Skyscraper now officially part of RetroPie, please test

mitu

@muldjord said in Skyscraper now officially part of RetroPie, please test:

I think for those 3 parts (artwork, import, localdb), just link to my docs. It's great to have the RetroPie specific things documented in the RetroPie wiki and the overall explanations of course. But I feel like we should stick with my updated docs for the rest. Agree?

Sure thing. For the Artwork/Import my idea was just to say a few words and point to the official docs anyway, there's too much to cover and it's just silly to duplicate things instead of using the source.

@robertvb83 Thanks for the ideas - will probably add it as an advanced option in one of the next iterations. Can you elaborate a bit on the:

would it be possible to even do something like xml-scraper with the arcade cabinet with marquee and screenshot?

Is this a template in XML scraper (I assume you're referring to UXS) ?

mitu

@muldjord I've modified the WIP wiki page (link here) and added your suggestions. For the advanced part I've added your descriptions for Import and Artwork and linked to the official docs. I've removed the CLI usage since this is going to evolve and will probably be outdated.

muldjord

@mitu Awesome! Love the artwork example, looks good. I just went over it all real quick, I don't have further comments, looks good to me.

mitu

@muldjord said in Skyscraper now officially part of RetroPie, please test:

Love the artwork example, looks good

I couldn't resist putting it there, I initially thought of adding a table with each example artwork and it's preview, but I think that one table is suggestive enough to grasp the 'magic' behind the artwork compositor.

muldjord

@mitu Agreed, it's nice to have it there as a teaser for what people can do and it works well to have the individual pieces first, and then the result. I think that explains how it works well. We can add more examples if we create a bunch of default artwork.xml files for people to use.

mitu

Page is now live at https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper

muldjord

Posted on reddit now: https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/9p1zqq/skyscraper_now_officially_part_of_retropie/

robertvb83

@mitu said in Skyscraper now officially part of RetroPie, please test:

@robertvb83 Thanks for the ideas - will probably add it as an advanced option in one of the next iterations. Can you elaborate a bit on the:

would it be possible to even do something like xml-scraper with the arcade cabinet with marquee and screenshot?

Is this a template in XML scraper (I assume you're referring to UXS) ?

Yes i am referring to UXS. They actually have a similar art output mixer but they also have the option to show a little arcade cabinet with screenshot and marquee as you can see here (scroll down a little)

muldjord

@robertvb83 This can actually be achieved relatively easily using the Skyscraper compositor. It has the option to do masks and frame overlays and can rotate the resources to fit the different sections of the cabinet. I will consider creating an "arcade cabinet" artwork.xml and we can add that on a list of artwork templates. But I need a completely royalty free arcade cabinet overlay to do that. Creating one from scratch is a bit much for my artistic skills.

Clyde

@muldjord said in Skyscraper now officially part of RetroPie, please test:

It has the option to do masks and frame overlays and can rotate the resources to fit the different sections of the cabinet.

So it can put scanlines in the videos? That would be great, since ES and the OMX Player can't do that on the fly like Attract Mode can, for example.

muldjord

@Clyde OMG IT'S CLYDE FROM PAC-MAN! I'm a big fan :D

No, it can't add effects to videos unfortunately, but you could add a scanline effect to the graphics using a frame effect with transparency applied to a layer.

mitu

@muldjord

So it can put scanlines in the videos?

Does it work for videos ?

muldjord

@mitu Sorry, no, I was just editing my post while you were posting. :D No, it can't process videos.

Clyde

@muldjord said in Skyscraper now officially part of RetroPie, please test:

@Clyde OMG IT'S CLYDE FROM PAC-MAN! I'm a big fan :D

:)

No, it can't add effects to videos unfortunately, but you could add a scanline effect to the graphics using a frame effect with transparency applied to a layer.

So, it can put scanlines over the videos? That's what I actually meant, since Attract Mode doesn't modify the videos themselves either.

Just to be sure I understand you correctly: I would create a scanline image with transparent lines between the scanlines, and use that as a "frame" although its no actual frame?

muldjord

@Clyde Yes, you can do that for images, but not for videos unfortunately.

Clyde

@muldjord Damn, just when I saw a silver lining on the horizon.

Thanks for the clarification, though.

muldjord

@mitu Two users just asked on reddit why they got "File not found" when trying to run Skyscraper from command line after installing it with the setup script. Could we add a sudo ln -s /opt/retropie/supplementary/skyscraper/Skyscraper /usr/local/bin/Skyscraper line to the installation script somewhere so users can run it easily from command line?

mitu

@muldjord Almost all of the scriptmodules don't modify the system's folders and I'd like to keep it in line with this principle. What we can do is add an option in the Advanced section to add the skyscraper installation folder to the user's $PATH. The install path is documented in the wiki page and I've added - similar to the scraper's doc - the command line path if the user wants to use it from outside the RetroPie script.
I've looked over the reddit topic and I've seen the topic, but it looks like the user didn't understand how to install and run Skyscraper - neither the normal way from your github repo, nor through the RetroPie-Setup script.

muldjord

@mitu Yes, it's purely for convenience. Typing the entire path each time is a bit of a hassle and strays from the Skyscraper github documentation. So any solution that makes it possible to just type "Skyscraper" is fine by me. I'm mostly worried about this on a support level. But I agree that I might be jumping the gun on this one. We'll see if it becomes a frequently asked question.

muldjord

EDIT5: Yes, it's definitely the binary release that is broken. It doesn't copy any of the required files and results in a non-working version of Skyscraper.

EDIT6: The source release is missing the following important files (the examples are copied and used if none exists. Especially the priorities.xml.example is really important):

dbs/priorities.xml.example
dbs/README.md
import/definitions.dat.example1
import/definitions.dat.example2
import/README.md

@mitu The Retropie-Setup Skyscraper binary installation seems to be broken (EDIT4: Currently compiling source release to see if it has the same problems). Are you in control of that? I just installed a clean RetroPie 4.4 to test the Skyscraper installation. I installed it from binary (no idea how that works) and it runs it just fine, but the artwork.xml is not copied to the .skyscraper folder, so I'm guessing other files don't either. EDIT3: Yep, just checked the folder and none of the required files are there. It's missing the following files:

mameMap.csv
README.md
hints.txt
config.ini.example
ARTWORK.md
artwork.xml
artwork.xml.example1
artwork.xml.example2
artwork.xml.example3
artwork.xml.example4
tgdb_developers.json
tgdb_publishers.json
dbs/priorities.xml.example
dbs/README.md
import/definitions.dat.example1
import/definitions.dat.example2
import/README.md

All of these files are required for Skyscraper to run properly. Some of the example files are copied over if none exists and so on, so they are quite important.

I also noticed that it by default inserts paths for dbFolder, importFolder, inputFolder and artworkXml in the default config.ini it creates. Could you remove those? They don't do anything right now as there is the symlink to the .skyscraper folder already and the inputFolder is the default one used by Skyscraper so it doesn't need to be set.

EDIT: Noticed that my config.ini has wheels="false" even though it is set to true in the ui.

EDIT2: You can also remove maxFails="30" as it is also the default and most users don't need to set this so there's no need to expose it.