Favorites for EmulationStation

Zigurana

An advantage of having a custom font is that it is fully in the hands of themer, and end-user to set it up how they like.
Maximum flexibility for those who want to tinker.
Apparently others have managed to do this for the NES-mini theme, so they should be able to create a guide.
The alternative would be for one of us to extend the textlistComponent to include an additional asset (icon) for entries/lines. Which would need to be themable if we want to enable themers to adjust it to their needs. I doubt we would be able to make that strategy any easier to use, or efficient to run, but I might be wrong.

pjft

@Zigurana Sure. I suppose my concern is always "what about themes that don't have a custom font, how will the folder be rendered"?

Maybe that solution is obvious to those who are already using such features, but it's unclear to me how we would keep folders in simple (i.e. non-custom-font) themes looking fine. :)

nevsan

I'd love there to be a way of adding a folder, say making an OUTRUN folder which contains all the versions of that game from other systems inside for easy play. This way there would be a stock image for the 'folder' then when clicked inside, get the usual media displayed for each game (like usual).

This possible? I suppose its like adding videos to playlists in Youtube.. with a similar way of implementation.

pjft

@nevsan You can currently do that. Just make sure the Gamelist has the folder entry, with the right metadata and such.

nevsan

@pjft Oh does it? My apologies. Would I have to add the game manually via the gamelist text file though, rather than when I see them in other system lists and then 'add to [foldername]'?

pjft

@nevsan No need to apologize!

You would need to do that on the file system, though, and edit your gamelist accordingly - that is correct. EmulationStation is not a rom/file manager solution, it just has minimal support for metadata editing and file deleting, but not moving things around.

mattrixk

@Zigurana, @pjft:

The basic <textlist name="gamelist"> looks like this:

<textlist name="gamelist">
  <selectorColor>FFFFFF40</selectorColor>
  <selectedColor>FFFFFF</selectedColor>
  <primaryColor>FFFFFF</primaryColor>
  <secondaryColor>DDDDDD</secondaryColor>
  <size>0.280 0.670</size>
  <pos>0.020 0.220</pos>
  <fontPath>./_inc/font/Roboto-Light.ttf</fontPath>
  <fontSize>0.035</fontSize>
  <lineSpacing>1.5</lineSpacing>
  <horizontalMargin>0.01</horizontalMargin>
  <alignment>left</alignment>
</textlist>

How difficult would it be to add a couple of extra properties to it like this:

<textlist name="gamelist">
  <folderIcon>./_inc/img/folder_icon.png</folderIcon>
  <folderPosition>top</folderPosition>
  or
  <folderPosition>inline</folderPosition>
</textlist>

We could even wrap them in<feature supported="awesomeFolders"> to preserve backwards compatibility.

pjft

@mattrixk well, if we're naming the section awesomeFolders, there's no way I can decline that offer.

:)

I'm not a professional themer (yeah, that's now a thing), but I'd expect you'd want to have a bit more control over the position of the folder icon, relative to the particular line element? Unsure what that would effectively entail or how it'd work in reality, but just a thought.

That being said, it'd be easy then to extend it to adding a star for the favorites, and the teddy bear for the kid friendly games as well, should one want to add them to the theme.

alt text

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft are we making theme requests now! This post is on topic, but also strays just a bit, sorry, it all links back to the folder icon.

A few things about this, and maybe @Nismo @ruckage or others who are working on themes now can add to this, but I am not sure I would want an image file within the textlist, or if this is even possible. I personally want to keep my <textlist> exactly that, text.

Now to add to this a bit, one thing that I have wanted for awhile is to be able to add more meta data image fields. Now that we have video and marquees and the standard image, it would be great to add 1 or 2 more meta data image fields. That way we can have a screenshot and boxart both displayed. Could we possibly create a medadata image for the folder icon? "md_icon" This could then be added to the gamelist and or theme.xml. We could then add whatever icon you want to the gamelist and locate it as an image that would appear when you scroll to that game in the gamelist. Thus we keep the text field separate from the images.

Not sure any of this is feasible, but i propose seeing if we can add these meta data fields:

md_icon (this could be for favorites)
md_thumbnail (this would be a screenshot)
md_wheelart (so we can have marquee and wheelart as separate elements)

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy Not necessarily here - I think here was more about how to best render the "star" icon for the favorites that @Zigurana was trying to implement in this "Favorites" change :)

Nonetheless, all your change requests sound reasonable. I believe there's a massive thread where like-minded theme creators are having those conversations. @Zigurana , @mattrixk - is this the latest thread where those requests and conversations are being added and discussed? Or is there a running Google doc?

Definitely echo these there, as I'm sure they'll benefit from the discussion and design conversations :)

Thanks!

herb_fargus

Personally I'm not keen on requiring specific fonts for rendering folder icons, but them again I don't know if I have a better solution than what's been proposed either. Also I don't use folders so my opinion doesn't count much at that rate!

Zigurana

Some inspiration :
The guys over at the Recalbox branch of ES have just committed a change that hardcodes a specific glyph to be used as a fav icon for each system.
These glyphs are pulled from the large web awesome font collection, which can cater to a large number of icon related use-cases.

DarkWolf

I think I'am missing something here (I kinda feel stupid right now):
So I tryed to install your es build but it doesn't seam to change anything...
I followed the steps to make the emulationstation file and installed it (over an existing emulationstation build). But I don't see a change at all...
The emulationstation version is now V2.1.4 RP which is correct I think.. Do I have to do something now?

pjft

@Zigurana ...a favicon? Do you mean a favorites icon per system?

I imagine that's good overall, but without seeing it in action, I struggle to grasp the full extent of that change for the users and for the theme makers :/ Is there a video or set of images I could reference to better understand what we're considering?

Anyway, to avoid scope creep, maybe we could break down the "implementing favorites with the old metadata icon in the theme data", for feature parity with ES Kids, and then maybe "customizing games list and theme with further icons for folders and favorites"?

Just a thought, as I don't want you to lose momentum here :)

Zigurana

@DarkWolf you sure you got the favorites dev branch, and not the master branch?
The version# should be "2.1.8rp".

DarkWolf

@Zigurana Oh, well, that's embarassing...
Not using github that much, so I thought https://github.com/zigurana/EmulationStation.git would be the correct link to clone it... Isn't it? Ok, no it isn't... wow...
I got it now, I think, thanks for answering

Zigurana

@pjft good point, scope creep is my arch-nemesis!
So, the current plan:

I'll revert the cosmetic changes i've made to the gamelist entries, and
re-introduce the themable favorites Icon which is toggled when the selected item is a favorite or not.

Sounds ok?

Zigurana

@DarkWolf no worries, thank you for testing this!

Syhles

@Zigurana
My personal opinion is that the favorites icon and folder icon should be handled like the help icons, there should be a default icon built in to EmulationStation for them, but you should be able to point to new images in the theme to replace them.

I'm not sure how feasible that is, but this way it wouldn't break any themes and we would also keep easy themeablilty.

DarkWolf

@Syhles That sounds like a good solution if you ask me