Futura Theme

FlyingTomahawk

Yeah, too bad indeed. 15 years ago things used to be simpler. Either things were free or you just paid for it.
These days you have to be a lawyer to know and understand all those damn licenses.
I found a font for the main text stuff now I only need to find a matching font for the system name and year.

FlyingTomahawk

What would be the best and easiest way to set all the emulators to detailed view mode?
Fake roms?
Real roms?
Gamelist?
Other setting?

jdrassa

@FlyingTomahawk each system needs to have one game with an image

FlyingTomahawk

@jdrassa

Maybe I didn't formulate my question correctly.
I know how it usually activates the detailed view. I was just hoping to find a different way to do it.
So you are saying the only way would be to use real roms to do it?

jdrassa

@FlyingTomahawk There is currently no way to force detailed view. The roms don't have to be real, but the gamelist xml needs to have at least one entry with an image that points to an actual file.

FlyingTomahawk

@jdrassa

I see...
Thanks.
You not might happen to know how to create fake roms for testing?

jdrassa

@FlyingTomahawk Just save an empty text file with the appropriate extension. You can see the supported extensions for each system here https://retropie.org.uk/documentation/systems-in-retropie/

mattrixk

@FlyingTomahawk: When I was making the Theme How-To for the wiki I made some fake games for the Spare theme. You can download the zip file here. It's just 15 games each for gameboy, nes and snes. They are just empty renamed .txt files, but they scrape fine with the built in scraper (not the sselph scraper).

You can make your own pretty easily (but it's time consuming):

Make a new empty .txt file and rename it to game.zip
Paste game.zip into every single ROM directory (eg: gb, new, snes, etc)
When you restart ES, every system that accepts .zip format will now have a game in it called Game. This is fine for testing System View and Basic View, but as they aren't named after a real game, they won't scrape.
For each system, go to Wikipedia and type in "list of [system] games", then choose one from the list and rename game.zip to whatever that game is. You can also check the RetroPie Wiki to get the right file extension (eg: .gb for gameboy games, so game.zip will be Aladdin.gb).

Like I said, time consuming, but it should do the job.

FlyingTomahawk

Thanks guys.
That is simple enough for me.
Hopefully I'll be able to finish this theme in the next few days and then move it to my RPi for further testing.

FlyingTomahawk

I finished the theme but I need to get it running on my Pi for further testing.
What are the right steps to do that? I accessed my Pi via FTP but can't find any theme folder.

lilbud

@FlyingTomahawk The file path is /etc/emulationstation/themes

Rookervik

A less dangerous directory to place a theme is /home/pi/.emulationstation/themes This directory takes dominance over /etc/emulationstation/themes and does not require you to chmod the directory to give you write permissions.

liquidzoo

To go along with what @Rookervik said, you can also add that path to your Samba shares so you can modify the theme without SSH or FTP just in Windows Explorer (or another OS, I'm not picky). Here's how:

SSH into your Pi (I use PuTTY) and type sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Scroll all the way to the bottom and add the following:

[themes]
comment = themes
path = "/home/pi/.emulationstation/themes"
writeable = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
force user = pi

After that, you will need to restart the samba service:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop
sudo /etc/init.d/samba start

Then when browsing to \RETROPIE you will see a themes folder where you can add and modify your theme all you need.

FlyingTomahawk

Thank you guys.
I'll get to it asap.

FlyingTomahawk

Everything worked as explained, thanks. Putty is a very nice tool. I could create that theme folder and uploaded the theme files to my RPi.
I then downloaded the missing emulators/cores and put 1 fake rom in each rom folder.

30+ systems showed and I could finally test this theme on the resolution that it was build for. On my Notebook I only had max 1366x768.
Because of that all the custom text needed to be moved to its right positions again.
It did work with one rom in each system and detailed view worked fine too.
When I activated the show FPS feature in ES it showed 45-59 fps VRAM: 172.78mb (texs: 130.83mb, fonts: 41.94mb). I am not sure if the theme crashes if you have 10+ systems active with 50+ scrapped roms in each one of them.
Would be nice if someone could test this in the near future.

I think the next step now would be to create a package with a readme file and then offer it for download? Not very familiar with github. I used it once, a while back though, in combination with a program called sourcetree. Never really figured out the whole push and pull stuff.

lilbud

I'll test if you need someone to test. You can create a README file with screenshots and info on the theme. Just a reminder, name the repository with the naming convention.

es-theme-futura

FlyingTomahawk

I somewhat managed to upload the theme to github. YEAH!
I have no idea how to proceed from here but I guess I'll soon find out.

mattrixk

@FlyingTomahawk Congratulations. It feels good to get your first theme up there for people to take a bite of.

FlyingTomahawk

@mattrixk said in Futura Theme:

...to get your first theme up there...

first? that is my first and last theme. :-D

The work behind it is very tedious and time consuming and mine is rather a simple theme.
I can only imagine the work behind a theme like Pixel where all the console icons and system names are self made.
All the people that have released themes thus far have my out most respect since I now know how much hard work is put into it.

backstander

@FlyingTomahawk
Awesome looking theme! I can see all the attention to detail!