[Theme] Art Book

alphatoanant

I had a chance to set up Game & Watch today and am really enjoying it. The implementation of lr-gw is awesome and very easy to get running.

It also gave me a chance to check out how it would look in the theme and work out the command for selph's scraper to get things looking clean.

Here is what it ends up looking like:
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To get this look:

make sure you have selph's scraper installed (see: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/)
from the command line navigate to the gameandwatch roms folder

cd RetroPie/roms/gameandwatch

and run this command

/opt/retropie/supplementary/scraper/scraper -console_src=ss -console_img=clabel,b,s -img_format=png -max_height=540 -max_width=505 -image_dir=media -image_path=media

These settings make sure the scraper uses Screenscraper as a metadata source and prioritizes downloading Label images (clabel) which is how the system images are catalogued there

I added these details to my github readme (in addition to scraping options for other systems). Hope you find them helpful!

Thank you all for your feedback on genre icons. Are there any others that you would find useful (like "platformer", "puzzle")?

@DeadlyEdna thank you. The system view design as it looks now is what I was originally shooting for and I am very happy with it as well (and amped to know you and others are digging its simplicity).

I noted a few posts back that one of the principles I am following for this theme is "can I leave this on a tv in a room and not have it feel out of place, does it feel subtle, not overwhelming".

So if I do work on a variant design I will be checking it against that principle at each step - I have left a few ideas on the floor so far because of it =)

All that said I am focusing on custom system logos now so its not likely I am going to get to trying out other ideas for system view for a while

If I come up with something interesting my plans are:

This theme and its design would remain as is
and I would release the new design xml here for users to manually change by hand or release a variant (new name/github repo)

I hope that helps and I again I very much appreciate your thoughts on this. Thank you for joining the forums and helping out.

incunabula

Amazing theme, i love the layout! Quick question about the scraper settings -- i'm looking at the example command line you provide for consoles and was wondering if you are running that command line in each rom dir separately or just the roms (parent) dir?

When i run it in the roms dir it creates the \roms\media dir but i would prefer to have the media for each system in its own directory. Just curious if i'm missing something obvious before i go and run it multiple times in each systems directory. Thanks again for the great theme and all of the platforms you've added support for!

HurricaneFan

@incunabula You run it inside of the system you want to scrape. so if its arcade roms, you have to go inside the arcade roms folder before you run the command.

alphatoanant

@incunabula yes you run the commands in each system's rom folder individually (example: run it in RetroPie/roms/nes). I'll update the readme with those details - thanks for catching that and asking.

I am wondering if there is a way to run it from /roms and still have it create the /media folder in each system's rom folder. Will see what I can find.

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant I just threw on a Nintendo DS rom onto my system to run a test and I noticed the Nintendo DS logo looks super tiny compared to all your other logos. Any chance you can take a look at that?

alphatoanant

@hurricanefan totally - will check this evening. By chance have you updated the theme recently? (I made a bunch of changes last night and wanted to see if thats what caused it)

incunabula

FYI, same issue with the SG-1000 logo. I updated the theme yesterday, btw.

alphatoanant

@incunabula well that sorts it =) I think I know what I messed up.

Will do a scrub through tonight and fix.

Sorry for the mix up and thank you for catching it.

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant I did update your theme last night cause I noticed you made updates to your GitHub.

alphatoanant

@hurricanefan sorry man - I should have tested more before the final commit. I have a plan tonight on how to fix.

alphatoanant

@HurricaneFan and @incunabula NintendoDS and SG-1000 logos look to be fixed now.

What happened?... This came up as I was making changes to each logo to make sure they worked well with the launchingimages script.

Whats next?... I am scrubbing each logo though to make sure all others are ok. Should have that done by tomorrow but if you see any others that before then please let me know.

Benefit of the work is that launching images generated from the script will match the theme well and not be blurry =)

side note: it looks like after you get latest from github you have to make sure to restart ES to get the logos to recognize their new size

Thank you for your help on this.

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant updated the theme and it looks good on my end. Thank you!

incunabula

DS and SG-1000 look great, thanks. I just noticed that the colecovision logo isn't showing up even though it's on your list of supported systems - and if you wanted to add Dragon32 and TI-99 4/A to your list of supported platforms (they both have carbon logos) i would be very appreciative. I didn't see that poll that was done a few months back but I like messing with the obscure systems that are supported. Don't worry about it if it takes more than a few minutes; i'm not sure how many others would make use of it. :)

adu

Hello,

Thanks for your awesome theme.
I've managed to scrape the infos/images like you explained on Git, but I don't have a so nice cover like you, I found them quite ... pixelated ? (sorry I'm French I don't know the word). It's kinda blurry, not as clear and nice as yours on your screenshots. Do you have any ideas ?
I'm on a Raspberry Pi3, 1080p screen.
Thanks in advance

alphatoanant

Updates 8/11/17

finished logo cleanup - for real this time =)
optimized each SVG to remove extra cruft and hopefully help them render more universally
that work allowed better support for the launching images script that @meleu created (see: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7193/runcommand-launching-images-for-any-theme)
with the logo updates the generated images look a lot better now
added themes for ti99 and dragon32 (heads up @incunabula)
fixed colecovision theme (I had the folder named incorrectly)

For launching images you can leave all settings as default except "solid_bg_color"
For that setting change it to "get from theme" (aka "Use the system color defined by the theme"). Hope you like it and let me know how it looks.

@adu I have been experimenting a bit with getting better looking images but have more work to do on that front (and yes pixelated is good word to describe what you are seeing). For the screenshots above I had manually curated a few of them in PNG format which is why they look a bit sharper.

An option to try for now is to add a flag of -img_format=png to the strings I have on github. That may help get sharper images without manually having to curate them by hand.

The command I am using also downloads image resolutions more optimized for a 1280x720 screen so changing the sizes there could help - I'll try to play with that next and write back my findings. Just keep in mind that larger filesizes on images (which would occur from using pngs and larger resolution) could start to add lag to the interface. I'll experiment more.

Thank you for checking out the theme!

incunabula

@alphatoanant Thank you, i really appreciate the effort!

duiz

Any chance you could add Sega Saturn and SNES MSU1 to this theme?

There is a svg of MSU1 here
http://zork.net/~st/msu1-attempt-2.svg

alphatoanant

@duiz yes totally. Just added them to github so they will be there when getting latest. I named the msu1 folder "msu1" - let me know if that's what you were looking for. Also thank you for the MSU1 svg; that was a big help.

Pietze

@alphatoanant Your themes are outstanding!

Question: I worked on my own theme (https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12229/240p-honey-theme-optimized-for-crts/8) and I used the svg logos and the three icons for all-games, favorites, last-played.

Is it alright for you, if I share my themes? I can mention your theme in the read me, if you want.

alphatoanant

Thank you @Pietze

I just checked out your theme and its looking sweet! I especially like how you are handling the system artwork behind the logos - its very nicely stylized.

Yes it's totally ok for you to use the logos and share your theme with them.

For the standard logos (nes, genesis, etc..) I sourced them from Carbon initially and then made changes to make them grayscale. So all credit on those really goes to Carbon.

For the ones I made (i.e. all-games, favorites, last-played, custsom systems) please feel free to use them as is. If I can help with additional logos/updates just let me know (I am glad to)

Thank you for letting me know and awesome work again on your theme.