[Theme] Art Book

[Graphicsgod]

I'll try to whip up some concept images tonight after I get off work. And if you like it, maybe we can work together on this..

[msheehan79]

@hurricanefan @alphatoanant

"I believe if you put an image in the video tag, you can do that in your gamelist.xml file. This will load instead of the static video.

example:
<video>./images/myimage.png</video>"

Did you guys successfully get this method to work? I tried putting an image in the video tag and it didn't render for me.

My ideal scenario is a theme that can display the wheel/logo, boxart and instead of a video just a screenshot image but could never get it to work and was under the impression ES doesn't support this. It would be awesome if it does work and I just missed something.

[Jaxel]

I've made some more changes...

In addition to the changes I mentioned in my post above... I made the right panel bigger, with smaller text.

Then I went for some uniformity in the default and landscape layouts. As well, to fill up the extra space in the default layout, I added marquees below the meta data.

[Graphicsgod]

@graphicsgod

Ok Heres something I came up with that explains the idea I had in mind..

System List

Game List

[greekmanx]

@graphicsgod your gamelist view looks awesome man nice mockup although just my option but I don't care for the whole page 1 system view thin. I myself prefer the layout used by showcase theme by david marti which shows more systems on one screen. but otherwise good stuff and again only my opinion.

[Graphicsgod]

@greekmanx

No please, I need criticism! I need to know if something sucks or not.. The red and blue are more "extreme" to what I would probably do for this system, but I wanted to see how bad it would look with bright colors contrasting each other. Otherwise it doesn't look too bad. But for Genesis, I'd probably go with black and gray backgrounds.

What do you mean by showing all systems? Have a screen shot for example?

I haven't mocked up other system examples yet. This took me about four plus hours to create in PSD. But now that I have a template in place, adding in other colors, images, and systems is just making a few tweaks here and there and changing a few images!

[HurricaneFan]

@graphicsgod Can you create a new post for your new theme idea? This way it doesn't make the Art Book post super long since its unrelated.

[alphatoanant]

@Jaxel, thank you for your suggestions and examples!

• For metadata - I need to fix that width issue for genre. Missed it on initial build will get to it as soon as possible
• For gamelist - There have been a few requests for a wider gamelist so I am looking at that too. For height; I don't plan to use the full height of the gamelist in the theme. I had tried something similar in a first pass and noticed watching friends use the theme that they found it easier to focus on what game to pick when the list had less items. 14 display in the current theme which seemed to be a good balance. And keeping the font at its current size helps when viewing from a couch. I'll try ideas on width.
• For description - I agree on the scrolling. Whats been bothering me most is that it starts right away and I have been wondering if there is a way to put a delay on when it begins to scroll. I agree moving the launch and favorite buttons to below the box and video gives more space for description - not sure how i feel about that layout yet though but I will play with it.
• Again thank you for helping and giving more ideas.

@Graphicsgod, nice work on your theme! I like the style and would be glad to help out (and also get help from you on my theme) My initial feedback on system view is to maybe try bringing in at least 2 more systems (so they flank on either side of the selected one) and remove the arrows. Having the focus on that view be the books themselves could look really clean. For detail view are you thinking of using the marquee tag for a screenshot? I hadn't thought of that before but it could be interesting.
Please write back to the link to your thread on your theme and I would be glad to continue the conversation there.

@msheehan79, I was able to reference images in the video tag and have them display on my pi3. Do you have OMX player turned on? If so I am wondering if thats whats causing it not to work on your end?

[alphatoanant]

Updates 9/18/17:
Added a #playing folder - why you ask? =)

So Custom Collections are an awesome new feature (continued thanks to @pjft) and it got me thinking of an easier way to get back into games I am currently playing. Essentially having the first system shown be a list of those games (less searching, less clicks)

Before custom collections I would just try to remember which system + game I wanted to continue playing. Which as you can imagine would lead to a bunch of searching, scrolling, etc...

So with custom collections a natural way to solve this is to create a collection called "playing" or something similar. This is all good with one minor niggle for me. That system is going to either be grouped with the other custom collections or sorted alphabetically with other systems (depending on the setting you have chosen for game collections)

So I decided to create a theme folder called "#playing" for 2 reasons...

1. the "#" makes it sort to the begining of a list when viewing things alphabetically (e.g. it shows up first)
2. Creating a theme folder for it means it will show up with a nice logo and not be grouped with other unthemed collections

So now when I boot up retropie the first system i see is "now playing" which allows me to jump directly into that list of games. No more scrolling or searching for what to play... unless I am looking for something new to start =)

Hope you find this helpful too

[HurricaneFan]

@alphatoanant There is a Last Played collection that might help you. It was one of the first 3 collections built before custom collections was released.

Last Played will just use the lastplayed gamelist.xml data that is already getting saved every time you start a game.

[alphatoanant]

@hurricanefan true I use Last Played from time to time.

There are a few minor things though that made me go with the #playing folder instead

• with last playing you still have to scroll to a different system before jumping in
• I wanted a bit more curation other than what i have last played (as I will play a game on a whim from time to time that I am not interested in diving in deeper on just yet)

[pjft]

@alphatoanant I do have a "now playing" collection under "my collections" as well. This is an interesting workaround for having it show first. Thanks for sharing.

[msheehan79]

Hey @alphatoanant - good call on why I couldn't see an image in the video tag. I did have OMX player enabled and switching to VLC does show an image. Thanks!

My only concern is VLC player isn't as efficient as OMX is, and I switched because I had run into heat issues while browsing through gamelists (with actual videos mind you). I'm wondering if rendering an image through the video tag is still using VLC player and if so is rendering a still image as CPU intensive as a video or does it handle it differently? I'm not sure how best to test this, other than load a bunch of images and navigate around in ES to see how hot the Pi gets. I'm sure there is a better way, if anyone can suggest it :)

[pjft]

@msheehan79 Trying to use an image on the video tag is certainly not intended nor supported. The fact that per chance VLC seems to have codecs to load up an image there is just coincidental.

Edit: as far as performance goes, I wouldn't know. Feel free to test it out. An easy way is to navigate there for 10 or so minutes and after that check the temperature.

[blubbblubb]

Just to make sure, is the marquee data used in the theme? All the scraping commands on github include marquee data and i want to make sure it is ok to disable those to save some space

[alphatoanant]

@blubbblubb marquee is not displayed in the theme so marquee commands are safe to remove to save space. The main reason I kept those commands in was for users that switch back and forth between themes and want to have the full set of images just in case.

Here are the adapted commends without marquee download:

Arcade:
The first command to download flyers from gamesdb remains the same
Then for the video download from screenscraper use this
/opt/retropie/supplementary/scraper/scraper -mame=true -mame_src=ss,gdb,adb -download_videos=true -image_dir=media -image_path=media -video_dir=media -video_path=media

Console:
/opt/retropie/supplementary/scraper/scraper -console_src=ss -max_height=540 -max_width=505 -download_videos=true -image_dir=media -image_path=media -video_dir=media -video_path=media -use_nointro_name=false

[Jaxel]

@alphatoanant What command do you use for FBA?

[JesseBlue]

I love this theme!! :D But i think the main menu is a little bit to clean.

Would something like this be possible with ES? The background image is from the "bichromatic pads" collection of retroarch.

[Chalamannn]

How can i change a logo or make mine? i made one with illustrator but it see Smaller and Darker

[HurricaneFan]

@jesseblue I like the subtle controller image background. How many other controller images do you have?