ES themes ready for favorite, all games, recently played and custom-collections

RxBrad

FYI.. I just added favorite, all games, recently played and custom-collections functionality to both the light and dark versions of Gameboy Zero 3.5.

TMNTturtlguy

@mrjordaaany sorry I just saw this post now, you may need to update your comic book theme. My theme should support everything being talked about in this post without any issues.

cyperghost

@rxbrad Please use the @ sign ;)
Without it your chances are good that I oversee your theme
I think I will use your GBZ theme for my next project build :)

alphatoanant

@cyperghost - CRT is ready to go now with support for all 4 VS (recent, all, favs, custom-col). Thank you!

MrJordaaany

@tmntturtlguy It sure does! Thought I was up to date but wasn't. Have since updated and all works great. Thanks!

cyperghost

Added Retrorama

TMNTturtlguy

@cyperghost I just wanted to let you know that the ComicBook theme (all versions) have been updated to incorporate the "Default" theme. This is useful with the new custom collections that @pjft is working on. You might want to add this to your list. FYI - this is a great tool! Thanks

cyperghost

@tmntturtlguy Added this to Special Notes

NoeleyC

@choccyhobnob thanks for the update, that's made cygnus my no. 1 theme to use again! Without trying to come across as a pest, there's still a few systems missing in your theme that I have (megadrive Japan for example), is there any chance you might add them at some stage? I have no real coding knowledge so I don't know how much an ordeal those might be!

Thanks for all your hard work on this!!

ohmycommodore

Is there a separate Canadian theme with "favourites" spelled correctly? :)

cyperghost

@ohmycommodore Yes... IO-theme! I rather prefer BE did not know that canadians also use the ou

pjft

Hi all,

Happy Saturday.

Apologies for the trouble here, and a big thank you for all your support so far throughout this process!

As you know, we started this endeavor without anything concrete, but now that there's a testable working build and themes are starting to be updated, I ran into some inconsistencies that, while they'll unfortunately require a slight bit of work from us all, it's good that they come up early-ish in the process as we can make the best decision together.

Now that a few people are testing builds, especially when they choose to sort the systems alphabetically, the experience can be somewhat inconsistent and awkward. The main reason for that was that - in my miserable naming skills - named the designated folder to group the collections custom-collectionsbut during development after some suggestions I ended up settling on a more friendly name of "My Collections" for the user facing name.

This poses the following problems:

For themes that named the user-facing theme "custom collections", it's fine, as the system is sorted between "c" and "d", as expected.
For themes that named the user-facing theme "my collections" as I suggested, it's weird if they sort the systems to go from "colecovision" to "my collections" to "daphne".

I've thought about this, and here are the few options I'm seeing:

Name the user facing theme "custom collections".
- Pros: it will match the folder name. It will be correctly sorted. Some themes already have that.
- Cons: longer name, which poses some challenges for some themes in terms of font sizes. "Feels" less user friendly/more jargon-y.
Name the user facing theme "my collections", and rename the folder to custom-my-collections.
- Pros: More user friendly. Some themes already have that.
- Cons: needs change in the current themes to change the folder structure to custom-my-collections. Needs to change the code as well.
Let things be as they are.
- Pros: no extra effort.
- Cons: inconsistent user experience. Some themes will call it "custom collections", other "my collections". Sorting order will either be good or bad, if they sort it. May look like a bug.

I'd love to hear your perspective, as most options will require a bit of work from all of you - and for that I do apologize.

I'm personally inclined to option 2, if you feel "My Collections" is more user friendly, and update the code accordingly. I know a lot of you will have to change the name that shows in the carousel to match that (well, in option 1 others would probably have to change it as well to match "Custom Collections"), and I know that's not necessarily a small task.

So let me know your thoughts, and I do appreciate you all having been early adopters and supporters of this work. I'm sure ES will be a lot better and user-friendlier platform as a result!

Thank you, and have a good weekend.

cyperghost

@pjft As I'm no theme creator and I'm far away from saying everything must work 100%. I vote #3 because there is still the option to sort all auto generated systems together if you are not happy with alphabetical order. And I find it a bit funny - there is more than just the western part of the world. The alphabetical order is not always ABC - ABW is also common :)

But you are so kind to ask the users - so let the users decide :)

So here is the poll

before vote please read @pjfts thread above!

pjft

Thank you for the poll.

By the way, we can also just call them "collections", without the "custom" or "my" prefix, and keep the folder as custom-collections.

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft just an FYI, it is very easy for theme makers to change the folder name. Changing the folder name is a simple click and rename of the folder and then uploading that change to github. If the themes uses github desktop this whole charge is about 4 clicks of a button.

Changing the system logo art is of course more work, but I don't see a need for that in any of your request.

If you want to test this out you can renam the theme folders within the ComicBook theme however you like and see how everything works.

alphatoanant

@pjft I agree with @TMNTturtlguy thoughts on this as well. Its easy/quick to update a folder name on the theme side.

Are these are the aspects?

the name of the folder:
From a theme maker perspective this can be changed easily. Any of the folder name options presented above would be fine
the logo:
This would be up to a theme maker to decide what is displayed in the image so I think this is ok as well
the text that displays if there is no logo defined for the theme (e.g. what shows for logoText element):
The proposed options are "My Collections", "Collections" and "Custom Collections" right?
If so I like the simplicity of "Collections".

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant @pjft I also like the minimal term "Collections".

dmmarti

Since I personally don't usually rearrange my es_systems.cfg .. it doesn't bother me so much where ES displays it in the menu. But, I could see where the folks that do...it might bug 'em.

As for renaming the new theme subfolder from "custom-collections" to something else, as the others have said, easy peasy. My only thoughts about that would be, if folks have already installed a few themes that use that folder name, then update their RetroPie install ... just need to make sure they also update their themes too (if the theme author made the change to the different name).

dmmarti

@cyperghost --- real quick, my recent theme called "Showcase" has full support of the 4 virtual systems .... if you wanna throw it in the chart above.....thanks

cyperghost

done added Showcase theme @dmmarti