[Theme] Art Book

alphatoanant

@JesseBlue, @HurricaneFan, @greekmanx and @pjft I made an initial commit to github for the system view update with a few systems to test with (nes, gb are probably the best to look at)

I am converting each controller to an SVG so they scale well and am playing with variables in my main theme.xml to avoid having to update the xml for each system individually.

Interested in what you think before I dive deeper on color, placement, size etc...
Getting latest from either retropie es-themes menu or direct from github will get you the changes to check out.

It's going to take me time to create an svg controller for each system so I don't have a good idea on timeframe for all yet but I am liking the way it looks so its something i'll try my best to do. The good news is some systems use the same artwork (like genesis and segacd). Any help of course will be awesome.

Thank you again for the idea @JesseBlue

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant I'll test this later today. Thanks @alphatoanant !

blubbblubb

@jaxel @alphatoanant The arcade command works fine for fbalpha, i scraped some images and videos over the weekend.

I made some changes to the command though, different order for the regions, enable video reencoding to 320x240@30fps (needs HandBrakeCli, i scraped on my Desktop PC instead of the Pi), and i used adb as the primary source as they seem to have more game flyer available, for adb you need the latest version of the scraper as there was an update to their API recently (took me some time to find out why the download was not working correctly)

Flyer
./scraper -mame=true -mame_src=adb,gdb,ss -mame_img=fly,b,t,s -max_height=540 -max_width=394 -image_dir=media -image_path=media -ss_user=xxx -ss_password=xxx -lang "en" -region "eu,wor,us,jp,xx"

Video/Marquee (after asking about marquees i actually went for a bigger SD Card and just went all in with the game media ;) )
./scraper -mame=true -mame_src=adb,ss,gdb -download_videos=true -download_marquees=true -image_dir=media -image_path=media -video_dir=media -video_path=media -marquee_dir=media -marquee_path=media -ss_user=xxx -ss_password=xxx -convert_videos -lang "en" -region "eu,wor,us,jp,xx"

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant I love the look of the new system backgrounds. They are just subtle enough without making the theme too busy looking. I think they look amazing in your theme! Keep up the good work.

JesseBlue

@alphatoanant Awesome! I´ve just tested the update and it looks even better than I could have hoped! :)

This image might be useful to create the missing Famicom SVG: Famicom Controller

And one for Neo Geo AES: SNK Arcade Stick

CDI: Philips CDI Controller

MSX, MSX2, X68000: ASCII Stick X

Unfortunately I pretty much suck at vector graphics.

alphatoanant

Thank you for those scrape details @blubbblubb. Wondering if there is a way to install handbrake cli on the pi to save me the re-encode step i go through now on the PC.

Chalamannn

@alphatoanant How to make a Logo? i tryed with Illustrator but see's darker.
Thanks! :) Amazing theme so minimal ♥

alphatoanant

@chalamannn try this tutorial - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7357/tutorial-create-vector-logo-from-bitmap. Its what helped me get started.

blubbblubb

@alphatoanant It is possible to compile HandBrake from source, but it takes a really long time, my estimate would be around 3 hours on a rpi2 and probably double that on a rpi1
edit:
I created a new Thread for the how to compile HandBrake, you can find it over here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/13092/scrape-videos-and-reencode-them-directly-on-the-raspberry-pi-with-sselph-s-scraper

alphatoanant

@blubbblubb amazing! Thank you for the detailed walkthrough and packages. This will be a nice time saver for sure. Could be a good tutorial thread to create as well.

blubbblubb

@alphatoanant yeah i probably should move this to another thread about scraping or create a new one, this thread is about your awesome theme after all ;)

spoonmugen

@lilbud hi mate,

i've notice the same issue with the font not exactly straight / i thought it was a setting in retropie... but cnat find a solution
did you figure out while fonts are tearing/jagged??

lilbud

@spoonmugen Never figured it out

spoonmugen

just did an update
seems to have slow downs in main window which didnt occur before...

noticed fba/mame folder/menus have a bg image of a controller - and this is where the slowdowns generally happen?

pjft

@alphatoanant what image resolution are we using for the carousel backgrounds?

alphatoanant

Hmm interesting.

@pjft The controller backgrounds are 1280x720 svgs on system view.
I am thinking I should be able to shrink those down resolution wise and still allow them to scale well because they are svgs. Maybe that will solve it?
Edit: I just noticed an error when restarting ES "glGetError 0x505" figured thats being thrown because my recent changes. Have you ever run into that before or know what it points too?

@spoonmugen are you using a pi3 or a pizero?

spoonmugen

@alphatoanant i'm using a pi3 - it used to run like butter now its really laggy at spots in the main carousel.

i tried art-book pocket... main works like a champ!
really like this one too :)

pjft

@alphatoanant Ok, so that's double interesting.

The glGetError means the GPU runs out of video memory. I usually recommend setting VRAM to 80 to work around that, but in this case I'm inclined to suggest using 1280x720 PNGs on the system view.

I am not an expert in the image processing pipeline on ES, but from recollection SVGs (vector) and non-vector assets are handled significantly differently. Vector images are resized in memory to take up the needed size at full resolution, so I am willing to believe that they are in fact being rendered as full-on 1080p SVGs (or whatever screen resolution you're using). The reason why "1280x720 svg" doesn't really make much sense is that the SVG resolution per se doesn't matter much as vector images are really meant to scale to any resolution and stay as sharp as a native-resolution image.

I'd recommend trying to make those PNGs and see if the performance improves.

alphatoanant

@pjft good call. You are on to something for sure as I just did a test of scaling the viewbox of a few SVGs down to much lower resolution and even with that I can still see the error. So even though the image is smaller in resolution I can imagine ES still seeing it as "this is a 1080p image that I need to render somehow". Going to work on converting a few to PNGs.

For now I have removed the controller background from the main theme.xml so at least it won't affect live installs until I work out another approach.

@spoonmugen you should be able to get latest now

Thank you both for your help

spoonmugen

@alphatoanant just refreshed :) - tbh i prefered the clean look/performance of being just logos