Please Test: Creating Custom Collections

HurricaneFan

@pjft I've been testing it more and more as themes are adding the collection themes. I love the create collection based on theme folder. I've added about 4 of those to my system so far and no issues to report.

hansolo77

Without reading the 145 posts... has this been merged yet? I'm eager to go through and build an achievement custom collection. Also.. did the post @meleu started about adding gamelist.xml support for achievements get deleted? I can't find it.

pjft

@hansolo77 not merged yet. Hopefully I'll submit it next week, just haven't had the time to clean up the code.

hansolo77

That's cool. I was just wondering. I've been trying to figure out all these other things on my other build, I was just looking for something to distract me on my WORKING system. Although, I'd hate to go and try to add something else new to it and end up breaking it lol.

HurricaneFan

@pjft How's the code clean up coming along with this feature?

pjft

@hurricanefan I apologize, I really haven't been having the time to move this forward, much to my chagrin.

The "good" news is that I do have a hard deadline to finish this off before end of month, as then I'll be moving countries, and I won't have a proper laptop for a while. So I do need to finish this off soon. I'll keep you posted here, sorry.

HurricaneFan

@pjft Real world stuff takes priority. Good luck in your move! I just moved states this summer, I know how stressful moves can be.

pjft

@hurricanefan Thanks.

Yeah, a bit hectic as I try to close everything off in my current work, while sorting out the move with the kids and all, and then trying to ensure a smooth, running landing for all when we arrive.

So yeah. But I really wanted to close this off soon, otherwise even I will forget what I did there :)

alphatoanant

@pjft, seconding what @HurricaneFan said above, my best wishes for your move as well.

pjft

Thanks all.

I added the final tweaks to the code and just submitted the PR:

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/210

In particular, @TMNTturtlguy I finally changed the sorting option so that it will sort all systems by name, and then at the end we'll have "RetroPie", then the automatic collections ("Collections", "All", "Favorites" and "Last Played"). I also added the "Exit editing mode" to the collections menu, just in case.

Thank you all for the testing, usage, feedback and support. I hope this will be useful for everyone.

For everyone who has been using it on an ongoing basis and testing it (@dmmarti , @HurricaneFan, @alphatoanant , @hansolo77, @cyperghost and others who aren't tagged here yet), if you'd want to drop by the PR and share your experience (how long have you used it for, and whether it has any pending issues or if it's good to go from your testing) that may help it be approved faster, or at least alleviate concerns with the change, as it is a big change.

Thanks.

@alphatoanant Thanks for the wishes as well.

ohmycommodore

@pjft I had always wanted these other entries being listed toward the start or end of the carousel. Great idea.

darknior

Woaw very impressive, i love your new stuff <3
Thanks a lot for it :)

dmmarti

@pjft --thank you for all of the work you did for this. This is an awesome enhancement to RetroPie and I'm sure the community is going to love it for sure (I know I do!). I was an early adopter of Attract Mode .... but I have to say, with your enhancements and the newer ES theme features, I find myself using ES more and more now.

I hope your move goes well and you get all settled in quickly.

Once again .... thank you!!!

pjft

Thank you all. This is as much my work as it is the community's - and this means each and every one of you.

In fact, none of this would have happened if @meleu and @TMNTturtlguy hadn't started this thread over 2 months ago now:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/10849/create-a-custom-es-system-able-to-launch-games-for-many-systems

which raised the valid use case which I kind of had felt the need for in the past, but hadn't really given much thought to.

So all in all, this is really their intuition and ingenuity, and all of your enthusiasm and desire to have it in ES - I just tried to refine it to hopefully make it more accessible to the wider community.

Glad that it's been helpful. Do make sure to chime in on GitHub with your experiences (how much you've used it and if it works or where it doesn't), as the more people to test it, the easier it will be to get some reassurance of what is effectively working and what isn't, which will in turn make it easier to merge.

I'm providing a binary with the effectively last version of ES with this, so that if anyone does want to test it, they can in case something came up during the update to 2.5.2 (possible, certainly).

Full instructions:

mkdir /home/pi/tmp-es
cd /home/pi/tmp-es
rm emulationstation
wget https://github.com/pjft/EmulationStation/releases/download/0.9cc/emulationstation
chmod +x emulationstation
cd /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation
sudo cp /home/pi/tmp-es/emulationstation /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation

Thanks.

ohmycommodore

@pjft so these are the steps to implement this now? if it gets rolled into the next official update is there any downside to having done this pre-release version?

pjft

@ohmycommodore No downside, you can just update ES from RetroPie-Setup at any time - binary is usually faster. In fact, you can do it straight away if you don't like this particular update.

Just make sure to exit ES before running these instructions, but yeah, you can install this and test it out.

Had you tested out any of the custom collection builds in this thread so far (sorry, it's a long thread and has been going on for a month)?

ohmycommodore

@pjft I have some of the themes that support collections, but didn't get into making custom collections yet. Threw a couple of ideas out when I felt it was helpful. Not a coder. Former TV production guy... so a creative guy and idea guy I suppose. Always good to keep the brain sharp and this is an interesting outlet :) Looking forward to trying this enhancement out. I'm all for anything that increases functionality and this certainly does.

So this is an ES thing, not a RPie thing, correct? And I take it your instructions above are essentially removing ES, and getting the permissions to replace it with this alternate version...

So if this is rolled into ES officially, it would then end up rolled into a RP image?

HurricaneFan

@ohmycommodore Yes, this is an EmulationStation feature. If this gets approved to be added into the master branch of ES, it will show up on a users installation if they choose to Update all packages. Or when the next official release of Retropie install image is out.

pjft

@ohmycommodore correct. This will just replace your current version of ES. If in doubt, make a copy of your current ES before running my instructions. Happy to share them when on my laptop tomorrow.

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft Thanks for working on the sorting! That is awesome - you are the best!