Theme troubles

masteryoer

Ugh. So it's small change, upload, reload skin every time?

herb_fargus

@masteryoer well it depends on your theme and what you're trying to incorporate eg video is only on the pi version. It's easiest to test themes on the same build of ES.

masteryoer

@herb_fargus it's really basic, no videos, but I used the simple theme as a reference when building it so the layout was the same.

Now I'll need to manually adjust positions etc to get it to work. I wonder why the theme itself isnt the same. That's all I changed was the .xml and added some custom colors.

herb_fargus

@masteryoer likelihood is the XML is messed up somehow then. You can use an online XML validator to make sure it's good. The placement and everything should still behave the same as far as that code goes.

herb_fargus

@herb_fargus if you have your code posted somewhere I can give it a look

FlyingTomahawk

If you want to test a theme with videos and marquees then use this beta version here.

https://github.com/fieldofcows/EmulationStation/releases/tag/v0.1-beta.7

Otherwise I would recommend to use Herb's Portable Version and run it from a USB stick.

https://github.com/HerbFargus/Portable-Game-Station

There you have the Launch Portable files. Open the Launch Portable (Windowed).bat file and add --debug to it and then you can refresh the page with ctrl+r
This works good to position things inside the page but some modifications might still require you to swap between themes to see the changes.

Capeman

Had this same problem, if you reference a textface (.ttf) ANYWHERE in your code that is not in the theme folders, it will crash out ES into the command prompt. Go through your code line by line and make sure you didnt reference a typeface that is missing, or if you deleted any typefaces from the "Simple" resources folder, put them back, even if you're not using them. They could be set in an unused part of the theme that you didnt even think to check.

masteryoer

@Capeman it was a typeface error. I didn't even touch the fonts at all. When I switched to the theme and went into the one system I had themed, it crashed to command line with the typeface error. The fonts are in the themes/simple/art/ folder same as they are the default simple.xml file.

One thing I noticed is my theme folder is called xcade but I left the main xml file as simple.xml.

I will paste my code in a few minutes, once I'm at a desktop

Capeman

"Typeface" and "font" mean the same thing, haha... just different names for a .ttf or .otf file.

Anyway, you also might want to check and make sure the file path in the windows theme isn't referencing a windows path, and make sure they are relative to the pi operating system. I'm not sure if windows uses the same ".././" style of relative structure to show previous/next folders. It could be botched because of that.

One thing i am completely sure of, is when ES can't load a font that is referenced in the code, it crashes back to command prompt. So it is definitely a problem with the file path to the font. ES thinks it's missing.

masteryoer

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/96e6a468665fe50ab724b30b6b9b8adc

here is the theme code I am using. It works on the PC version of emulationstation, but once I put it into the pi version and load up a system (in this case, snes inside themes/xcade/snes/theme.xml), it crashes the system. All i've done is change the colors and the logo.png. Everything else is the same as the default simple.xml which is leading me to believe the xml is parsed differently.

masteryoer

@FlyingTomahawk Will this USB version be compatible with the retropie version of ES? If not I don't think this is any different than using the installed version of ES on my windows machine.

mattrixk

@masteryoer You're linking to both OPENSANS.TTF and OPENSANS-LIGHT.TTF. Are both of those fonts in the "art" folder?

Edit: I've used both of the Windows versions of ES that @FlyingTomahawk mentioned to make themes for the Pi, and I haven't had any problems.

FlyingTomahawk

@masteryoer

They are the same, the one you currently use and the portable version. The only benefit of the portable version is the Launch Portable (Windowed).bat file.
If you don't need it then you are good as you are right now.

masteryoer

@mattrixk Yes, they are both in the /art/ folder. This theme is literally a copy/paste of the 'simple' theme that comes with the latest version of the windows ES build. I literally just copy/pasted the folder in the /themes/ directory, renamed the folder, and edited the .xml file