EmulationStation Updates and Guide

Rookervik

I'm finding it difficult to find information on all of the updates made to EmulationStation over the last 2 years and how to use them. Is it possible we could round up all of the commits and a detailed implementation for each feature?

herb_fargus

also may be good to have a bit of a roadmap to see where emulationstation is going, I haven't really been able to keep up with everything as of recent so I don't really even know what's possible at this point.

EctoOne

Same here, and for me that is actually a reason NOT to update every so often. I'm quite happy with my current setup and I have that since the themeable carousel was added. And from what I've seen there is no feature incoming that interests me. On the other hand I've noticed a lot of threads about problems with the latest updates.
If there was some sort of changelog, I would be more open to updates because if I ran into errors I could at least look at the changelog and try to figure out a way to fix it myself.

Hex

@herb_fargus I think this thread should be moved to Ideas and Dev section.

herb_fargus

@hex I think its fine here as the request is essentially for documentation on how to make themes with the newest changes.

pjft

Sure.

I can detail my end of things as to what has changed regarding themes:

we have added support for 3 new systems, as part of the overall "game collections" initiative:
--- all games (under auto-allgames theme folder)
--- favorites (under auto-favorites)
--- last played (under auto-lastplayed)

Furthermore, I'm working on adding the possibility for users to create their own game collections (which are, in effect, system agnostic collections of games) from within EmulationStation. This will benefit from a "custom-collections" folder, I believe.

Furthermore, any unused theme folder will be able to be used for theming these custom collections, meaning that if you'd have a Mario theme folder, you could use it for a Mario game collection.

That's what I've been working on for the most part, that affects themes, and what I'll be working on in the coming weeks.

On this note, I had asked for help in updating Carbon to support these new folders, so if you're keen on helping @Rookervik (as I believe you created Carbon) I'm happy to link to the thread - I'm on my phone right now so I'll add links and more details or corrections tomorrow on my laptop.

Furthermore, @jdrassa has added variable support for themes and z-index sorry among several other things, @Zigurana has been hard at work on refactoring the whole theme logic and architecture, the two of them added vertical carousel support, and @fieldofcows added video support to themes.

I think these are the main theme-related changes I can think of, and I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty, but each of them can provide a lot more detail and color to it :)

Thanks!

Rion

I wonder what have happened @fieldofcows . He hasn't been online for over 4 months..

Rookervik

Yeah this is only intended for documentation on themes, not an idea platform. I have found that most updates have actually been added to the themes readme of the retropie emulationstation branch. I was quite happy to find this and it almost covers every change. But I'd still like to see a roadmap of theme changes since RetroPie branched Aloshi's github emulationstation. I get people suggesting features and I don't even know they exist in the RetroPie branch.

And I have found bugs already in the updates that I am not fond of. One such bug is the resizing of images. I believe it's related to an update that "fixes" proper location of images... while it does this, it does it slowly after the image is already drawn on screen. Making it look like your images are shrinking every time you change to another game. This is almost a game-breaker for me.

But also features I really love; such as the "Instant" transition. It works wonderfully and really keeps a slower Pi looking great since fading and sliding are slow transitions.

But anyway, here is a link to the theme.md. It sure helped me.

Rookervik

Oh, PS... there is a "road map" of sorts if you follow the pull request log of the RetroPie branch of EmulationStation. The problem is that they are not labeled in a consistent way. So while some additions to ES are very obvious: "Added Video Support", others are vague and require you to go into the pull request itself and read the entire post to figure out what it changes. And while I can ascertain the obvious posts, I get a little lost in the more complicated ones.

TMNTturtlguy

@rookervik said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

And I have found bugs already in the updates that I am not fond of. One such bug is the resizing of images. I believe it's related to an update that "fixes" proper location of images... while it does this, it does it slowly after the image is already drawn on screen. Making it look like your images are shrinking every time you change to another game. This is almost a game-breaker for me.

I second this, at first i thought it was maybe something with my wheelart, but I have noticed specifically with my wheel art that every time i scroll the next game, wheelart (<md_marquee>) will load and then flash and slightly change sizes and almost adjust location by 1 or 2 pixels. It is pretty annoying, I am not sure when this started, but it was recently.

pjft

@tmntturtlguy said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

@rookervik said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

And I have found bugs already in the updates that I am not fond of. One such bug is the resizing of images. I believe it's related to an update that "fixes" proper location of images... while it does this, it does it slowly after the image is already drawn on screen. Making it look like your images are shrinking every time you change to another game. This is almost a game-breaker for me.

I second this, at first i thought it was maybe something with my wheelart, but I have noticed specifically with my wheel art that every time i scroll the next game, wheelart (<md_marquee>) will load and then flash and slightly change sizes and almost adjust location by 1 or 2 pixels. It is pretty annoying, I am not sure when this started, but it was recently.

I can't comment on marquees as I don't use them, but the exact same thing has happened since almost forever to the image next to the video in your theme.

Since I had never seen it "not do" that, I just assumed it was a quirk with the image implementation, and didn't bother with it.

But would love to perhaps collate somewhere all the bugs or glitches people have been observing with those, especially when compared to the main branch as some of you are able to do so, so they're easier to track and tackle.

Thanks!

Hex

@Rookervik PR page is definitely the place to checkout the road map.

dankcushions

the image thing is definitely new (as in, sometime this year). i would bisect if had the time.

some summery would be good, and ideally more focused user testing/feedback. there's been a number of features added to es i don't really like (and a number i really do!) but there's so much development it's bit overwhelming to keep up with the threads, etc.

pjft

@dankcushions surely this year is a possibility. There was quite a bit done on that, I wouldn't rule that out.

I can try to bisect it in the coming weeks, if nobody does it before.

dankcushions

@pjft said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

@dankcushions surely this year is a possibility. There was quite a bit done on that, I wouldn't rule that out.

i didn't. in fact, i ruled it in :)

cyperghost

@ectoone said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

Same here, and for me that is actually a reason NOT to update every so often. I'm quite happy with my current setup and I have that since the themeable carousel was added.

Therefore I've created a collection of precompiled binaries. Sadly I started just this year and so not all versions of ES are included. It also lacks in support of Pi 1 and 0.
You can give it a try and just exchange binaries by downloading them from github

@herb_fargus said in EmulationStation Updates and Guide:

I haven't really been able to keep up with everything as of recent so I don't really even know what's possible at this point [....] I think its fine here as the request is essentially for documentation on how to make themes with the newest changes.

There is a fine tool for adding how-to and every developer can add pages here and descripe the branch. The moderators can add them later to the RP-wiki here

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki

I agree for documentation of features and how to use them ....
The presentation that @pjft did for his favorites feature is a good example how it can be written down per wiki-system.

pjft

@cyperghost yeah, I have a backlog of documentation to put together. It's on my list.

TMNTturtlguy

I just want to add that all of your guys work is outstanding! Thanks for all the time and effort.

Rookervik

We also need to be careful when adding these changes to our themes. The new features are not backwards-compatible with previous versions of EmulationStation. Any of these new tricks I've added to my themes will not load on my RetroPie because I have not updated to the newest ES... and frankly, I'd rather not. Not until a couple of annoyances are ironed out. The md_image re-size tweak is quite distracting.

So keep a copy of your themes. Don't blindly update them with the newest features... fork your theme, or you risk cutting off a portion of your audience. Such as me. LOL.

Hex

@Rookervik You can always go back in time on your themes if they dont work. All themes are hosted on github.

so if you want to go back like 5 commits enter this command in your theme dir. Not the one where you are developing the theme

git reset --hart HEAD~5

And vola your theme has gone back in time.