Long standing ES bugs

[ruckage]

Hi.

I was just wondering if any of the long standing ES bugs are likely to be fixed. The gamelist in particular seems to have quite a few bugs and it would be nice if they could be looked into at some point.

There are three bugs in particular in the textlist that could do with being looked at:

<horizontalMargin> - if this is set to anything other than 0 and the game name is too long the ends of the name are cropped. Examples below.

<lineSpacing> - if this is set to anything but the default setting then the selector bar no longer lines up. Example below

Scaling isn't consistent between resolution, all other element display exactly the same regardless of resolution (assuming same aspect ratio) but gamelists can vary greatly. Example below.

There are other problems as well but these are the ones that for me at least have caused the most headaches and often forced me to compromise my original theme ideas.

Could any of the devs comment on these? It seems that the likely cause would be some miscalculations somewhere. Programming isn't completely alien to me so I'm going to have a look through the textlist component myself to see if I can spot anything but as I've never really used C I'm not sure how much help I will be. If I see anything that looks suspect I'll post it here.

[Zigurana]

In the past, there was no real development of ES anywhere, as the project has been abandoned by the original developer in 2015 or so.
With the current activities going on at the Retropie branch however, you can try an add the misbehaviors of the gamelist component as an issue on github here.
That is of course no guarantee that this will be picked up, but at least that list is a little more persistent than a forum thread. You can reference the discussion here as well though.

To help highlight the issues you are seeing, could you please create some screenshots combined with the gamelist properties you are trying to use? Those would then make excellent test cases.

[ruckage]

@Zigurana
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.

I'll open these as issues on github shortly and will upload screenshot etc. here. I did just check the current issues list and these bugs haven't been mention before from what I can see.

[ruckage]

@Zigurana
I've updated the first post with screenshots showing each bug.

[jdrassa]

@ruckage Thanks for the screenshots. I have fixes for the horizontalMargin and lineSpacing issues, but still need to look into the scaling issue.

For the horizontalMargin, The end of the name may still get chopped off, but it is now consistent. The beginning will always be visible, regardless of alignment, and only the end will be cut off is there is not enough space.

[ruckage]

@jdrassa said in Long standing ES bugs:

@ruckage Thanks for the screenshots. I have fixes for the horizontalMargin and lineSpacing issues, but still need to look into the scaling issue.

For the horizontalMargin, The end of the name may still get chopped off, but it is now consistent. The beginning will always be visible, regardless of alignment, and only the end will be cut off is there is not enough space.

That's great :). The end being chopped off is fine as you can obviously only display as many characters that will fit. I'm not sure I mentioned this originally but will it scroll the text now if the end is chopped off? With the bug it sometimes wouldn't scroll the name even if it was chopped off as it seemed to think that the name was fully displayed if that makes sense (I'm guessing it was only considering the full width of the textlist without accounting for the margins reducing the available width.)

[jdrassa]

@ruckage Yes it will still scroll the text when the end is chopped off. I did see that bug where it wouldn't scroll sometimes and fixed it. Your guess is correct, it was only considering the full width.

[ruckage]

@jdrassa said in Long standing ES bugs:

@ruckage Yes it will still scroll the text when the end is chopped off. I did see that bug where it wouldn't scroll sometimes and fixed it. Your guess is correct, it was only considering the full width.

Thanks. I really appreciate you fixing this, I wasn't expecting anything so quickly.
Any idea when these fixes will appear in retropie itself as I know the line spacing bug fix will definitely break my themes as I modified a font to specifically work around it?

[jdrassa]

@ruckage No timeframe yet. Unless it gives me trouble, I was hoping to fix the scaling issue and submit them all together. If you prefer, I can submit the first 2 fixes sooner. Regardless, I will make sure to post a build beforehand so that you can test it out with your theme.

[ruckage]

@jdrassa said in Long standing ES bugs:

@ruckage No timeframe yet. Unless it gives me trouble, I was hoping to fix the scaling issue and submit them all together. If you prefer, I can submit the first 2 fixes sooner. Regardless, I will make sure to post a build beforehand so that you can test it out with your theme.

No need to rush, it's been a problem for a long while so it's just nice to know that it's going to be fixed.
I'll definitely give the fixed build a test though when it's ready, keep us posted.

[jdrassa]

@ruckage I think I have the scaling issue fixed. I need to clean up the code some and I will get a build for you to test.

[ruckage]

@jdrassa
That's great :). I'd be happy to test it.

[jdrassa]

Fixes are ready for testing.

I tested it against all of themes that are currently installable through RetroPie-Setup. There are a few that have the side effect of the last entry being cut off slightly. Before I submit this I plan to go through and submit the necessary fixes for those themes.

Code is here:
https://github.com/jrassa/EmulationStation/tree/gamelist-fixes

Windows build can be downloaded here:
https://ci.appveyor.com/api/buildjobs/yolhkm014epxeqpk/artifacts/EmulationStation-Win32.zip

[ruckage]

@jdrassa
Fantastic, I'm downloading it now to test, I'll let you know how it goes. I'm expecting my themes to break due to the font hack I'm currently using but that should be an easy fix (just a font change).

[ruckage]

@jdrassa
Sadly seems to have broken my theme. The text now lines up and is spaced exactly as you would expect based on what's in the xml so that's good but the selector bar itself is huge. I've attached a screenshot, before the selector bar would fit within the boxes in the background but now it's much higher than the text and overhangs by a huge margin.

[pjft]

@ruckage Complete tangent on this topic, but your theme looks really good!

[jdrassa]

@ruckage I saw that same behavior. I believe the issue is with your font. The font you are using appears to have a some empty space below the actual characters. I assumed that this is what you had to do to work around the bugs. You mentioned this above.

@ruckage said in Long standing ES bugs:

I know the line spacing bug fix will definitely break my themes as I modified a font to specifically work around it

I disabled your custom font and with a little tweaking to the font size and line spacing I got the following.

[ruckage]

@jdrassa said in Long standing ES bugs:

@ruckage I saw that same behavior. I believe the issue is with your font. The font you are using appears to have a some empty space below the actual characters. I assumed that this is what you had to do to work around the bugs. You mentioned this above.

@ruckage said in Long standing ES bugs:

I know the line spacing bug fix will definitely break my themes as I modified a font to specifically work around it

I disabled your custom font and with a little tweaking to the font size and line spacing I got the following.

Hi, the original font was shifted down below the baseline to make it line up with the selector bar however the screenshot I posted above was with the unedited font. The fonts were designed in bitfontmaker2 which is an online tool for designing pixel fonts.
Obviously I need that font as my theme relies on keeping that particular look. Previously the selector bar was the correct size with my font, it just didn't line up with if I altered the line spacing.

[jdrassa]

@ruckage If you can post a link to the unedited font, I can test it out and see what I can come up with. Currently, the height of the selector bar is 1.5 times the size of the text. This corresponds to the default line spacing. Worst case scenario, I may just need to add an additional theme option to make the selector bar size configurable.

[ruckage]

@jdrassa said in Long standing ES bugs:

@ruckage If you can post a link to the unedited font, I can test it out and see what I can come up with. Currently, the height of the selector bar is 1.5 times the size of the text. This corresponds to the default line spacing. Worst case scenario, I may just need to add an additional theme option to make the selector bar size configurable.

Thanks. Heres a link to the font : http://www.pentacom.jp/pentacom/bitfontmaker2/gallery/?action=dl&id=2639

I actually think having the ability to define the selector bar height would be a real bonus if you could add it - along with an option to change the 'y offset' so that it's vertical position in relation to the text could be set as well. The more we can edit ourselves the better, gives us more freedom with design options.