[New ES Theme] VectorPie (16:9)

SgtJimmyRustles

I like the look man. I'll throw it up on my Discord as one of the "Themes Jimmy Likes!"

Zachariel

@sgtjimmyrustles Thanks, glad to hear it!

Zachariel

@mattrixk Alright, the stars should be white now. They're a touch too close together now, but it doesn't really bother me. lol

Clyde

One suggestion: Your README.txt has no instructions about the installation. Although most seasoned Retropie users should know how to install themes manually, a short description for newcomers would be nice.

Clyde

I installed your theme and it looks even better in action. 😊 I especially like the modest zoom effect on the system name.

Buut … I may have found a bug or at least an inconsistency: Even with other Transition Styles than "Fade", a fade still occurs when switching between systems. So for example, if set to "Slide" it would slide and fade at the same time. Addtionally, it becomes erractic (i.e. fades only any other time) when I switch systems very quickly back and forth.

I'd rather don't have a fade in the other transition styles. Would that be possible?

Zachariel

@clyde Hmm, that's a good point. I might just direct beginners to the RetroPie theme installation instruction page.

About the transitions. I haven't seen what you're talking about myself. My intention was for it to be viewed with "Instant", as I think that suits it best and I definitely don't like the fading either. I don't think the fade you're seeing is a product of anything that I did, it's more likely due to ES not preloading all the elements, or perhaps just the way ES handles multiple elements needing to be loaded per system page. It's possible it could be corrected, maybe by changing the load order, but I'm not sure. As I said, this is my first ES theme, so I'd be happy if any other seasoned themers could give me some advice on this. Just as another reference, what systems/categories are you currently displaying on it?

Clyde

@zachariel It's strange that you don't experience this effect. With "Instant", it is even more erratic than with "Slide" on my machine. That said, I'm testing it on my new Mini PC on a fresh installation of Kubuntu Linux 18.04 right now. Later today, I can test it on my Pi with Retropie 4.4 and see if the effect also occurs there. But what I can already say is that it doesn't occur with the only other theme currently installed on the Mini PC, namely Carbon.

Alas, I don't know anything about theme creation. I just use them. 😌

mitu

@clyde said in [New ES Theme] VectorPie (16:9):

Buut … I may have found a bug or at least an inconsistency: Even with other Transition Styles than "Fade", a fade still occurs when switching between systems. So for example, if set to "Slide" it would slide and fade at the same time. Addtionally, it becomes erractic (i.e. fades only any other time) when I switch systems very quickly back and forth.

It's because of the VRAM settings. Try upping the limit as @Zachariel said in the 1st post and restart ES.

@Zachariel nice theme - thank you for creating and sharing it !
The large VRAM requirements would make run erratically on a PI, maybe it can be improved. I've noticed one of the assets (VectorPie-master\_ass\images\basicbg.ong) is unusually large for its contents (7mb+ for a basically a background color). If I re-save it (using Paint.Net), it goes to about 170Kb.
I've run it on Windows, with a VRAM limit set to 120, and it seems to work fine (after I shrunk that large image), but didn't have a change to test it also on a PI.

Clyde

@mitu Thanks for the hint, it really was my VRAM setting in ES. Rasing it from 100 to 160 MB on my Pi fixed the unwanted fade, but even with 260 MB (presumably capped at 256 by the gpu_mem_1024 setting in my /boot/config.txt) I got the white screen bug that's mentioned in your link, beginning with the 5th or 6th system displayed. I will test a higher setting on my Mini PC with 8 GB RAM when I get back to it. I don't know how much VRAM its system currently assigns.

So, the theme could definately use a good trimming in terms of memory usage. I didn't know the importance of VRAM, simply because I only used more frugal themes up until now.

edit: Aaand … I just read in this post that the white screen effect may occur with setting VRAM too high rather than too low. Is this correct?

@Zachariel The good news is that the theme fits to my 1600x1200 4:3 monitor quite nicely already. It shouldn't require that much of an effort to modify it for 4:3 screens.

mitu

@clyde said in [New ES Theme] VectorPie (16:9):

edit: Aaand … I just read in this post that the white screen effect may occur with setting VRAM too high rather than too low. Is this correct?

Seems so. If you get close to fill in the amount of VRAM in the system, the GPU will start to mis-behave and the display will not be stable. Your link gave me an idea on how to debug the texture allocations and see what how they're allocated :).

ClassicGMR

I have to say this one is pretty! Will watch this extra close.

Clyde

@mitu said in [New ES Theme] VectorPie (16:9):

Your link gave me an idea on how to debug the texture allocations and see what how they're allocated :).

Sweet power of synergy. :)

Zachariel

@clyde Yeah, sounds like you've got that issue fixed with the vram? Please let me know how it runs on your other rig/s. I'm also still curious about what systems/categories you're displaying on it. The theme is well under the average memory usage for the more graphical themes as far as I can tell. What actually needs to happen is someone needs to fix ES's resource management. I realize that people have tried, and have succeeded in making it better and I mean them absolutely no offence, I just think it's sad that they're going to use ES as the default frontend when it has so many problems.

Yeah, I don't think it will be a huge issue to adjust everything and create a 4:3, but it will take time. I don't want to just simple resize and distort the backgrounds as I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

@mitu Thanks for the kind words! Yup, that one slipped by me because it was a bit of an afterthought to add "Basic View" functionality. Since I don't use basic view, I completely forgot to correct the size. My grand assumption though is that ES is not SO preposterously bad that it loads things into memory that it doesn't even need, so my theory is that that doesn't effect me running it in detailed; however I will be fixing it immediately, regardless.

@ClassicGMR Thank you! Watch it extra close? You afraid it's going to run away? :-D

Clyde

@zachariel Alas, its not really fixed, as I can only choose whether I want the strange fading or white screens on the Pi. I couldn't test it again on my mini PC, yet. Here more data from my tests on the Pi 3b:

With 100-110 MB VRAM, fading and occational black screens happen.
With 120 MB VRAM or higher, white backgrounds and/or system pictures happen.
These effects are mostly limited to the background, wheras the titles and system pictures remain. Rarely, and then mostly at "border" screens between the correct screens and the faulty ones, the background is okay but the system's picture is a black or white block.
I have 9 systems plus 4 Retropie categories. I don't want to get into more detail in a public forum, sorry.
When I start at the first system with 140 MB VRAM and browse to the right, the 5th screen (excluding the starting one) has a white box instead of the system picture, and from the 6th on, all backgrounds are white with only the titles and consoles being shown correctly. From the 10th on (5th from the left of the start), the screens will be correct again. It seems that ES preloads a couple of screens left and right from the starting one until it hits the memory barrier.
No screensaver videos are played when your theme is loaded with 140 MB VRAM, just black screens. I didn't test other VRAM settings.
I also tested other themes that seem heavy on graphics, namely Magazine Madness, Showcase and Superdisplay. None of them showed any of those effects even with only 100 MB VRAM. Only sometimes on the gamelist screens, they couldn't keep up with my fast system switching and loaded the graphics 1-2 seconds after the switch, but every time completely. So they must do something™ differently than your theme.(?)

By the way, did you test your theme on a Pi?

As for ES, I can't judge its code at all, but at least on a Pi, the main reason for these problems seem to come from hardware limitations. ES can be set to 1000 MB VRAM, after all. And even if ES could be optimized in this matter, it probably won't happen soon, so you'll have to work with the current conditions.

Please take all this as constructive criticism. I like your theme very much and I would like to help making it perfect. :)

Zachariel

@clyde No, of course. Constructive criticism is always good!

Yeah, the problems stem from the hardware limitations, but it's because ES was never optimized to manage the limitations. But you're right, it definitely won't be changing any time soon.

I did test it on my pi, but I've got like 30 categories and I can't really see any rhyme, reason, or pattern to what gets left out. While I was initially developing it I loaded each specific system theme at a time to my pie and I started getting the white images/pages after five systems, so I pretty much accepted that as the inherent limit of my design.

My theme does load more individual images at once than those other themes, but it's actually smaller in size per system than Magazine Madness for instance. Taking a look at their code I can't decipher anything that's being done different, other than fewer total images per page, of course that could be the inherent flaw right there.

When I run Magazine Madness on my pi, I get all of the console "magazine" images, but only three of the actual system pages will load, the rest are all white, so my theme seems to be on par with that. I really did all I could to maximize it's operation before the initial release, but I'll be glad to take any suggestions from others.

I have other design optimizations that I know need to be made, mostly with colors and clipping of logos, but that won't help it operate better. For now I think I'll have to accept it as a limitation that I can't do anything about. But if someone better than me (not hard) has any suggestions, I'm all ears. :-D

Zachariel

Hello again everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that over the past few days I've made a great many changes, corrections, and improvements, mostly cosmetic. There were a couple optimizations, so it may run better than the original release. Thanks for all the input so far!

Clyde

@zachariel Thanks for the update! The glitches are still there, but apparently less severe. The threshold between black backgrounds that sometimes (!) load the graphics after a few seconds (or not) and white backgrounds and/or whole screens is approx. between 120 and 130 MB VRAM. The update reduced the amount of systems affected by roughly 30%, I would say.

One noticable system that nearly always shows a white box instead of the console picture is Neo Geo, even if it's selected as the system ES is starting in, and even if the adjacent systems are okay. So it seems that there's something problematic with it especially.

Keep on the good work! o/

Zachariel

@clyde Thank you for your in depth assessment. I appreciate the attention you put into it. That's quite strange about the Neo Geo. I'll study on that area and see if there's something really wrong there that I missed. Could be a graphic that's way out of wack.

Alright, so I checked it out, and the weird thing is that the Neo Geo page is one of the smallest and simplest ones. I have no idea what that's about.

Clyde

@zachariel said in [New ES Theme] VectorPie (16:9):

Alright, so I checked it out, and the weird thing is that the Neo Geo page is one of the smallest and simplest ones. I have no idea what that's about.

*stunned* Okay, I will keep an eye on it in further updates, then.

[irony] Maybe ES thinks, „nah, I won't load that tiny thing while I'm having much bigger problems!“ [/irony] 😄

Zachariel

@clyde Actually, I did consider that maybe ES was prioritizing other things for some reason, but I have no idea. lol

I just issued another big round of optomizations. I think it might be a bit better now.