example, if the box art for Contra is square, then the box art for all other games will also be square irrespective of the actual image aspect ratio.

AndersHP

@Capeman said in Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas:

I just found this post and was fascinated at the progress everyone was making with this awesome fork of ES. Is this something that is going to be integrated into the main RetroPie image in the future? I don't generally use forks of software until they're officially released. Wish I was a coder so I could help, but unfortunately I'm just one of the many hopefuls waiting for more skilled people do their magic, haha.

I second this. Really loving the work here, fingers crossed it will be implemented into the RetroPie UI at some point! Looking very good!

radius

@dudleydes Thanks I'll check if I'm using latest source or not :)

roquen

Check out https://squaredretrogameart.tumblr.com/ for a growing compilation of square box artwork; and feel free to submit your own work as well, the more the merrier :)