Please Test: Adding support for "All", "Favorites" and "Last Played" systems

pjft

Hi all,

It's that time of the week.

This took a bit longer than I intended, as throughout the development I ended up going back and refactoring a few of the things I was doing.

Several recent topics in the forum for the last month have been around creating custom systems - not only "favorites", but also theme-based systems. Truth is, the reason why we call the ES top-level entries "systems" is purely because ES itself was designed around it. I feel there's a use case for creating entries at the top-level in ES that don't necessarily have to map 1:1 to an actual "system" per se.

I've just implemented the option for users to enable 3 such entries - which I'm naming "Virtual Systems", for lack of better terminology. These are:

An entry with all games in your system;
An entry with the games you last played (effectively, a list of games with play count larger than 1, and sorted by last played time, descending)
An entry for all games you marked as "Favorite". This was pending a separate PR, but as that went through "design paralysis due to undefined scope", I ended up implementing it here with the original submitters' blessing. All credit goes to @zigurana on his work on the ES-Kids mode, and to @sokiee for pushing for it in the main branch recently!

These entries are disabled by default, but users can choose to enable any of them. These require specific folders in the theme, otherwise they'll be unthemed. I'm working with @UDb23 to create these in Carbon, so that the default theme supports these. Themes that currently support it are @TMNTturtlguy's Comic Book theme and the Steampunk one, who I asked to add those entries.

If you want to test it out with another theme (or edit your theme), the right folders are auto-allgames, auto-lastplayed, and auto-favorites.

Other notes:

Since the favorites implementation stayed away from any theme- or visual-related UI changes, users can add a game to the favorites system by editing the metadata, or - if the system is enabled - by pressing the "Y" button. Given the discussions taking place on how to best proceed, I created a popup notification that gives the user feedback on whether they added or removed an item to the favorites list. This keyboard shortcut may be temporary, but for now I feel it helps.

I'm considering expanding this to allow users to create their own custom entries/games collections and edit/manage those from inside ES, provided that their themes have such folders, to address the main use cases that have been discussed and raised by @meleu , @TMNTturtlguy , @cyperghost and others.

Looking forward to testing, feedback, the usual.

You can get it on my repository (pjft), under the RetroPie-Virtual-Systems-PR branch, using meleu's tool if you're so inclined.

Thanks in advance for your time, and looking forward to having your help in making this a reality.

A small inspirational video:

meleu

@pjft compiling right now!!

lilbud

@pjft theming right now

pjft

@lilbud @meleu

We'll finally know the answer for the age-old question "which came first - the theme, or the binary?". :)

EDIT: Looking forward to the first crash reports, obviously.

cyperghost

@pjft Just may a bit late....
what will be the standard expression of the FAVs...

AE: favorites
BE: favourites

pjft

@cyperghost I opted for AE as the ES Kids branch used it, so that is both consistent between the front-end and metadata, as well as compatible with gamelists from ES Kids previous users.

cyperghost

@pjft okay, AE prefered.
If I don't use any gameslist.xml does this also work?
Are the tags of a favor system are stored in the origin of the rom ...maybe ~/RetroPie/roms/gb/Tetris.gb in the system gameslist or is a gamelist genereated and stored to the virtual-systems?

I may compile the new ES ... but I'm on buisness yourney the next two days, so I'm asking stupid :D

lilbud

@meleu How did you get this to compile? It takes 20 min to compile, and spits out an error message.

pjft

@lilbud oh. What error message do you get?

Are you exiting EmulationStation before compiling?

lilbud

@pjft It says something to the effect of
error, failed to compile, did you see the error messages?

My answer to that is no, I was busy playing Cards Against Humanity

lilbud

@pjft This is what happens, it jumps from 43 to 71%

UPDATE: Got it to compile, using make clean. But is fails to install, claiming that the .sh file doesn't exist.

meleu

@lilbud please, do the following:

bash -x ./es-tests.sh 2> err.log

And try to install the this branch again. And when it fail, exit the script and post the err.log on ghostbin.com or something.

edit: by the way, I compiled here and everything seems to be fine.

pjft

@lilbud I wouldn't take it as a problem per se. Those missing ones are resources that you could have perhaps previously completed.

If it stops the compilation do let me know. And make sure to exit ES.

I might certainly have messed something in the PR so I'll gladly fix that to compile. Last minute code cleaning can result in that.

@cyperghost The "all" system will work regardless.

The last played will only work if it can tell what games you last played. That's stored in the metadata, which means gamelists. If you don't have any, no game will show up there.

As for the favorites, same thing applies for now: it's metadata so if you don't use gamelists it won't know what to show there.

In the future I plan on implementing custom systems not based on metadata, for themes folders that aren't in use, so conceptually you could create your own favorites system without having gamelists for that.

Unsure if this clarifies it for now, but I don't write any new gamelist or anything to file. Asides from the new favorite metadata field, I only store a setting stating which systems are enabled.

lilbud

@meleu I will post the err.log shortly

@pjft I added a few games to my favorites, I launched a game and, upon exiting, the favorite notification flashes for about 2 minutes

ADDDED SONIC 2 TO FAVORITES

meleu

@lilbud

@pjft I added a few games to my favorites

Then you compiled fine?

pjft

@lilbud well, I really wanted people to make sure they knew what games were their favorites. Is two minutes a long time? :P

That's obviously a bug, great catch. Thanks!

lilbud

@meleu Yeah, got it to compile. Installing supposedly fails, as I can't set it as the default, but it runs in the command line perfectly fine.

Here is the error log

https://ghostbin.com/paste/gnnfz

cyperghost

@pjft That is exactly what I thought... Thank you for explanation.
The code for future version without gameslist.xml is already made by me.

I "created" the FAV-file format. The FAV-file acts as descriptor of path and emulated system. It stores the info about ROM-path and emu-system to use in one simple file.
With this info you can load any system from any place. I'm sure it's easy to implent into your branch and this would offer all users a way to use favourites.

So maybe you can take a chance and have a look to the BASIC soource-code and translate it to C++. My suggesetion was to first create this in C but then I realised that heavy string manipultion is a better task for annother language.

Take this only as suggestion how a fav-system can be installed without using XML.

Or... that would be my deepest wish you can create a call to a Bash-file by pressing Y-button with marked ROM in menu ;) So you give user the decision what happens by pressing Y-button and maybe you can expand it to X-button also ;) What about this?

How a bash file call can be established can be seen under Prerequisite #5 of topic lfl-create v0.85

meleu

@lilbud caught the "bug": you're running the script as root! I'll change the script to avoid that. Thanks.

UDb23

@pjft said in Please Test: Adding support for "All", "Favorites" and "Last Played" systems:

I'm working with @UDb23 to create these in Carbon,

Next Weekend you'll get a proposal and "beta" version of the required SVGs ;-)