Favorites for EmulationStation

mattrixk

Jeez I go to sleep and then work for a few hours and I miss all the fun stuff.

you'd want to have a bit more control over the position of the folder icon

I hadn't thought of that. I guess I was just expecting it to go inline with the text, but you can't really expect an image to behave the same way / use the same properties as the text element.

@Zigurana: I was thinking about gamelist icons before falling asleep last night, and I wondered if Font Icons would be a feasible solution. I use Font Awesome on every site I make at work and I love it. With nearly 800 icons there should be something for most use cases.

For anyone curious, you can see the full list of Font Awesome icons on their Cheatsheet.

I can think of these elements of the <gamelist> that might need their own icon:

folder
favourite
kids
hidden

They can each have a default icon built into the system that a Theme Maker can override in their XML, like:

<icon name="md_favorite">
  <name>fa-heart</name>
</icon>

They could go at the end of the game name like this:

Imgur

That way the names are still all left aligned, except the folder which would stand out a bit from the rest.

TMNTturtlguy

@mattrixk hmmmm....interesting, but what you are showing is the icon still being a part of the text element and this would limit a lot of options for placing text in themes. Every theme would need to have their text left aligned in order to make this appear correctly. In themes like my comic book theme, or even more significant, in themes like @ruckage is working on where he lines the text up in outlined boxes, this would really limit the creativity.

I do like the icons, and the simplicity of it, but I wonder if there is a way to allow more flexibility?

mattrixk

@TMNTturtlguy Maybe have them right after the name, instead of right aligned? But then if the name is too long, then the icons would be off the page...

It's a dilly of a noodle-scratcher isn't it?

DarkWolf

@pjft Exactly, it is a per system thing...

How are you adding it? - I'am adding it through the Y Button ("Toggle favorites")
Do you have any filters active when it crashes (I.e. are you filtering by favorites) - No filters
When exactly does it crash? - When I press the Y button on my controller
What are the exact step by step instructions to make that happen? - Boot retropie, go into a system with roms and scraped data (no matter where the gamelist.xml files are), add one game to favorites (Y), add another game to favorites (Y)

Gamelist.xml:
Download
Located at: /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/atari5200/
Scraped with: UXS (Screenscraper)

Hopefully that doesn't have to do with me being stupid, but, yeah,...

pjft

@DarkWolf thanks, that should be useful for troubleshooting!

DarkWolf

@DarkWolf I found the problem right here. I guess I was just stupid and used sudo make install and killed the files/install with that! Switching the emulationstation file only works then

The segmentation error is still there sadly

pjft

@DarkWolf Just to confirm, what problem did you find and solve with this one - the crash on double favorites, or the shutdown one?

DarkWolf

@pjft The shutdown one, edited my previous answer

DarkWolf

I looked into the code a bit and I have to say:
Wow, my skills aren't enough for that...

I think there is something wrong with accessing variables/memory (got Segmentation Faults in one of my earlier tries..). In this particular case it seems, that non existing or gamelists generated by emulationstation are working but pre generated ones doesn't.

I don't know how much you guys know, but I guess @Zigurana knows a lot more about this than I do, but I'm just saying :-)
Hopefully I'm not spaming some unnecessary stuff

pjft

@DarkWolf No, not at all. It's also good to help others get into the code :)

I have not had the chance to test this yet, alas, but hopefully with your details @Zigurana will replicate it easily and debug it.

DarkWolf

Seems like I was able to track down the problem a bit:
I tested some different themes and view modes and it seems like the problem only occurs if the video view is activated!
Also the code that adds the favorite tag seems to work (debuged and added some log entries, code located in /es-app/src/view/gamelist/ISimpleGameListView.cpp), but the tag doesn't appear in the gamelist.xml (even the ones that worked)

pjft

@DarkWolf Thanks for investigating further!

On the saving side of things, in the options front, do you have the "Save Gamelists on Exit" or similar option turned on?

Welcome to the dark - and fun - side of debugging ES via logging :D

lilbud

@pjft said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Welcome to the dark - and fun - side of debugging ES via logging :D

DarkWolf

@pjft The Save Metadata On Exit setting is turned on (it crashes if it is off too)

To make it a bit quicker, it is a fresh installation of the latest retropie img with a nes30 pro controller setup... that's it

Welcome to the dark - and fun - side of debugging ES via logging :D

Seems like fun, yes... kappa
Gonna have fun as always

DarkWolf

@lilbud lmao :'D

ruckage

@TMNTturtlguy said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@mattrixk hmmmm....interesting, but what you are showing is the icon still being a part of the text element and this would limit a lot of options for placing text in themes. Every theme would need to have their text left aligned in order to make this appear correctly. In themes like my comic book theme, or even more significant, in themes like @ruckage is working on where he lines the text up in outlined boxes, this would really limit the creativity.

I do like the icons, and the simplicity of it, but I wonder if there is a way to allow more flexibility?

Agreed. Also, while using those fonts would make life easy I wouldn't want to be forced to use them as they won't fit every theme. For example in my theme or any other pixel based theme they will look out of place so there should always be the option to replace them with your own assets in the form of png or svg files. Oh, and you should also be able to color them - very annoying you can't color the rating icons in ES as you can all other elements.

This may complicate things but could the icons be a linked but entirely separate list element? e.g you would have an iconlist that just displays the folder icons etc. and this could be moved around/resized completely independently of the gamelist itself so it could be positioned exactly as the themer wants. It could also be easily removed if a themer didn't want to use it at all.

TMNTturtlguy

@ruckage

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

This may complicate things but could the icons be a linked but entirely separate list element? e.g you would have an iconlist that just displays the folder icons etc. and this could be moved around/resized completely independently of the gamelist itself so it could be positioned exactly as the themer wants. It could also be easily removed if a themer didn't want to use it at all.

I agree. My thought would be that it is created as another meta data field and as ruckage has alluded to it is treated similar to the ratings stars.

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Oh, and you should also be able to color them - very annoying you can't color the rating icons in ES as you can all other elements.

This would allow both the user to add the favorite setting to their gamelist.xml if they wanted and the theme creator to place that icon where they want it. Both the user and creator have control on if they see it or not.

@ruckage you can replace the stars in the art folder with new icons. If you want to edit the stars color you just need an editing program like photoshop or gimp. Save the new icon or star as the same name and you are good to go. I have little comic "pow" symbols in mine, they react the same way the stars do to the meta data.

Syhles

@TMNTturtlguy
I think @ruckage was meaning the ability to change icon colors through the XML like you can with the help icons.

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles yeah, I know what he was meaning. I was just sharing an easy work around for the problem.

ruckage

@TMNTturtlguy said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@ruckage you can replace the stars in the art folder with new icons. If you want to edit the stars color you just need an editing program like photoshop or gimp. Save the new icon or star as the same name and you are good to go. I have little comic "pow" symbols in mine, they react the same way the stars do to the meta data.

Hi. Yeah I'm aware of that, you'll notice I'm using pixel hearts for the ratings on my theme. Trouble is if you want a different colour icon for each system (which would be nice on my theme) you need a separate set of images for each colour - nearly every other element you can use a white image and then colour it through the xml (the logos on the carousel are another example that can't be coloured - also annoying). This may not seem like an issue but say for example you decide you want to change the rating icon design completely at some point - this then requires replacing up to 172 images (assuming 86 systems and two images needed for the rating icon). If however you could colour them through xml you would only have 2 images to modify.

Apart from being really useful it also seems a strange inconsistency that these are the only 2 elements that lack the option to be coloured.