Favorites for EmulationStation

Zigurana

@pjft good point, scope creep is my arch-nemesis!
So, the current plan:

I'll revert the cosmetic changes i've made to the gamelist entries, and
re-introduce the themable favorites Icon which is toggled when the selected item is a favorite or not.

Sounds ok?

Zigurana

@DarkWolf no worries, thank you for testing this!

Syhles

@Zigurana
My personal opinion is that the favorites icon and folder icon should be handled like the help icons, there should be a default icon built in to EmulationStation for them, but you should be able to point to new images in the theme to replace them.

I'm not sure how feasible that is, but this way it wouldn't break any themes and we would also keep easy themeablilty.

DarkWolf

@Syhles That sounds like a good solution if you ask me

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles agreed!

DarkWolf

@Zigurana SO now I cloned it with
git clone -b Favorites https://github.com/zigurana/EmulationStation.git
The problem is that the cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-4.7 . fails with

/home/pi/EmulationStation/external/pugixml does not contain a CMakeLists.txt file.

Any thoughts on that one?

pjft

@DarkWolf a recent change meant that we need to initialize the submodules the first time around. Run:

git submodule update --init

DarkWolf

@pjft Wow, that was easy, thanks!
I have to learn more things about git obviously

pjft

@Zigurana I think that's a wise way to break things up. Especially as, at least the way I see it, some themes may opt to keep the icons in the per game metadata section like in your branch, either exclusively (I.e. not having it in the games list) or in conjunction with this change.

But either way, it can be tackled later. :)

Do let me know if/how I can help!

DarkWolf

@Zigurana Omg that is so awesome! I was waiting for something like this for quite some time now. It's way better than the kids mode!
Keep up that great work, works like a charm!

OT: The emulationstation developers are a bit overdramatic

make
This will take a very, very long time (multiple hours).

Literally took 15mins

pjft

@DarkWolf it might have been written at s time when only the Pi 1 was around. But either way, under promising and over delivering is better than the other way around:)

DarkWolf

One thing I noticed is that if I want to shutdown/restart the system it only closes emulationstation and leaves me with a console left

pjft

@DarkWolf that's normal when you're calling emulationstation from the terminal. :)

DarkWolf

@pjft Like I said before I installed it over an existing emulationstation (or retropie to be exact)... I just switched the emulationstation files

pjft

@DarkWolf oh, apologies. And did you launch it by restarting the system? Does that happen when you restart the system?

DarkWolf

@pjft
It automaticly launches on boot... If I than want to shut the pi down or reboot it, it closes es and thats it

pjft

@DarkWolf I see. Thanks for catching it then, as I doubt it would have been caught by many. Hopefully it'll help tracking it down.

Still, that's a very specific part of the code to have been messed with, and very much unrelated to this development, so I'm intrigued by what's causing it.

DarkWolf

I found another thing... When I want to add a second game to favorites (in one system, but not every one... for example in atari5200/7800) emulationstation crashes with following error message:

/opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh line1: 930 Segmentation fault
emulationstation

EDIT:
Seems like it happens on all systems with scraped data..
(Don't know if this helps, but my gamelist.xml's are in the rom folders)

pjft

@DarkWolf does that mean it crashes when you make a second game a favorite?

How are you adding it? In the gamelist, manually? Via the metadata editor in ES? Do you have any filters active when it crashes (I.e. are you filtering by favorites)? When exactly does it crash? What are the exact step by step instructions to make that happen?

There are quite a few new things here so it can be reasonably anything - either the favorites logic to the filtering or indexing. Let us know some more details, so we can investigate further. :)

Edit: also, if you want to share a gamelist that crashes, that'd be handy!

mattrixk

Jeez I go to sleep and then work for a few hours and I miss all the fun stuff.

@pjft:

you'd want to have a bit more control over the position of the folder icon

I hadn't thought of that. I guess I was just expecting it to go inline with the text, but you can't really expect an image to behave the same way / use the same properties as the text element.

@Zigurana: I was thinking about gamelist icons before falling asleep last night, and I wondered if Font Icons would be a feasible solution. I use Font Awesome on every site I make at work and I love it. With nearly 800 icons there should be something for most use cases.

For anyone curious, you can see the full list of Font Awesome icons on their Cheatsheet.

I can think of these elements of the <gamelist> that might need their own icon:

folder
favourite
kids
hidden

They can each have a default icon built into the system that a Theme Maker can override in their XML, like:

<icon name="md_favorite">
  <name>fa-heart</name>
</icon>

They could go at the end of the game name like this:

Imgur

That way the names are still all left aligned, except the folder which would stand out a bit from the rest.