Plymouth Themes

herb_fargus

For those of you that are not familiar, plymouth is another method for creating splashscreens. Most distros use a plymouth splash for their boot sequence.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation added a plymouth splash for the Pixel desktop environment which has made it that much simpler to utilise for RetroPie.

I imagine most people probably are happy with the current implementation as plymouth is a little more hands on but I always like more options.

I've set up a repository with a bunch of plymouth themes including a retropie theme (modified from the original plymouth theme nilsbyte made):

https://github.com/HerbFargus/plymouth-themes

The readme details how to set it up (at your own risk)

I'm working on a Plymouth theme where Pacman will be chomping along the bottom for the loading bar but I'm running into some code roadblocks

herb_fargus

Just as an update to my madness.

Anyone can make a pacman chomp across the screen but I want to be as accurate as possible so I'm working on some calculations to see how often his chomping sprite
cycles along with how quickly he moves in the X Y direction

Resolution and framerate: 288x224@60.606061 Hz

The sprites are 16X16 tiles

From what I gather he moves 80-88 pixels a second and the sprite cycles every frame as long as he is moving, waits a frame if eating, and skips a frame if turning a corner. waits 3 frames when eating a ghost.

I need to get a proper video recording at native resolution and 60fps with a fps overlay so I can calculate relatively precisely the movement rate. also based on the dossier his default speed is 80% of his possible speed.

There are some good resources with info here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossier.php?print=1

http://www.lomont.org/Software/Games/PacMan/PacmanEmulation.pdf

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/93692/how-fast-does-pac-man-move

herb_fargus

Quick update, I have the maze sprites placed, Pacman chomping and running across the screen.

Now comes the difficult part: the dots and the timing. To be continued...

robertybob

So Plymouth basically means it's an animated splashscreen?

herb_fargus

@robertybob it's more than that, it's a logging tool, it runs as long as your boot sequence rather than a finite time like a video, and it also incorporates dialogue boxes/password input

It's more integrated. Look up the manpage for Plymouth

robertybob

@herb_fargus Ah ok I understand. Keep us posted :)

herb_fargus

I've succeeded in getting a pacman based loading bar:

VGMonkey

@herb_fargus Looking good, I have no idea how any of this works, i know its hard work and not magic but that is it.

keep up the good work

Sashby

@herb_fargus HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh this Pacman loading bar made me laugh with joy. Love the music too. Awesome job :)

xadox

Could someone give me a hint installing the themes on Ubuntu?
The command plymouth-set-default-theme --list does not exist on Ubuntu.

And putting the themes under /usr/share/plymouth/themes/ does not show them with update-alternatives --config default.plymouth.

herb_fargus

@xadox https://github.com/HerbFargus/Raspberry-Pi-Scripts/wiki/Plymouth#using-plymouth-on-ubuntu

retroprogrammer

can't wait to see the finished product, Looks beautiful