Fresh impressions from someone that used several Emulation frontends over the years.
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Retropie has a deep need of being transformed on some pretty basic levels to become anywhere as usable as previous "projects" in the emulation space.
Here are some concept that you should revisit, at one point in the future.
Finally acknowledge the existence of 11 button controllers. (PS3, PS4, Xbox, ...)
What I mean by this is, that it was only recently, that you implemented the concept of a dedicated "guide button" to do retroarch specific commands.
This frees you up to build configurations for the vast majority of controllers out there that aren't limited by deliberations such as "we cant use select+A as a shortcut, it might be an ingame command".
To specify: One of the commercial forks you dont like, has mapped quicksave to (PS buttons used in the description) guide+x and quickload to guide+triangle - which is a much better setup conceptually, because -
players have been educated that L1 and R1 can be everything and enything, while X is always associated with confirm and triangle is always associated with a secondary action such as a menu.
I cant tell you how many times I have quickloaded instead of saved even a month into using Retropie and its just, because its not intuitive at all, that you have to remember a shouder button mapping in a game. The "symbols" are less memorable, and you usually "can try first" in most games, and arent punished. In Retropie you are - because quicksave and quickload is a prette definitive thing.
Same concept applies to usefull stuff such as "cycling through filters". And by that I dont mean "cycling through all 235 of them", but pick 15, make 1 or 2 user definable and make them cycleable using guidebutton+2 of the shoulder buttons, or guidebutton+up/down.
This concept has been in controller centric emulators since the Xbox v1 days. Retropi managed to break a standard, and loose functionality from past emulation iterations for no reason.
Get rid of the DOS Menus from hell
They are unreadable as a leanback design item. Even on a 55 inch TV from a normal seating distance, you cant read any of them. Also -the UI experience SUCKS. Really, really bad.
The same goes for the Retroarch in game menu. The Retroarch team actually developed a new GUI interface thats more legible on a 10 foot interface (its the standard on their Android build), Retropie i still opting to use the old one - because of familiarity to the PC interface, I guess. The old GUi is less clear, less inviting, so less people will opt to use it
Make GAME (= "general emulation configuration") a top level settings item in emulation station
Most people will never even touch core specific setting options, much less game specific ones, but having access to some BASIC settings in an environment where they would play with them is necessary. Retropi as of now is the only "emulator experience" where most of their audience is enticed to never touch any emulator setting at all. People are afraid of your DOS Style menus (guess how many millenials are familiar with that design language...), and your main settings menue doesnt feature ANY emulator settings at all.
Consolidate your Option Menus
This is a hard one, as I understand why you are presenting them like you do - but having a "emu box experience" where you have 6-7 different settings menus, and you HAVE to touch all of them to get a build working and running is outright cringeworthy.(Everyone laughed about Microsoft when they had two in WIndows 10.)
This includes hacks like "map leftstick to digipad inputs on non analog stick game plattforms" which is something I'm sure more beginners would like to use - but good luck finding that piece of code in seventh nested submenu.
Make screenshots a global thing. Map it to a button combo.
I don't think I am telling you something new, but people like to share stuff on social media these days. What percentage of your audience is able to ssh into specific rom folders to pull out a screenshot after they have captured it using a retroarch ingame menu item? How often do you think, they will do it over smb? When all they use in their daily life is a smartphone?
Currently, Retropi is a worse usage experience than five different system specific emulators and retroarch on an Android Box - and it is a worse usage experience than any one of the emulators from rbox' (?) xbins days (Xbox v1).
It basks in the glory of a DOS style interace language that is unreadable from the couch, doesnt acknowledge 11+ button controllers (and the hotkey options that become possible using them (if some people still want to use NES style pads, make it a selection between two preset layouts - or enable the "more complex one" as soon as people map a guide button...)), and doesnt have any social forward features for people that are acustom to share moments with their friends, since they were five years old.
Thank you for reading. I how some of those points are able to stick enough, that they might be considered.
As of now - people in the real world have started to recommend one of your forks to others (even intelligent gamejournalist types), because they at least thought a little bit more about the UI experience for the individual user.
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(Use tech, that doesnt flag forum posts as long as the one above as spam, and prevent them from being edited (Akismet).)
Sorry for the typos I now cant edit out.
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Your feedback has been forwarded to the 10-foot couch UX, social media integration and millennial focus group teams. Because of the current volume of correspondence, you may not receive a response but your message is important to us. Thank you.
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@notimp if you researched more, you would find you can remap all kinds of stuff to whatever buttons you want manually. You can even add things like screenshots. You have always been able to manually reassign/assign all kinds of stuff including the hotkey.
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Dude, if you really hate it in its current state, why don't you help contribute to this project? Then, you can help conform it into what you want it to be. 😃
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@notimp said in Fresh impressions from someone that used several Emulation frontends over the years.:
The Retroarch team actually developed a new GUI interface thats more legible on a 10 foot interface (its the standard on their Android build), Retropie i still opting to use the old one - because of familiarity to the PC interface, I guess. The old GUi is less clear, less inviting, so less people will opt to use it
Current Retropie does support the "new" RGUI.
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Hi @notimp, welcome to the forums. I appreciate your feedback, it's at least honest about your first impressions.
Many of the points you raise are reasonable, even if they are stated as an absolute truth, rather than an improvement request.As you can imagine with a volunteer-run open source project like this, focus will often be on introducing new features, and not on polishing the UI experience. It seems you have some experience in these, would you be willing to help out?
Also, you might be coming at this with a different expectation than what we are trying to achieve. There is a large, large gap between 'works out of the box', and 'made to tinker with', and while things should not be made overly complicated because of arcane-ness sake, its not our intent to make this a plug-and-play experience either.
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@incunabula Ooh, the sarcasm, it burns!
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@notimp said in Fresh impressions from someone that used several Emulation frontends over the years.:
Retropie has a deep need of being transformed on some pretty basic levels to become anywhere as usable as previous "projects" in the emulation space.
Whew, thank goodness the professionals have arrived! How could the project even have lasted this long without expert direction like this?!
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In my setup I've changed the menu driver to xmb, and to make it run well I've turned shadows off, changed the font to pixel, and turned menu shaders off. Would it be a bad idea to make this the default?
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@slimy I believe part of it is memory related, for older Pis, and part of it was storage, but I might be misremembering it completely.
There's a bunch of other threads with that suggestion, and folks much more informed than I am have explained why that's not on the table at the moment.
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@notimp said in Fresh impressions from someone that used several Emulation frontends over the years.:
Retropie has a deep need of being transformed on some pretty basic levels to become anywhere as usable as previous "projects" in the emulation space.
Learn some tact, and start again.
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Personally i like the retropie setup and emulationstation far better than most frontends. It is so much easier to get running in my opinion. So many people think launchbox is so great and i think its a pile.
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@edmaul69 I like the big box art from launchbox, but that's about it..Pegasus is the closest thing to launchbox on the pi, and I'm using that as my daily driver. I find the layout tons better, too.
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@slimy How do I turn off shadows in the menu?
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@thewinterdojer
In Retroarch: Settings > User Interface > Menu > Icon Shadows Enable = Off
This greatly improved performance for me. -
Two more UI experience additions, before I react to the the reactions - because I guess thats what millenials do these days...
First - make the Emulation Station Menu "endless" (i.e. pressing up on the first item moves you down to the bottom one), second - make "shutdown" the last option in the menu , NOT "quite to command line". Because - guess who uses the quit to command line option in the main menu in the grand scheme of things - NO ONE. (I quess, people that cant press F4 on a Keyboard they are about to use, for the command line anyway... (dont get rid of it, move it to a less prominent place).
As far as the reactions are concerned, you are just the NES controller loving, self aggrandising 45 year olds, that have lost touch with modern UI sensibilities, I might have imagined you to be... ;) Screenshot sharing as a feature (although present in all modern consoles as a standard) - is seen as sacrilege. UI and user experience f*ck ups are internalized as "funny quirks" -
and "if you had looked hard enough, you'd found a way to configure..." nerds are trying to help non existent users - because UI defaults and "configuration posibilities" arent the same.
Just for the record though - I've used Retroarch for many years, I'm familiar with its base settings and at least the better part of ithe individual core options, and I have no Illusions, that the fork ripoffs that are out there have done nothing more, than to customize some of Retroarchs defaults.
What I am saying is - that you should think about defaults -
UI, control schemes (hotkeys), feature set, streamlining settings instead of adding one block on top of the seven others, ...
Because of a "90% of facebook users never look at the settings" type of argument.
You drag with you really arcane concepts and sensibilities, have a tendency to want to stick to "the familiar", even when Retroarch itself has left you behind in terms of seeing the need for better UI design, and the "default" to you is an afterthought.
(The bios folder doesnt get copied over using the USB fsync method, sync is uni directional, ssh on the current stable image doesnt work out of the box (key creation issue on part of that build of raspian), new emulators dont get added to emulation station (I guess when "only scan for "rom" files" is enabled), ...)
And you have never experienced the "console centric" emulation plattforms that came before. Or at least you havent internalized their findings.
Instead I read interviews you give that talk about morale and enthusiasm being down, or getting "that one core you love to work" (ATTENTION, the ScummVM Core is unusable for the better part of a year now, because of jumps in analogue stick mouse emulation - Im sure that has been forwarded across a dozen of github issue trackers by now - but who among you really cares... It shouldt be such a simple fix, but its never fixed...) while not identifying the most basic of issues -
you have a usability and accessibility problem.
Fresh eyes, criticism. Thats all I'm offering. I find a better experience with the multitude of commercial emulators, and Retroarch on android based plattforms - so its not for a lack of alternatives...
(Want to know whats funny to me? That your defaults currently drive people away from ppsspp as an emulator, and tell people thats more "easy" to use lr- ppsspp, because it comes "preconfigured" with retroarch inputs.... While PPSSPP actually WIPES THE FLOOR with Retropie UI and menu navigation wise (offering visual representations for savestates, having a legable interface...) - AND is the better emulator in the first place, making PSP games "boarderline playable" on a Pi3 in the first place... I wonder who is managing the project - making those kinds of decisions...)
That said, I like the retroarch concept, because of the "all in one place" nature of it. Thought I could point out, where it fails horribly , went out to take names, instead of making pals.
The answers showed an absolute lack of interest. So I guess that the issues are unresolvable.
Also, of course I will not donate hours of work to this project, theres no use.
In case someone sees value in the criticism and the logical inconsistencies I've pointed out - you are welcome. Please run with them, as you see fit.
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@notimp said in Fresh impressions from someone that used several Emulation frontends over the years.:
In case someone sees value in the criticism
I see. Suggestions for improvements are welcome here. Making demands is not.
Maybe you would get more attention from the devs with a more polite speech. Maybe suggesting things rather than dictating what you think that must be done.
If you know how to implement the stuff you want to see on RetroPie, submit a Pull Request. This is a welcome action.
I would like to suggest you to try recalbox. It seems to be a project with the same goals as you are trying to impose to RetroPie.
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