Grid tile content (image, text, or more ...)

[herb_fargus]

I personally use screenshots rather than box art as that way I can guarantee a consistent aspect ratio (usually) so I don't particularly have an opinion on the titles. Though I'm excited to try it out on @chicuelo theme.

[chicuelo]

Another option is to reduce the amount of columns of each row (3 instead of 4) and make them look with a different aspect ratio, so you can get a better image visual and take advantage of that space to use a bigger game name, this is an example I have in mind right now, you also could use the game name on the right in a bigger size.

Tip: try to use a good performance font, could it be a condensed one, so you get more characters than other fonts on the same space

[A12C4]

@chicuelo Thank you for your input but I don't think what you suggested can work.

Another option is to reduce the amount of columns of each row (3 instead of 4) and make them look with a different aspect ratio, so you can get a better image visual and take advantage of that space to use a bigger game name

The problem is I can't assume the image aspect ratio like you did. The user may use screenshots or box art which have bigger height than width, in that case that would leave really small amount of space for the text (as the background size and the text size depend on the size of the image)

this is an example I have in mind right now, you also could use the game name on the right in a bigger size.

If you talk about displaying the selected game name in big somewhere like on top of the screen, this is already planned.

Tip: try to use a good performance font, could it be a condensed one, so you get more characters than other fonts on the same space

This is an interesting tip, I already thought about reducing the text size or make it slide when selected, but I didn't thought about changing the font.

Like changing the text size, changing the font is like half a solution, it guarantee it will work in more cases, but can't guarantee is work in all cases.

PS : I hope I doesn't sound too mean in my message, as english isn't my native language. Thank again for your input

[A12C4]

@lilbud Thanks I added it to my list, I will post some screenshots while using it later on but for now the theming syntax is too limited, it will just look like my screenshot of your Material theme with a different background image.

[A12C4]

@shadowron What do you mean by "saw some themes using this" ? The only scrolling text in EmulationStation is the game description as far as I know.

[EctoOne]

@a12c4 said in The Grid View need your opinion:

@shadowron What do you mean by "saw some themes using this" ? The only scrolling text in EmulationStation is the game description as far as I know.

I believe he's referring the scrolling names in the gamelist when they are to long for the set width.

Anyway on to the input, or some questions first:

• In the end will we get only one default solution or are we able to specify the look in the theme? Maybe with some tag like <tile_name>hidden|top|below|noimage</tile_name>.

• How is scrolling handled? I assume if we have more games then tiles, we can only scroll up/down to see the previous/next row. I could see some possibilities if we could scroll horizontally by columns. I'm thinking of having a grid with 3 columns where the left/right one are partially overlapped by some image to create some sort of preview. But now that i think of it, it would be probably a problem because the grid won't center on the selected tile, so that the selected tile might also be hidden when it's in the left/right column.

• Will grid view also support videos? I mean not just as an extra element like it is now, but also in the grid itself, like have a running video in the active tile. Side question: Are we able to use <md_marquee> as element in grid view? I still kinda hate it that it is exclusively bound to video view and not available in detailed view.

[herb_fargus]

@ectoone my personal opinion on points 2 and 3:

I personally think the grid should just function in rows from left to right top to bottom, not an infinite left to right loop as I feel it's a counterintuitive interface unless maybe it's like one of those book type ones like on Apple music or whatever it is, might look good on a handheld (probably better implemented on pegasus tbh). Also since you'll have multiple games per row it should be faster just by virtue of more visual real estate though. I believe the shoulder button function was discussed here

As far as videos I personally think that would just be seizure inducing if they all had videos running and probably taxing on something like the pie anyhow at that rate. I also don't care for videos either so even just on the active tile isn't my taste. So. There's that. I don't do the code, but just my personal opinion on the matter.

[lilbud]

How Navigation should work

[Clyde]

@a12c4 Foremost, great project. A good grid view may me the thing I miss most in Emulation Station.

Concerning the font size, please keep in mind that many people use Retropie with small screen resolutions. The font should remain readable on those.

edit: I second @EctoOne in the question of videos, if only in the selected frame to avoid the possible overload to the system and the players' senses that @herb_fargus mentioned. (Though overall videos could be an option for less sensitive people with bigger systems.)

[A12C4]

@herb_fargus Yes it scroll from top to bottom, if you hit the right side it just bring you to the leftest tile of the next row, if you hit the left side it bring you to the rightest tile of the previous row.

But I was actually thinking to give the possibility to theme makers to make the grid scroll horizontally, that would allow theme makers to do some cool looking one row themes like the snes mini theme.

Definitely not my priority at the moment, but the question is still open !

[Shadowron]

@ectoone said in The Grid View need your opinion:

@a12c4 said in The Grid View need your opinion:

@shadowron What do you mean by "saw some themes using this" ? The only scrolling text in EmulationStation is the game description as far as I know.

I believe he's referring the scrolling names in the gamelist when they are to long for the set width.

This, exactly.

[A12C4]

@ectoone Oh yes my bad forgot it also happened in the basic and detailed list view in the text list. About your questions :

• My plan is detailed in my original message : in the first version of the grid view distributed publicly, the game name will not be part of the grid (the ones inside the grid, you can still display the selected game name in big on top of the screen). In a second time, I want to see what theme makers/users want to do with their grid, if they just want the game name I will reintroduce it, if they want to customize more the grid I will go for the "highly customizable grid tile" talked about at the end of my first message, if they don't care I will just keep the image (atm I got a lot of feedback for the first option, but none for the second one).
• I partially answered that in my answer right above. No that wont work, because yes the left and right tiles will be partially hidden.
• Videos aren't supported. At all. The video preview of the selected game may be added later on the road. But displaying the videos directly in the grid, I'm not so confident about it.

[EctoOne]

Ok, my bad then. I thought this was already about customizable grids.

But yeah, i would prefer no title in the grid at all and go with the "go grab some images first". But only if <md_name>is added at the same time, so that I can place the game name wherever I want. If it's not added, I would probably say that I want the name either at the top or bottom of the grid, not inside the tiles.

And yes, i had horizontal scrolling in mind for a 1 row navigation myself. I believe @jdrassa was working on making the carousel working as element in gamelist view but sadly this wasn't mentioned in the last time.

[A12C4]

So, nobody is interested by the highly customizable grid tile so far ?

I love this idea as it could give the theme makers way more opportunities to create good looking grid views, like the snes mini theme do. But if nobody, or nearly nobody is interested, it's not worth the time developing and maintaining this functionality.

[EctoOne]

@a12c4 well of course I'm interested in a more customizable grid view, that's why I asked if we even have options to try different things. On the other hand, I personally have to see/test grid view first so that I can say if I'm interested or not.
I'm not sure if I would use a huge grid in my personal theme but a one line grid seems like something I would use.

Speaking of customizations, I noticed that you removed md_image from the metadata tags for grid view (at least that's how I understood the pr on github). I wonder if it would be possible (later) to define in the theme which image should be used for the grid. Something like <imagetype=image|marquee|thumbnail>, in that case it would make sense if we had md_image available in grid view.

[A12C4]

@ectoone I removed the md_image metadata because it made no sens in a grid view to display the exact same image that is already in the grid on the side of the screen with other metadata, as a "md_name" metadata field wouldn't make sens in the detailed view, as you are already using the game name to choose the game you want.

But about image and thumbnail, I must admit I don't know much about it, I assumed the thumbnail was just a smaller version of the image, like it is usually. Until now I just scrapped my game images using ES scrapper and nothing else. Is customizing the images something common ? How do you do it ? What tool, software is the most commonly used ?

For the video there is nothing planned right now, as most of the video related stuff is already and only usable in the video view, I would need to duplicate a lot of code with current implementation. We would need to first refactor all the code related to game views, to create one, unique view, where the theme maker would choose one way for the user to choose its game (either the text list or the grid), and then add all the extra stuff he want. This is a big task and won't be done anytime soon.

[A12C4]

@herb_fargus As I said in the message right above, I never tried to customize the images. Is this something common along the RetroPie user base ? How do you do that ? What tool/software should I look at ?

[afiction]

I just wanted to say thank you for taking on this project. I'm looking forward to it.

[EctoOne]

@a12c4 Ok, first off. I totally appreciate all the work you and everyone else is doing!
But here is the problem, often when a new thing gets implemented it is somewhat restricted. I can understand that it sometimes is not possible to do everything easy but I also believe that some things are easy to add. Like not having md_marquee in detailed view, or having md_name just in grid view. That makes it difficult for me to create certain effects in themes and the need to find workarounds for some things which often don't look good. I asked before if it would be possible to get the game name as variable, because I was working on a theme where it would look better, instead i had use a one line gamelist element, which was bad because of the scrolling and some other things.
As for the md_image in grid view, I could see the use of having a bigger image of the selected game on smaller displays.

Anyways, for the customization of images: First thing is that we have three available tags now to display images:

• <image> which is used for boxart
• <marquee> for the game logos
• and the recently fixed <thumbnail> which will be displayed if a video has a set delay and the option to show an image is set. If no <thumbnail> is available in the gamelist.xml it will show the <image> instead.

For every tag you can show whatever you want, the build in scraper only scrapes boxart (unless that was updated) and adds the -image suffix.

I assume there are multiple ways to select what image you want to appear in which tag. But I will only tell you how I did it before.
I used Universal XML Scraper, with a modified profile to scrape all media files i wanted (boxart, screenshot, marquee and video) on my PC. Sadly, UXS has no option to directly put the different medias into it's own subfolders, so i had to use suffixes, separated them afterwards and bulk removed the suffixes. I ended up with having 4 folders which contain the media, which have the same name as the Rom. Then I had to remove all suffixes from the new gamelist.xml and change the paths to contain the separate folders.
A basic entry for a game looks like this:

		<path>./Shinobi (USA, Europe).zip</path>
		<name>Shinobi</name>
		<image>./_boxart/Shinobi (USA, Europe).png</image>
		<marquee>./_marquee/Shinobi (USA, Europe).png</marquee>
		<video>./video/Shinobi (USA, Europe).mp4</video>
		<thumbnail>./_screenshot/Shinobi (USA, Europe).png</thumbnail>

If grid view gets released and for some reason I want to use screenshots as tile images, all I have to do, is to rename the folders. No messing around with the gamelist, no bulk renaming of the files.

Here is another example, why I hate being restricted as theme maker. Before <thumbnail> was fixed, I used <marquee> to show screenshots along with the normal <image> in my theme. Now I can have three images, but only if I either don't have <video> in my gamelist (not really sure about this, never tried it) or i have all tags but use a different folder name for videos (I should mention that I don't use videos, but I want them scraped). Then I still have to manually set ES to use video view and if I don't set it also to parse gamelist only, the entry for the <video> will be deleted from the gamelist because it can't find them. If I ever want to use videos, I can't just rename my video folder, i need to have a backup of my gamelist. Also with parse gamelist only, I can't use the lastplayed collection (not a problem, because for some other reason i have to use parse gamelist only anyways). Some of these steps seem so unnecessary to me.

Edit: The theme from @chicuelo is a good example. It was designed to use screenshots as main image, but we can't just use md_thumbnail in detailed view, if we want the same look, we have to use the methods I mentioned. Either by using video view (easy to achieve for people who actually use videos) or by using screenshots as <image>. By using the last method we can't simply switch themes, because some don't look as great with screenshots.

[Clyde]

@ectoone I don't want to start an off-topic discussion, but since you mentioned your scraping problems, and in case you or others don't know already:

Steven Sselph's scraper from Retropie's optional packages has command line arguments to scrape into different directories, put custom paths for images or roms into the gamelist.xml, as well as define or omit suffixes. Those options are not available via the scraper's setup menu.

It doesn't scrape existing images again by default, so creating a new gamelist.xml with a different existing directory structure should take not very long when only mere text is being scraped (title, description etc.). Alas, there's no option to only update certain tags of existing gamelist entries, like "scrape only descriptions".