Favorites for EmulationStation

DarkWolf

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.

sokiee

@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.

If you switch from icons to font-set glyphs then you can color and size them as fonts, could be an idea ( the linked font awesome has it too star glyph

ruckage

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@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.

If you switch from icons to font-set glyphs then you can color and size them as fonts, could be an idea ( the linked font awesome has it too star glyph

No, not a good solution as it takes away the ability to easily customise the images used and (unless you know how to make/edit fonts but that is not an easy task and not something most people can do.) Using images/svg would also allow full colour icons which some themers may want.
There is no reason the icons can't be coloured via xml as every other image can be - it just hasn't been included as an option.

The more new features the better but I think it's important not to limit creativity with those features so that we get more diverse themes.

sokiee

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@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.

If you switch from icons to font-set glyphs then you can color and size them as fonts, could be an idea ( the linked font awesome has it too star glyph

No, not a good solution as it takes away the ability to easily customise the images used and (unless you know how to make/edit fonts but that is not an easy task and not something most people can do.)

what i meant is add support for font awesome ( with all the glyphs included ) then you can let people not only customise the icon ( choosing any glyph ) but then you can also customise it as a font ( size, color ecc )

ruckage

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

what i meant is add support for font awesome ( with all the glyphs included ) then you can let people not only customise the icon ( choosing any glyph ) but then you can also customise it as a font ( size, color ecc )

Yeah, but picking from a selection of pre-defined glyphs isn't enough. I would want to draw my own icons to match my theme, as would many other themers.

sokiee

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

what i meant is add support for font awesome ( with all the glyphs included ) then you can let people not only customise the icon ( choosing any glyph ) but then you can also customise it as a font ( size, color ecc )

Yeah, but picking from a selection of pre-defined glyphs isn't enough. I would want to draw my own icons to match my theme, as would many other themers.

Then yes, I agree adding support for icon would be better then ( and probably easier too )

Chillimonster

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

sokiee

@Chillimonster said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

Yes, but what if people don't like green? what if they want it red because it matches their red theme :P
It's better if it's customisable.

ruckage

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@Chillimonster said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

Yes, but what if people don't like green? what if they want it red because it matches their red theme :P
It's better if it's customisable.

I imagine if used it would be implemented in the same way as folders, it would have separate tags to define 'selector bar' color and 'font' colour for favourites. However this is a bit of a limited approach and as with folders currently how would you know that the different colour signified the game as a favourite? Icons in some form are a far better idea as it's much clearer.

Chillimonster

@sokiee True, but if customisable it can be made to match a theme

@ruckage I was thinking more to do with the lack of intrusion in various themes rather than the colours, or even Itallics or Underlining. Just spit-balling ideas really :-)

Zigurana

@ruckage
Do you have any idea how many glyphs are included in this particular set? Which one in particular are you missing?
The one thing that using a font has going for it is that the implementation is a lot easier to accomplish.
My proposal would be to start with the star hard-coded (as in the initial implementation for recalbox).
After this, we could allow it to be a themable element, from the FA set.
If then there is still a need, we could consider heavily modifying the GUITextListComponent to create some sort of hybrid list that includes both images and text.

Zigurana

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@Chillimonster said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

Yes, but what if people don't like green? what if they want it red because it matches their red theme :P
It's better if it's customisable.

I imagine if used it would be implemented in the same way as folders, it would have separate tags to define 'selector bar' color and 'font' colour for favourites. However this is a bit of a limited approach and as with folders currently how would you know that the different colour signified the game as a favourite? Icons in some form are a far better idea as it's much clearer.

This is actually not difficult to implement at alk, we already have 'primary' and 'secondary' colors values for the gamelist element (which should really be called 'file' and 'folder', as that is what they are used for anyways).

Adding more colors is a 15 min job, but that strategy only works for a limited number of modifiers. Ie: how many could you really expect a user to remember? Also, what about favorite folders?

pjft

@Zigurana If we use a standard font set for the star, regardless of the theme font, I am supportive of that for now. Feels fairly small and self-contained, and wouldn't require themers to develop their own fonts.

We can later on add more to it if someone feels brave enough.

sokiee

@Zigurana said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Also, what about favorite folders?

I really think the current implementation is fine, that is no favourites on folders. If you filter by favourites, you look inside folders if they have at least 1 element matching the filter ( which is how we both implemented it ).

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft @Zigurana I don't want to be difficult because you guys are awesome in building all of this for us, but what happens when i want to use the comic book "pow" symbol as my star system? Right now I can use any image i want and as long as i name them correctly they will work instead of a star. By making the symbol a font, i can no longer use any image i want, but have to choose from a selection of characters? I might be missing something here?