EmulationStation Updates and Guide

[jdrassa]

@rookervik said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

And I have found bugs already in the updates that I am not fond of.

Please elaborate (either here or in a new thread) on any additional bugs that you have found. We can't do anything to fix them if they are not being reported.

One such bug is the resizing of images. I believe it's related to an update that "fixes" proper location of images... while it does this, it does it slowly after the image is already drawn on screen. Making it look like your images are shrinking every time you change to another game. This is almost a game-breaker for me.

If you or anyone else can provide more detail on this it would be helpful. I just tested (with several themes) it out on my linux desktop and I am not seeing it at all.

But anyway, here is a link to the theme.md. It sure helped me.

Glad to hear you found it helpful. I have made it a point to make sure I update it whenever making a change that effects themes.

@rookervik said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

We also need to be careful when adding these changes to our themes. The new features are not backwards-compatible with previous versions of EmulationStation.

For many of the new theme features, there are ways to implement them in a However that is something that we need to do a better job of documenting.

[jdrassa]

@pjft The version tags in themes act more as a fail safe. For example, if you are running a verison of ES that supports themes up to version of 4, but try to load a theme with a version of 5, ES will immediately throw an error and won't even try to load the theme. In the case where we add a new theme element, but don't increase the version, ES will try to load the theme, but will eventually fail due to an unrecognized theme element. For the user, the end result is the same.

In the work I have done, I have only increased the version when adding variable support, because it felt like it was a bigger change that effected the structure of themes.

[pjft]

@jdrassa Sound good, wasn't aware of that. Thanks.

As for the image moving, I made a very shoddy video (apologies for the music, I had to remove all the sound from the video and it was easier just to add a song YouTube suggested...).

It is very subtle, but it's noticeable, especially if you put it at 720p, full screen, 0.25x speed. Even though my hand isn't fully stable (sorry), you can easily spot it in the two first images (the two 10 Yard Fight versions) as they're the same size, if you focus on the right edge of the image. It's a split second, but can get annoying.

My bets are that it's related to a rounding thing, or maxsize changes.

See if you can spot it, and if it would ring a bell.

I was also going to mention your disciplined work on Themes.md - it is definitely precious, otherwise this would be hard to keep track of!

I'll make sure to add the collections work to it as well.

Best.

EDIT: it's also easily noticeable in Carbon, if you force it to detailed view rather than automatic or video. It affects the element that corresponds to the image metadata, at least.

[AndersHP]

@pjft said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

Furthermore, I'm working on adding the possibility for users to create their own game collections (which are, in effect, system agnostic collections of games) from within EmulationStation.

Out of curiosity; how's this part of the project holding up? I'm not sleeping until this is incorporated, that's how excited I am :-)

[pjft]

@andershp it's holding up extremely well. In fact, it's running as well as the current public branch!

(I haven't really managed to start it yet, but I lack other positive ways to describe the lack of progress :) )

[AndersHP]

@pjft I just tried the ES update, and the favourites function in each system folders are spot on what I searched for. Awesome work!
Is there any way of making EmulationStation keep the "favourites=true" filter on after a reboot?

[pjft]

@andershp while you wouldn't have that ability, you have a "favorites" system that contains all your favorite games. You will need to enable it in the game collections menu, and you'll never from using a compatible theme.

You can also sort it by system if you'd rather have it instead of by name.

That use case you're aiming for will only be available if/when the kiosk/kids mode features are brought to the main branch, but hopefully these suit for the time being.

[AndersHP]

@pjft Allright, just wondering. I had a lot of fun yesterday running through roms to pick out my fave's. Still need to finish my scraping on some of my systems, I imagine this has to be done first, since the metadata otherwise will be overwritten, correct?

Anyways, thanks again. Keep up the good work!

[pjft]

@andershp I don't know enough about the inner workings of the scrapers, and whether or not they'll overwrite the metadata or merge it. I'd imagine they might overwrite it, but you can probably test it on a single game and see how it goes.

If you want to try to keep that work, I can imagine that if you'd backup the current gamelist.xml files, you'd be able to merge them with the scraped ones, though that is not straightforward and can be error-prone. :/

So yeah, definitely scrape stuff beforehand, that's probably the way to go.

[pjft]

@Rookervik just saw your post on updating Carbon to add some of the requested features!

Would you be adding support for Game Collections?

If so, would definitely appreciate you chiming in here:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11321/theme-changes-attention-theme-makers-upcoming-game-collections-in-es/64

as since I hadn't heard form you in a while, @UDb23 and @mediamogul had already started to work on something to that effect, so that at least no work is duplicated (meaning, if you would want to take that on, it would be great to give them a heads up as it's obviously your theme).

Let me know if there's anything we can help, and thanks!

[mediamogul]

@pjft

My examples were really just for myself and to get the creative juices flowing. Carbon is a democratic endeavor and I've even added system artwork to the project myself, but having the skin's creator would certainly help keep a consistent look throughout.

[Rookervik]

@pjft Well, Herb_Fargus and I designed the theme. I did all the graphics and Herb did the code. That was back when ES only had a couple themes and we were still learning how to theme it. So once Carbon was updated to a full theme with all systems, I sort of handed it off to Herb to keep updated.

There are so many features being added to ES that we simply cannot keep up. If you have a team adding features to Carbon, then that is fine. Let me know if you need some graphics. That's my category.

I will be going in and trying to edit in the variables and then hopefully writing a script to allow people to change the color of Carbon easily. It already comes with ~8 colors now. I don't think there is a single person that has used it tho. It even has bright orange, just for Jools. But I think he still uses default red. Haha.

-Right now I'm trying to find an ES feature request post. Every rom launcher I've ever used has been able to load screenshots/box-art from a sub folder in the rom folder. So if the image name matched the game, it was displayed. I was wanting this added. It would reduce my boot time from 25 seconds down to 5 :D

[pjft]

Thanks both.

I am certainly aware of the idea of Carbon being a democratic endeavor, but I wanted to make sure you were comfortable with the direction. :)

As for a ES feature request post, I'm not sure there is one such post that is actively monitored or checked, but you can probably file a bug over at the GitHub repository?

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/issues

That's probably the best bet, as at least there'll be a centralized repository where everyone can check things. I'm not sure of the proper recommendation for feature requests.

[jdrassa]

@Rookervik Since there have been several requests now for a more accessible changelog of EmulationStation, I am going to attempt to create and maintain one. My current plan is to go back as far as when video support was added. That was around the time that I first got involved here and appears to be when development really picked up. I will also try to update the wiki/docs with tutorials on how to use the newer theme features, but those will take a bit of time to write.

@herb_fargus Are you OK with this being on the RetroPie-Setup wiki/docs or would you prefer it to be in the forums?

[herb_fargus]

@jdrassa yeah that would be much appreciated. there are some generalised readmes in the emulationstation GitHub that @pjft has added some to, it would be good to have those completed at some point but I think it would also be good to have something in the docs as that's generally where most people go

@mattrixk did a good job with his basic theme tutorial but perhaps it's worth having a emulationstation theming page that just lays out the features and/or variables.

I'm sure whatever you come up with will be lovely

[DD-Indeed]

Small request: add option to change the menu controls info bar buttons to different ones. It now uses the default ABXY-system, but would be nice to have Playstation-buttons on it as well.

[mattrixk]

@herb_fargus I want to go back and redo the tutorial with all the new stuff, but there's been so much new stuff that I've fallen behind. I can't guide others in how to do something if I don't know how to do it myself... I'm not management material.

[jdrassa]

Forgot to post this early, but I have created a changelog page for EmulationStation on the wiki. I will do my best to keep this updated as changes are added. I am also working on adding documentation/tutorials for some of the newer theme features.

[EctoOne]

@jdrassa you're the best! I'm actually surprised about how many features have been added from which I thought have always been there. :D
Time to do some reading and try all the theme enhancements.
I found a broken link under point 2.1.3, it shows a 404 page.

Edit: That also reminds me, didn't you set up a method to get the latest build for Windows?

[jdrassa]

@ectoone Link is fixed. You get an updated build of ES for Windows here.