[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

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant Great post! And thanks for the tips on tweaking the xml. I'll play around with that tomorrow.

Dumb question about the scraper. I've never used the command line scraper before. Do I need to install that? I've only used the built in scraper in EmulationStation gui.

SP

@alphatoanant Awesome, man. Thank you.

soloskywalker

This looks nice, any plans on adding the TG16CD?

alphatoanant

@soloskywalker yes I can do that (I'll plan also add pcecd at the same time)

would it be possible to let me know what "theme" folder is referenced in your es_systems.cfg for tg16cd? I want to make sure I add the right name =)