Favorites for EmulationStation

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles yeah, I know what he was meaning. I was just sharing an easy work around for the problem.

ruckage

@TMNTturtlguy said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@ruckage you can replace the stars in the art folder with new icons. If you want to edit the stars color you just need an editing program like photoshop or gimp. Save the new icon or star as the same name and you are good to go. I have little comic "pow" symbols in mine, they react the same way the stars do to the meta data.

Hi. Yeah I'm aware of that, you'll notice I'm using pixel hearts for the ratings on my theme. Trouble is if you want a different colour icon for each system (which would be nice on my theme) you need a separate set of images for each colour - nearly every other element you can use a white image and then colour it through the xml (the logos on the carousel are another example that can't be coloured - also annoying). This may not seem like an issue but say for example you decide you want to change the rating icon design completely at some point - this then requires replacing up to 172 images (assuming 86 systems and two images needed for the rating icon). If however you could colour them through xml you would only have 2 images to modify.

Apart from being really useful it also seems a strange inconsistency that these are the only 2 elements that lack the option to be coloured.

sokiee

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Oh, and you should also be able to color them - very annoying you can't color the rating icons in ES as you can all other elements.

If you switch from icons to font-set glyphs then you can color and size them as fonts, could be an idea ( the linked font awesome has it too star glyph

ruckage

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Oh, and you should also be able to color them - very annoying you can't color the rating icons in ES as you can all other elements.

If you switch from icons to font-set glyphs then you can color and size them as fonts, could be an idea ( the linked font awesome has it too star glyph

No, not a good solution as it takes away the ability to easily customise the images used and (unless you know how to make/edit fonts but that is not an easy task and not something most people can do.) Using images/svg would also allow full colour icons which some themers may want.
There is no reason the icons can't be coloured via xml as every other image can be - it just hasn't been included as an option.

The more new features the better but I think it's important not to limit creativity with those features so that we get more diverse themes.

sokiee

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Oh, and you should also be able to color them - very annoying you can't color the rating icons in ES as you can all other elements.

If you switch from icons to font-set glyphs then you can color and size them as fonts, could be an idea ( the linked font awesome has it too star glyph

No, not a good solution as it takes away the ability to easily customise the images used and (unless you know how to make/edit fonts but that is not an easy task and not something most people can do.)

what i meant is add support for font awesome ( with all the glyphs included ) then you can let people not only customise the icon ( choosing any glyph ) but then you can also customise it as a font ( size, color ecc )

ruckage

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

what i meant is add support for font awesome ( with all the glyphs included ) then you can let people not only customise the icon ( choosing any glyph ) but then you can also customise it as a font ( size, color ecc )

Yeah, but picking from a selection of pre-defined glyphs isn't enough. I would want to draw my own icons to match my theme, as would many other themers.

sokiee

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

what i meant is add support for font awesome ( with all the glyphs included ) then you can let people not only customise the icon ( choosing any glyph ) but then you can also customise it as a font ( size, color ecc )

Yeah, but picking from a selection of pre-defined glyphs isn't enough. I would want to draw my own icons to match my theme, as would many other themers.

Then yes, I agree adding support for icon would be better then ( and probably easier too )

Chillimonster

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

sokiee

@Chillimonster said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

Yes, but what if people don't like green? what if they want it red because it matches their red theme :P
It's better if it's customisable.

ruckage

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@Chillimonster said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

Yes, but what if people don't like green? what if they want it red because it matches their red theme :P
It's better if it's customisable.

I imagine if used it would be implemented in the same way as folders, it would have separate tags to define 'selector bar' color and 'font' colour for favourites. However this is a bit of a limited approach and as with folders currently how would you know that the different colour signified the game as a favourite? Icons in some form are a far better idea as it's much clearer.

Chillimonster

@sokiee True, but if customisable it can be made to match a theme

@ruckage I was thinking more to do with the lack of intrusion in various themes rather than the colours, or even Itallics or Underlining. Just spit-balling ideas really :-)

Zigurana

@ruckage
Do you have any idea how many glyphs are included in this particular set? Which one in particular are you missing?
The one thing that using a font has going for it is that the implementation is a lot easier to accomplish.
My proposal would be to start with the star hard-coded (as in the initial implementation for recalbox).
After this, we could allow it to be a themable element, from the FA set.
If then there is still a need, we could consider heavily modifying the GUITextListComponent to create some sort of hybrid list that includes both images and text.

Zigurana

@ruckage said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@sokiee said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@Chillimonster said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Been following this thread and was thinking (and forgive me if its been covered already), could the 'favourite' not be highlighted by a colour change fro the fame name, say from white to green?

This would mean that no additional formatting issues would arise with different themes etc.

Yes, but what if people don't like green? what if they want it red because it matches their red theme :P
It's better if it's customisable.

I imagine if used it would be implemented in the same way as folders, it would have separate tags to define 'selector bar' color and 'font' colour for favourites. However this is a bit of a limited approach and as with folders currently how would you know that the different colour signified the game as a favourite? Icons in some form are a far better idea as it's much clearer.

This is actually not difficult to implement at alk, we already have 'primary' and 'secondary' colors values for the gamelist element (which should really be called 'file' and 'folder', as that is what they are used for anyways).

Adding more colors is a 15 min job, but that strategy only works for a limited number of modifiers. Ie: how many could you really expect a user to remember? Also, what about favorite folders?

pjft

@Zigurana If we use a standard font set for the star, regardless of the theme font, I am supportive of that for now. Feels fairly small and self-contained, and wouldn't require themers to develop their own fonts.

We can later on add more to it if someone feels brave enough.

sokiee

@Zigurana said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

Also, what about favorite folders?

I really think the current implementation is fine, that is no favourites on folders. If you filter by favourites, you look inside folders if they have at least 1 element matching the filter ( which is how we both implemented it ).

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft @Zigurana I don't want to be difficult because you guys are awesome in building all of this for us, but what happens when i want to use the comic book "pow" symbol as my star system? Right now I can use any image i want and as long as i name them correctly they will work instead of a star. By making the symbol a font, i can no longer use any image i want, but have to choose from a selection of characters? I might be missing something here?

sokiee

@TMNTturtlguy said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@pjft @Zigurana I don't want to be difficult because you guys are awesome in building all of this for us, but what happens when i want to use the comic book "pow" symbol as my star system? Right now I can use any image i want and as long as i name them correctly they will work instead of a star. By making the symbol a font, i can no longer use any image i want, but have to choose from a selection of characters? I might be missing something here?

afaik it's gonna be:
step1: implement favourites with a star icon. no themeing support, but a lot of people asked for this
step2:implement either a font glyph system or icon and themeing support for it ( maybe including alignment, position, ecc )

pjft

Correct.

Otherwise it'd be like not ever having implemented Videos in ES because we couldn't get them to have good performance on the Pi. Or not implementing videos in gamelists because we didn't have them in the SystemView as well. Or not implementing filters because we don't yet have the right data architecture behind it (will it be SQLite? Something else? Still under discussion) :)

In fact, there are a few things being discussed here that are worthy of breaking down - even though, to be fair, I'm just watching from the sidelines. A reasonable, task-driven approach to making something like this happen could be (these are not necessarily sequential or ranked by anything other than what comes to mind):

Step 1: adding favorites metadata and labels.
Step 1a: adding basic theme support (to give feature parity with ES Kids). This means adding a metadata icon, just that - it's not theming the gamelist.
Step 1b: Optional, as a separate PR potentially, adding some sort of visual cue in the gamelist for favorite games. Something that works, not something that is the end-all-be-all of these solutions. Colors, stars, whatever.
Step 1c: Optional, as a separate PR potentially, integrating with sorting and filtering.
Step 2: figure out if/how we'd want to theme the gamelist. And then someone does it, they way they feel responds to the needs of theme makers, to their own preferences, and ultimately in a way that's achievable and manageable. :)

This way it's a practical approach to bring small, but meaningful improvements out to the community, and make these relevant - but sometimes hard to get closure on - architectural and design discussions to block only the actual things that they affect.

So, a proper answer - unless @Zigurana, @sokiee or someone else who'd like to take this on think differently and already have a proper solution in mind - is: "in the short term you wouldn't be able to use a custom image for that purpose (as you currently can't), but it is certainly under consideration for the roadmap" :)

Zigurana

@TMNTturtlguy
I think it's good to discriminate between a single separated element/icon that can be themed to be whatever, and the element that could be added to the gamelist itself (which scrolls with the game names), which I (for now at least) propose to be a text symbol.

We can have both of those solutions be present at the same time.

ruckage

@Zigurana said in Favorites for EmulationStation:

@ruckage
Do you have any idea how many glyphs are included in this particular set? Which one in particular are you missing?
The one thing that using a font has going for it is that the implementation is a lot easier to accomplish.
My proposal would be to start with the star hard-coded (as in the initial implementation for recalbox).
After this, we could allow it to be a themable element, from the FA set.
If then there is still a need, we could consider heavily modifying the GUITextListComponent to create some sort of hybrid list that includes both images and text.

No need to be combative, I assumed you would want the opinion of those who are making the themes. I'm well aware of how many glyphs are included - doesn't change the fact the symbols I want are not included. I've taken great care to make a theme with a specific visual style so I wouldn't want to be forced to use something that just didn't match up. Other themers may disagree but I think my concerns are valid.

I would much prefer just a metadata icon that could be displayed like the rating icons.