White flicker on moving through UI after update to 4.2.3

AlexMurphy

@TMNTturtlguy Yeah, I saw that. Ta.

josete2k

I have the carbon-nometa theme and only a few systems (NES, SNES, MEGADRIVE, MASTER SYSTEM, ARCADE, NEOGEO, PCENGINE and Kodi)

Pi3 (no OC) all updated.

I'll post a video tonight.

Thanks.

AlexMurphy

@josete2k Yeah, you shouldn't be seeing that with Carbon and so few systems. Did you play with the VRAM settings?

TMNTturtlguy

@josete2k agree with @AlexMurphy you should have no white flash issues at all with that then. VRAM should be set to 100.

josete2k

100 and 200 same issue...

TMNTturtlguy

@josete2k try switching theme to just standard carbon and see if that works. If not, you probably have some other issue causing the problems.

RedBatman

@TMNTturtlguy

I have a Pi3, it doesn't matter which theme I use it happens on all of them. As I said before this didn't happen until I updated to 4.2.3 Retropie.

TMNTturtlguy

Guys, I am stumped. I agree that with the "heavy themes" the white flash increased after an update. This flash was contributed to the white screen fix. From what I understand, we get a flash as the images are loaded into memory, this is an alternative to completely losing the backgrounds.

As for why you are experiencing this in themes like carbon, I am not sure. I can't replicate this. There is a PR that has been submitted to remedy this and it looks pretty promising.

I don't have much more to offer as suggestions other than trying to re update, reinstall, and look at any video preview or scraped images and see if you need to reduce file size.

Sorry I can't offer more help

AlexMurphy

@TMNTturtlguy It's a minor annoyance at most. Someone will find a fix or workaround. As you said it is infinitely better than the WSOD.

DarkWolf

@TMNTturtlguy I wasn't able to replicate this either...
So I would recommend a reinstall

RedBatman

@DarkWolf

How do you reinstall? I forgetc where to go for that, is it in the same place where you update the cores, or different. If that doesn't work is it possible to roll back the update.

josete2k

As you can see, flickering only appears after nuning a game. And it disapears when rollo back to the first system.

TMNTturtlguy

@josete2k from what I see your system is running perfectly normal. If you don't like the slight flicker you see you can switch to fade transitions instead of slide. Changing your vram will have no effect because you don it have any memory or image loading issues. The slight change you may see is because the white screen of death has been fixed. There is no need to modify or update as you won't see a difference. I am not at home with my pi so I can't show you, but the white flash we see with heavy themes is a lot more noticeable than what you are experiencing.

pjft

Yeah, that used to happen to me in the past with carbon as well, after loading a game. I suspected it would/could be related to the textures being unloaded from the GPU cache because of playing the game, and so they need to be loaded again on demand afterwards.

I didn't think much of it, to be honest, even though I admit it is not ideal. Someone may look into it one day. Or maybe whatever I'm working on may help with that, unsure.

pjft

Yeah, can easily replicate it in Carbon. Unsure why that is the case. I have a suspicion, but need to confirm.

Anyways, to replicate this, in Fade transition, open a MAME game, then return to the system view and scroll.

In my PR with changes to mitigate these white issues, choosing to re-use SVGs across the theme seems to fix this, so that's good news. It derives from the fact that the system logos in Carbon are SVGs, and not PNGs, and that SVGs aren't especially well dealt with in the current iteration of the texture manager. So yes, my changes should help.

If you want to test it, I'll provide a build shortly.

pjft

Ok.

I've uploaded a build for you to test here:

https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/0.9/emulationstation

Instructions:
1 - Download it and copy it to your Pi
2 - Run, via SSH, chmod +x emulationstationin the same folder.
3 - Run ./emulationstation

You don't need to have it in the actual ES folder to run as a one off. If you want it to be your permanent ES, just copy it to /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation.

But right now, anyone who's having white flashes and such, you'd do everyone a great service if you test this out so that it can be merged into the main ES after testing and confirming that the experience is better overall.

Thanks.

josete2k

@pjft yeah, I've set your newest emulationstation as permanent and no flickering issue.

pjft

@josete2k wow, that was quick. Great to hear!

Let me know if you encounter any unpleasant side effects from using it.

josete2k

I see new settings

Multithreaded image load
Re-use theme images

Both ON, is this correct?

pjft

@josete2k oh. I thought the build I had shared didn't have those options visible. :)

Anyway, yes, both on will be how it'll be in the main build. So don't change them :)