MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme

[Rookervik]

@CthulhuAndFriend Accents and other font errors are ES problems and not theme problems.

[mattrixk]

Thanks @Rookervik, good to know.

[Nismo]

@Rookervik Not tested but it can't be fixed by using another font with special characters?

[Rookervik]

@Nismo Nope, I've deliberately tried fonts with complete accent and special characters and they still don't display properly. Some sort of long-standing bug in ES, sadly. I believe there are problems with the & symbol as well. I just edit my games to remove the accent or special characters to get around the bug.

[Furluge]

@Rookervik I noticed the pixel theme displays the accented e character property. Do you know what the difference between the two themes that makes one work and the other not work?

[Rookervik]

@Furluge Hmm, I can't tell you. Unless some changes have been made to ES since the Carbon days. I know we couldn't get accents working back then. (But to be honest, long ago I changed all my games to remove the accents, so I couldn't tell you if it's been fixed. LOL)

[derek2k09]

hey hello hehehe, i personally love that theme and i need to ask.

now with the video preview option, you have planned to update the theme to have the support for the videos to this theme??

[mattrixk]

Hey @derek2k09. Yes, it is on my list of things to do. I need to update all my themes to support Video Preview, but I have other stuff on my "to-do" list before it. I just finished making my ES Toolkit, so that's a big thing out of the way, but I'm also elbows deep in a new theme. Making dozens of custom console graphics is time-consuming, I don't know how Rook does it so efficiently.

I think I'm going to set a little time aside soon to update my existing themes, because it might be a while if I wait until after I've finished my new one.

[herb_fargus]

@mattrixk once you've incorporated video view we can update this chart:

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Themes/#theme-gallery

[mattrixk]

@herb_fargus That page is a work of art. Also, I thought @Rookervik had updated Pixel to use video previews (although I could be wrong).

[herb_fargus]

@mattrixk the theme gallery is many thanks to @wetriner all I did was generate a markdown table of the theme gallery he set up.

our good friend rookervik being the genius artist that he is has been resistant to any changes that arent stable and worthy enough for his art ;) so im not sure where he is at with his themes. I know he's been pretty busy with his new job though

[derek2k09]

woah, thanks for your answer, hope to see it soon, i really love that theme :)

[Rookervik]

@herb_fargus You're very right with my time. I have no time for anything any more.

I haven't updated to the newest ES on my Pi and any theme with video tags crashes the theme. So until 90% of the RetroPie community has updated to the newest ES, I don't want to add video support to any of my themes and make them incompatible with older ES versions.

I could make multiple versions, but I just don't feel like maintaining many versions of the same thing. And I'm really totally uninterested in video previews. That's a massive amount of space to take up on your SD card. Fine if you have 20 games per system. Not for collectors like me.

I also don't like how they're implemented, I don't like how you can't control the volume of the playback, I don't like how the layering works. My current Pixel 2 is totally impossible to add video previews to because it uses 2 backgrounds. 2 Backgrounds aren't supported. <shrugs> It's just a hack job right now.

I'd rather wait for more issues to be worked out before I go and update my themes and break them on a lot of peoples' systems.

[herb_fargus]

@Rookervik well there is a way to implement them without breaking older builds but I'll hash through a few other themes first before I attempt yours ;)

[mattrixk]

@herb_fargus Are you referring to using <feature supported="video">? If so, wouldn't that also break themes on an earlier version of Es/RetroPie that doesn't recognise the <feature> element the same way they don't recognise the <video> element?

[herb_fargus]

@mattrixk not from my tests yesterday with a fresh 4.1 image, seems to work swimmingly for me.

[mattrixk]

@herb_fargus: Sweet. My Pi at home is using the Child-Friendly version and lives in the lounge room mainly as a Kodi box. As such it hasn't been updated since I set it about months ago. I'll have to test <featured> out it over the weekend.

[jdrassa]

@mattrixk the <feature> element was specifically implemented the way it is to ensure compatibility with earlier versions of ES. It is essentially invisible to older versions. (credit @fieldofcows for the great idea)

@Rookervik I don't think its fair to call it a hack job just because you don't like some aspects of how it was implemented. Regardless, I am working on an update that should solve your problem with multiple backgrounds.

How would you want volume control to work? Would you just want the ability to mute the sound or variable control?

[mattrixk]

@jdrassa said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

How would you want volume control to work? Would you just want the ability to mute the sound or variable control?

Could it work as a scale? Like <volume>0</volume> would be no sound, <volume>5</volume> would be the full volume of the file?

Speaking of sound, would it be possible to add other sounds to ES? I think currently there is only the gamelist cycle sound, but there could be a sound for switching Systems, or one for when you start a game. I'm sure other people could think of more.

Maybe even as a "view" like this:

<view name="sounds">
  <sound name="cycle_system">
    <path>./sounds/system.wav</path>
    <volume>3</volume>
  </sound>
  <sound name="cycle_gamelist_down">
    <path>./sounds/gamelist_down.wav</path>
    <volume>2</volume>
  </sound>
  <sound name="cycle_gamelist_up">
    <path>./sounds/gamelist_up.wav</path>
    <volume>2</volume>
  </sound>
  <sound name="open_game">
    <path>./sounds/game.wav</path>
    <volume>5</volume>
  </sound>
</view>

I don't really know why I'm mentioning this, as I don't use sounds, and it would just be making more work for myself to implement them, but I just all of a sudden got really curious if it could be done.

[robertybob]

@Rookervik said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

That's a massive amount of space to take up on your SD card. Fine if you have 20 games per system. Not for collectors like me.

There are 128gb cards so for the vast majority of users I bet it's not an issue - hell, that famous Attract / Retropie image that went around the Internet was 128gb and had all artwork and videos for the tens of thousands of roms it claimed to contain.

I don't like how you can't control the volume of the playback

Surely they're the same volume is the games themselves??