[Theme] Art Book

alphatoanant

Thank you @pjft & @HurricaneFan here a few more updates over lunch

System theme status

I organized a quick roadmap to see what I have open to complete: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gzaP0klzaBaE5_oB1_hQwr46qOmQnacSvSU3o-p5Q7U/edit#gid=0
With this it should hopefully be straightforward to knock the rest out soon. (@pjft I have Daphne, Dreamcast, Game & Watch and PC included as systems to finish)

Video Size and Centering
2 things were going on here

l had my origin set to "0 0" for videos and because I was using OMX player I didn't notice that they weren't being centered when using VLC (it looks like OMX may auto center the video based on the size provided and VLC does not?).
So over lunch I updated the video origin to be "0.5 0.5" which should fix the VLC use case.
That change is up on Github now
I'll need to check what that does to OMX player when I get home tonight - fingers crossed it works the same there =)
For the black background - I had simply missed that commit to Github. Its something I had added for my testing but hadn't yet added it to my master branch yet. I fixed that and its up on Github now as well. Essentially its a black box that sits directly behind the video and will show up if the video doesn't span to fit the 320x240 space I have allotted for.

The All Games, Last Played and Favorites Use Case

Totally understood on this and your explanation makes perfect sense.
I will work on the default square layout more to clean things up and really like your idea of having say a gray box placeholder that an image can sit centered inside. If the image fills the space thats best case if it doesn't then it still might look clean.
Considering your arcade screenshot use case I am thinking having the square layout as default would work best for those cases - considering you are running into this on the Arcade system it helps confirm something I was running into last night when working on mame. I would still like to keep the portrait and landscape layouts for systems like nes and snes so I'll continue to tweak.
Also this point is solid "I wonder if the getting the layout from the system for the game you're showing would be visually cohesive". I was thinking about that this morning and having things jump around on a given view could be odd.

Adding a gray box background behind images

I mentioned this above but wanted to call it out separately... this is an awesome idea! Thank you. I try out a few options and post back results.

RE: does maxSize scale an image up

you know I thought it didn't but it looks like it does scale it up.
I just did a quick test with one of my boxarts and it is definitely sizing it up to the fit the width of the maxSize I set

TMNTturtlguy

@alphatoanant @pjft maxsize will scale your image up or down to fit the size of the set "restraints" an keep the image in its native aspect ration. If you image is 4 x 8 and you set the <maxsize> to 4 x4 your image will be resized to 2 x 4 so that it fits within the size parameters. It will also do the opposite and scale up if your image is 2 x 2 it will display it as 4 x 4.

Tundra

This looks fantastic, will 100% use this all the time when it comes out. Would love to see all systems supported too.

HurricaneFan

@tundra You can use it right now. Just download it from GitHub.

https://github.com/anthonycaccese/es-theme-art-book

pjft

@alphatoanant said in [New Theme] 'Art Book' (WIP):

Considering your arcade screenshot use case I am thinking having the square layout as default would work best for those cases - considering you are running into this on the Arcade system it helps confirm something I was running into last night when working on mame. I would still like to keep the portrait and landscape layouts for systems like nes and snes so I'll continue to tweak.

I'm supportive of that, even though the majority of arcade games may be horizontal - but not necessarily all the same size. Also, some people may have screenshots, others may have flyers or cabinet art, so a square layout may perhaps be the best?

Following that, I wonder if a square layout may also be the best for the All/Custom/Favorites/Recent, as it does seem to be the most generic one.

Or, alternatively, pick the horizontal one and use a black box (inside the picture frame, like you had for the video) to cover the space that's not catered for. Maybe that could also be a good solution for the arcade layout as well, as the SNES horizontal layout you have is glorious.

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant My N64 logo has color showing up, not sure how thats possible when your GitHub doesn't show color.

Has anyone else had this issue?

pjft

@hurricanefan happens to me as well. I thought it was a stylistic option but truth be told I also prefer it grey like the other logos. It happens both there and in the gamelist view.

alphatoanant

Thats really odd - will try to address tonight.

Related - how is the n64 gamelist view looking on your end? (i don't have n64 set up on my test rig yet so I had my fingers crossed it works similar to snes)

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant There is a video overlap section with the game box.

alphatoanant

@hurricanefan the N64 logo is fixed now - I had missed coloring a a specific layer of the SVG. Thank you for the screenshots - I was intending n64 layout to display the same as snes so glad to see its working that way.

Going to work on getting the next set of systems complete tomorrow.

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant Thanks for fixing the logo.

With SNES and N64, is it possible to make the box art small enough to where the video doesn't overlap the box art?

I've got 2d box art for all my systems and those 2 systems just catch my eye wrong with the overlap. I've found a possible solution in using 3d boxes but don't want those 2 systems to be different than everything else in my setup.

2D Box

3D Box

SP

Could you please add Wii, WiiU and Sharp X68000 systems too?

Great theme, man.

pjft

@sp I've seen those in quite a few, so I do need to ask: what are you using to run those emulators, and is there even a Wii U emulator?

@HurricaneFan the box art overlap I think it's deliberate. It looks unusual at first, but it looks quite nice after a while. I wouldn't object to a different layout, but I feel it might defeat the purpose of the art book layout?

My main problem is that my images are not very high res :S I imagine I'll need to get them again. This looks fantastic overall.

HurricaneFan

@pjft I've grabbed almost all of my images from emumovies.com or hyperspin-fe.com.

I'd send you a zip but I imagine it would be well over a gig in space.

lilbud

@pjft said in [New Theme] 'Art Book' (WIP):

is there even a Wii U emulator?

Yes there is, its called CEMU and has made outstanding progress in the last few months.

You could have emulated Breath of the Wild a week after the game launched. And people are working on mods for it as we speak.

HurricaneFan

@lilbud on computer only I imagine. This isn't available on pi right?

lilbud

@hurricanefan Oh yeah, only on PC & Mac. This could NEVER run on the pi. Maybe the Pi 50

You also need one hell of a computer to run CEMU

pjft

@lilbud thanks.

@alphatoanant Apologies for bothering. The final name for custom collections might change, sorry.

Will post in a separate thread on Monday or over the phone if I have the chance. Sorry about that.

SP

@pjft I use Emulation Station on my PC, and lilbud is correct.

alphatoanant

Updates 7/28/17

Finished all systems I had initially planned for (open to adding more as well - just let me know)
Centered artwork on default layout (trying an idea for All,LastPlayed,Fav systems)

System theme status

As of this release I should have coverage for most of the main systems used in Retropie
This is the full list of what I have covered: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gzaP0klzaBaE5_oB1_hQwr46qOmQnacSvSU3o-p5Q7U/edit#gid=0 (also can be seen at the gitHub repo)
@SP I also added support for Wii, WiiU and Sharp X68000 - please don't hesitate to let me know if there are others you would like

What does Arcade/MAME/FBA look like?

It was easier to make a video to walk through it

Essentially I am aiming to optimize the design for flyer artwork on Arcade/MAME/FBA/Daphne systems
This does pose some challenges though...
Primarily is I haven't found a method to scrape flyer artwork and videos for Arcade systems in one command
Why? It comes down to our current metadata sources not having good coverage of both flyer and video in one place (gdb has great flyer coverage, screenscraper has great video coverage)
So what I am doing is running Selph's scraper twice in my arcade directories
First run is this (scrapes flyers from GDB): /opt/retropie/supplementary/scraper/scraper -mame=true -mame_src=gdb,adb,ss -mame_img=fly,b,t,s -max_height=540 -max_width=394 -image_dir=media -image_path=media
And the second run with this (to scrape videos from screenscraper): /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
Thats how I got the look in the above video
So yes, its not ideal but it works and I think it looks good in the end =)
Also this only applies to Arcade/MAME/FBA (consoles have great boxart/video coverage at screenscraper)
Looking forward to hearing your feedback on this

Notes

@HurricaneFan yes the box art overlap for systems that have a landscape boxart (snes/n64) is intentional. But there is a somewhat quick way to change them.
For example if you open up snes/theme.xml you will see this

<theme>
   <formatVersion>4</formatVersion>
   <include>./../theme.xml</include>
   <include>./../_inc/templates/landscape.xml</include>
   <view name="system, basic, detailed, video">
      <image name="logo">
         <path>./_inc/system.svg</path>
      </image>
   </view>
</theme>

See the 4th line that references "landscape.xml"?

Remove that line so it looks like this:

<theme>
   <formatVersion>4</formatVersion>
   <include>./../theme.xml</include>
   <view name="system, basic, detailed, video">
      <image name="logo">
         <path>./_inc/system.svg</path>
      </image>
   </view>
</theme>

Removing that makes the layout fallback to what you see on "All Games" system (e.g. its a more square type layout with no overlap)

If that is what you are looking for then the above change only has to be made on SNES and N64 systems.

Whats next

I am considering this release 1.0 at this time and going to see if it can be included in the Retropie ES Themes list
Also I am starting to play with the default layout and seeing whats possible to make it fallback gracefully in situations where say a game is missing artwork or description (as you can see in the video above for situations like Cave Story)
I need to look at how to handle folders as well
@pjft no worries on a possible name change to custom collections. I am more than happy to do it and help support the feature... it's another reason I am looking at folders soon =)

Thank you for helping me with this everyone