Please Test: Creating Custom Collections

[HurricaneFan]

@pjft The metadata for custom collections worked for me. Thanks!

[HurricaneFan]

@pjft What do you think about putting a game count at the end of the Collection name in the Custom Collections screen?

Mega Man (5)
Super Mario Bos (6)
etc

[pjft]

@hurricanefan I considered that briefly, but decided to add the info to the description. It's somewhat hacky to add the number to the name, I'm not thrilled on making that a standard. :/

What use case are you trying to solve?

[pjft]

Good morning/afternoon!

Updated the binary again - and the GitHub branch now - with the latest code then.

It should fix the SNES-thing you had picked up on, which I hadn't noticed earlier. Well spotted.

It should also fix a few minor things here and there, so functionally it should be close to final.

I'll leave it for you all to play with (I will as well), and after that I will likely try to clean up the code as I'm not that happy with it at the moment.

Thanks all.

[HurricaneFan]

@pjft I totally missed the description count you added when you brought over the game metadata to the custom collection section. Thats good enough for me. My logic was the Custom Collection looks like a game but technically its a list of games but to the user, the game list has a single game name like "Mega Man" but technically its a list of Mega Man games if they user clicks 'A' button. So having total game count next to Mega Man would help spell that out that they aren't selecting a game from that initial Collection list.

Tested the new binary this morning and the SNES bug is indeed gone. Thanks!

[pjft]

@hurricanefan I see.

That's probably more of a ES-wide question which is that folders aren't that distinguishable from files, perhaps? I thing those colours are themable - or at least slightly different though?

Either way, got it. Thanks.

I'm not going to change within the scope of this particular change, though. Hopefully the notion that those are collections (under "My Collections") will be reasonable and/or sufficient. :)

Let me know if you run into something more in the coming days, but otherwise I hope it's useful and helpful! Thanks for the feedback, as it certainly made this better than what would have otherwise been.

[HurricaneFan]

@pjft Thanks for all your hard work in this feature!

[dmmarti]

@pjft - updated to the latest binary ... so far its working great.

Thank you for all of your hard work on this. This is an awesome feature for sure!

[pjft]

@dmmarti @HurricaneFan Thanks all. As long as it's useful, that's all that matters.

I'll now spend a few days making the code more elegant before actually submitting the PR, but if any other bugs and such crop up, do let me know, and I'll gladly try to tackle them.

@dmmarti - may I add your nice video to the first post here? I wanted to create one as well, but spent most of my free time on the code :|

Thanks!

[dmmarti]

@pjft Sure! It would be my pleasure to be used.....showcasing your hard work for the rest of us to enjoy and tinker with.

[pjft]

@dmmarti Done! Thanks!

[TMNTturtlguy]

@pjft Thanks for responding to my questions in the other thread. I was apologize to @dmmarti for posting in his theme thread, i wasn't paying attention and thought it was I was in the thread.

No problems regarding the gamelist and marquee abilities. I am sure I am an edge case anyways! I am not sure that the marquee per game can be handled by themeing or changes to ES in regards to themeing as this is a per rom meta data setting that is already available, I have it set as the game logo in the main SNES folder gamelist for example, and then in the "Fighters" system i have the SNES logo in the gamelist. Since I already have this set up in my build anyways, i will just test to make sure that these updated don't affect hos my symlinks work.

Another basic question I am only asking because I haven't had a chance to test, does this create an entry into the es_systems.cfg? Or is it possible to arrange the order of the custom systems? I created a script that allows me to switch es_systems.cfg files so that i can display different setups on the fly. An example of this is the ability to switch to an es_systems.cfg that only contains neo geo and capcom so i can use @ruckage neo geo theme. Any idea how this might work with your new build? I will certainly test this when i have the chance.

It sounds like you have your hands full with the upcoming move, the kids and the new job. I hope that you can find some excitement in all of that work!

[pjft]

@tmntturtlguy not a bother!

This doesn't create any entry in the es_systems file, so there's only two real sorting orders: one for everything alphabetical, the other keeping regular systems first and collections second, once again alphabetical for each.

I suppose you could simulate that by creating the collections/theme folders for your scenario in an alphabetical way (like 1-fighters, 2-platformers, etc) since if they're themed the names don't really matter much because they'll never be visible anyways.

But other than that, there's no real sorting mechanism. For either approach you'll have to change some things outside of ES - either the systems file in your case, or the theme folders names for these.

Sorry about that.

[TMNTturtlguy]

@pjft No need to be sorry! Once again I have just created some very very far edge cases. I have options for my current builds -

1. keep they as they are since they work the way I want them too..
2. find new hacks to make the updates work the way i wan them too!

[cyperghost]

@pjft I can agree to @HurricaneFan the SNES bug is gone.
Thank you so much for creating this into ES
This is a great step :)

[pjft]

@tmntturtlguy I hope the update doesn't break anything that you currently have set up, so at least that's that :)

[HurricaneFan]

@pjft I'm seeing a new bug. If you remove a game that was already in a collection, EmulationStation crashes with a Segmentation Fault. I have to do a hard reboot of the pi to get it working again.

[pjft]

@hurricanefan Hm.

Let me test that. That shouldn't be happening, but after testing more now, I see it happens to Collections under My Collections.

Let me look into that. Thanks.

You would probably be able to ssh into the Pi and reboot it from there when that happens though. Hopefully. :)

EDIT: Apologies. Rookie mistake after a small refactoring yesterday. Thanks for flagging that. Will update the binary shortly.

[pjft]

Thanks.

Updated the branch and the binary, so you can re-do the commands to get the latest version.

Fixed the crash you reported, as well as an instance whereby trying to select a random game in an empty collection would - as expected - not behave well :)

Thanks for testing!

[HurricaneFan]

@pjft Adding and removing works as expected now. Thanks!

On a side note, Can Custom Collections the system be sorted differently in the system view?

Right now, My setup shows Mega Drive, Custom Collections, Nintendo 64. What causes it to display between M and N?