[Theme] Art Book

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...

the "#" makes it sort to the begining of a list when viewing things alphabetically (e.g. it shows up first)
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?

greekmanx

those background images plus a wider gamelist and this would be perfect

alphatoanant

@jesseblue awesome idea for system view. I think it adds really nicely while still keeping it clean. That’s very possible to do in ES theming.

These are the images right?
https://github.com/libretro/retroarch-assets/tree/master/wallpapers/bichromatic pads/1440x900
I’ll need to check the license to see if they are allowed to be modified and used in other works. If so I can try adding them. And if you are interested in helping source or create images like these for any missing systems i’d be more than happy to collaborate.

alphatoanant

@jaxel I have all of my arcade games under the mame folder currently so I haven’t had a chance to test scrape of FBA. I think the arcade commands I have should work though. I can try a test tonight and see.

HurricaneFan

@alphatoanant That would be so awesome to see those in the system view!

pjft

I agree that those images could be a nice option for the system view screen. Looking forward to seeing where this goes!

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"