Fun Facts Splashscreens

[hiulit]

I just wanted to let you know that I've started working on this project.

I'll keep you updated ;)

P.S. Looking good!

P.P.S. @meleu When using convert, it takes a lot of time. I'm working on a Virtual Machine. Maybe it's that. I don't know. Here's a snippet of what I'm doing:

convert splash4-3.png \
    -size 1000x100 \
    -interline-spacing 5 \
    -background transparent \
    -fill white \
    -caption:"${fun_facts[$random_number]}" \
    -gravity south \
    -geometry +0+25 \
    -composite \
    result.png

And here's what time outputs:

real 0m7.172s
user 0m6.300s
sys  0m0.656s

[hiulit]

BTW, if anyone wants to tinker, here's the GitHub's repo https://github.com/hiulit/es-fun-facts-splashscreens

[meleu]

@hiulit hey man! Well done!! ;-)

[hiulit]

@meleu Thanks! :D It's super basic now, but it seems to be working. Now it's time to take a look at your generate-launching-imagesscript and improve mine ;)

[meleu]

@hiulit I'm glad to know it can inspire you. I usually spend sometime making my code readable just to help others to understand it (including @meleu in the future). Knowing that you're reading it and getting some inspiration makes me feel like the work was worth it. :D

Let me know if you have any doubt!

[meleu]

@hiulit a small tip: if you want to store fun facts in a text file, one fun fact per line, you can get a random line from the file using the shuf command. This way:

shuf -n 1 fun_facts.txt

EDIT: This aproach would be useful if the users want to customize their fun facts. They wouldn't need to edit the script's code.

;-)

[hiulit]

@meleu Thanks for the tip! I'll try it! :)

[hiulit]

@meleu Done! It works beautifully :D

[Zigurana]

If it takes too long, maybe run the image-generation-script on system shutdown, to be used at next boot-time?

[meleu]

@zigurana good idea! ;-)

@hiulit I have more comments, maybe it's better to move the nerdy conversation to the nerdy topic... :)

[hiulit]

@zigurana Yeah, good idea! Although I really don't have any idea of where I should put my script to do that... (⊙_☉) hehe! Noob at scripting here :P

[hiulit]

More progress! :D
Now the splashscreen is created using the font of the active theme in EmulationStation, and if it has none it takes the Carbon theme font as default.

A little video demo of the script working https://streamable.com/s/bbzzd/fecqc

And here's the the splashscreen of the Pixel theme with a Fun Fact!™ using Pixel's own font.

[meleu]

@hiulit you're doing a good job bro!!

I've submitted a PR to your repo. But, as I'm away from my RetroPie currently, please test it before merging. ;-)

[hiulit]

WOW, thanks man! I will take a look at it and I'll get back to you :)

[hiulit]

@meleu Hey, I've merged your pull request but I had to make a little change because it didn't seem to work properly.

The change I made was adding a ! before -f "$splashscreen" when checking for the splashscreen.

if [[ ! -f "$splash" ]]; then
    splash="$DEFAULT_SPLASH"
fi

Besides that, everything was alright! Thanks! :)

[hiulit]

@meleu When I encountered the problem with Pixel theme and xmlstarlet I tried a different approach for finding the font.

function get_theme_font() {
    get_current_theme
    if [[ -n "$(find "$ES_DIR/themes/$current_theme/art" -type f -name '*.ttf')" ]]; then
        font="$(find "$ES_DIR/themes/$current_theme/art" -type f -name '*.ttf')"
    else
        font=$DEFAULT_FONT
    fi
}

I did the job, but I wasn't happy about repeating the find function , but I don't know any better :P

Do you think that could be a workaround for finding theme fonts?

I know that some themes can have multiple fonts but I think it's ok to use the first one found.

[meleu]

@hiulit it's better to move the nerdy conversation to the nerdy topic... :)

I'll try to answer your questions there. Wait a moment. ;)

[hiulit]

@meleu Oh, you're right! ;) See you there!

[meleu]

@BuZz please, evaluate if you would accept the following feature for splashscreen script module (and asplashscreen.sh script):

Adding an option to put a random "fun fact" on the splashscreen.

The result would be something like this:

Some notes about how I'm thinking to implement that:

• add a toggle option on splashscreen script module to enable/disable fun facts.

• when enabled, a new splashscreen would be generated at every boot

• a new dependency to generate the images: imagemagick (same as launchingimages scriptmodule).

• the image would be generated at boot in a background process and would be used in the next boot. I mean, when I boot my pi, the splashscreen I would see already exists and the script would be generating a new one for the next boot in a background process.

• (obviously) it would be only used when the splashscreen is an image (do nothing when using a video)

• the "fun facts database" would be a text file in $datadir/splashscreens/.

  • an "official" funfacts collection could be stored in the official repo in scriptmodules/supplementary/splashscreen/

  • provide a way to the user use a custom funfacts collection.

• the font to be used for the fun fact text would be the same as the one used by the current ES theme in detailed view.

  • Note: RetroPie must be frontend agnostic. Then, if the script can't find the font as described above, it would use a generic font.

• all the logic for the image generation would be in asplashscreen.sh script

[BuZz]

@meleu I wouldn't be interested sorry.