Grid Updates - emulationstation-dev

[meleu]

just a reminder:
testers can use the tool I mention in this thread to help developers with their work.

Cheers!

[paffley]

@meleu thank you! I will take a look at this....just to clarify you can test peoples pr's in es-dev with this?

[meleu]

@paffley
yep, I made the script able to load the list of open PRs in RetroPie's ES repo, and then you can download/compile/test them.

[paffley]

thats amazing @meleu thank you! great work!!! I'll have a play tomorrow :)

[paffley]

Couldn't get those pr updates to work at my end, just crashed my sd. Maybe you will have some luck @jdrassa when you get time to have a look. In the meantime im gonna keep trying :)

[paffley]

Hi @jdrassa any news on the new updates being merged?

I also noticed one little bug with the grid view when updating emu-dev - When entering a system, the md_name vanishes then re-appears when scrolled. Hope this helps. :)

[paffley]

Hey @jdrassa thanks for merging the new grid updates :)

Found a couple of bugs in the latest version of es-dev

1 - When you go back to the gamelist view 'after exiting a game' md_video does not play, even when you scroll. If you go back to the system view then back to gamelist view the snaps re-appear.

2 - When entering a system, the md_name, md_image, md_video etc vanishes then re-appears after the first scroll.

Now I'm not sure if this is a bug or not but with the latest es-dev update there is a frame rate counter in the top right hand side of the screen when you start a game? I'm not sure how to get rid of this as its not from es menu settings nor can I locate it in retroarch?

Hope this all helps :)

[paffley]

Any fixes for these as yet please @jdrassa ?

[ruckage]

Hey @jdrassa , hope you're well.

I've been trying your latest windows build of ES but there seems to be an issue with Grid view where the grid images are squashed after selecting a tile. It looks like they may be being squashed in a way that matches the aspect ratio of the ES window if that helps but I can't be positive. I'm not sure if this is just a windows issue or if its affecting rpi as well.

Here's a video to illustrate the problem:

[quicksilver]

@ruckage Ive noticed something similar when using "video" as gameslist view. The scraped image will be squashed after running a title after returning to ES or if you press select on the title like you are going to edit the metadata. This is on a raspberry pi btw. I tested on several themes including carbon.

[ruckage]

@quicksilver
@jdrassa

I've narrowed down the issue now. The bug first appeared in an update on 30 December when marquee, image and video were added to grid view.

What's more it seems to be specifically caused by md_image.

My understanding is that the update added the ability to display md_Image, md_video and md_marquee in the gridview as you can in other views as separate elements.

This works for md_marquee and md_video and behaves as expected.
For example adding the following into the grid View section of a theme will draw the marquee in the top left corner:

<image name="md_marquee">
	<size>0 0.2</size>
	<pos>0 0</pos>
	<origin>0 0</origin>
</image>

However if you try the same with md_image nothing extra is drawn. Instead it affects the way the images are drawn in the grid, this I am sure is a bug and I'm fairly certain will be causing issues in the Rpi version as well (I can't check at the moment as I don't have a spare SD card handy).

It's the size tags specifically which are affecting the grid images. Here are some examples:

<image name="md_image">
	<size>0.2 0.2</size>
</image>

<image name="md_image">
	<size>0.5 0.2</size>
</image>

And this is without adding md_image to the theme so the system uses default values which results in the images being stretched to a square shape.

Currently it can almost be fixed by setting one or both size values to 0, e.g <size>0 0</size> . However the first image in the grid still gets distorted and obviously the md_image still can't be displayed as a separate element.

I hope this helps pinpoint the problem @jdrassa and I hope you're okay as I see you haven't posted for a while (admittedly nor had I) .

[jdrassa]

@ruckage Sorry for the delayed response. I haven't had much time to dedicate to RetroPie stuff lately. I think you pretty much found the cause. I believe what is happening is that when ES caches the image texture it does so at the size it expects to renderer it. Since md_image is being displayed in 2 different places at 2 different sizes, one size takes precendence over the other, since only one copy of the texture is kept in memory.

I will need to run some more tests, but I just ran a quick test and I was able to get md_image to be drawn as expected. Any way you could share a copy of your theme with me? Or at least just the grid config portion.

[ruckage]

Hi @jdrassa,

It's good to hear from you, glad you're okay. Thanks for looking into this, you've put a lot of work into ES already and I appreciate you only have a limited amount of spare time - and sometimes you just need a break .

I've just managed to get md_image to show. It was being drawn behind the background image so it was just a case of setting the zIndex - I just didn't think of trying that earlier.
If you still need the theme to check I can find somewhere to upload it.

So it's almost behaving correctly now (providing md_image is set up) other than the first tile in the grid being distorted regardless of how md_image is set and in my case md_image not showing when first entering a system. I'm guessing for the first tile the default md_image settings are being applied before the md_image tags are read from the xml.

[ruckage]

@jdrassa
Bugs aside, I'm really pleased with the new grid view additions and extra options. The auto grid layout is very helpful and having the option to loop and centre the grid as well as animate it are all very welcome. And being able to finish it all off with video previews etc. is great :) . All combined it offers some great new theming possibilities.

[lilbud]

@ruckage Wait, when did all this stuff get added? Video previews and looping single row grid

Guess I can finally make a full and complete switch theme

[HurricaneFan]

Are all of these grid features in the default version of emulationstation provided by the RetroPie image file? Or is this only available in special windows build?

Second question, do we have to resize all our box art images to make them work with grid view?

[jdrassa]

@ruckage said in Grid Updates - emulationstation-dev:

So it's almost behaving correctly now (providing md_image is set up) other than the first tile in the grid being distorted regardless of how md_image is set and in my case md_image not showing when first entering a system. I'm guessing for the first tile the default md_image settings are being applied before the md_image tags are read from the xml.

I haven't been able to reproduce the distortion of the first tile, but I think I did reproduce md_image not showing when first entering a system. In my case, it actually does show for a split second and then disapears (along with the rest of the metadata). I need to dig some more, but hopefully should be able to come up with a fix.

If you still need the theme to check I can find somewhere to upload it.

No need to upload, if you could just provide the grid config, that should be enough.

<imagegrid name="gamegrid">...</imagegrid>
<gridtile name="default">...</gridtile>
<gridtile name="selected">...</gridtile>

@HurricaneFan said in Grid Updates - emulationstation-dev:

Are all of these grid features in the default version of emulationstation provided by the RetroPie image file?

All the features @ruckage is using are available in RetroPie, but I am not sure if they are all available in the latest image. To get the latest version of ES, you can install the emulationstation-dev module in RetroPie-Setup.

[mitu]

@jdrassa said in Grid Updates - emulationstation-dev:

All the features @ruckage is using are available in RetroPie, but I am not sure if they are all available in the latest image. To get the latest version of ES, you can install the emulationstation-dev module in RetroPie-Setup.

They should be available in RetroPie also, updating the normal EmulationStation package would get the lastest from the stable branch, which is more or less on-par with the dev branch right now. The grid view addition was part of the last year's version bump (Feb 2019), so it should be available in the 4.5.1 image.

[jdrassa]

@mitu There have been additional updates to grid view since Feb 2019. I believe most of it is in stable, but the ability to use marquees and video with grid view was just added last month and I don't think has made it to stable yet.

[paffley]

Everything works on stable apart from md_marquee and md_video in grid view. @jdrassa I posted some bugs in my previous post on these latest es-dev updates.