Carbon Theme Suggestions

Rookervik

@caver01 I do apologize for forgetting to test 4:3. Back when Herb and I made this we were very careful to make sure 4:3 worked. I rushed a little to get this out. My intention was a nice visual upgrade for people. What I caused was a mess. LOL.

caver01

@Rookervik On the contrary! I think your updates are great, especially taking inputs from everyone. That's never easy as there will always be some disagreement, but it's not a mess. You make certain choices.

qrayg

@Rookervik Just an FYI here's a vector TG16 controller I made with Sketch. If you'd like me to convert this to simple line art SVG for use with RP just let me know.

qrayg

@Rookervik said in Carbon Theme Suggestions:

Do you use Carbon, or do you download another theme?

I remove all themes and use a modified version of the simple theme that I created. I prefer the subtle light colored theme and the Open Sans regular weight font.

If you use Carbon, what do you like about it?

I really like Carbon's vector controller art over Simple's bitmap blurred screenshots for each system.

If you don't use Carbon, what about it do you dislike or what do you wish was changed?

I dislike carbon because of the font weight + size, and also the red text on the dark patterned background. That combination is difficult to read for certain color blind users such as myself. I prefer a UI that is simple and clean with very little busy-ness. I do have to say that the RetroPie menu with the 3D icons is really out of place and looks like Windows 95 to me. As a UX/UI designer for the past 20 years, it hurts me to look at those icons. Carbon uses flat line art for all systems and then on the RP menu it's a completely different style... it's jarring to me. I'd be happy to offer design assistance if you are ever thinking about re-working the UI. I've worked on archive.vg UI (the 1st version... the good one) and OpenEmu UI (I created the website frontend, animations, and also made preference controller artwork for the TG16, NGPC, and I'm working on a Dreamcast controller as well).

Rookervik

RetroPie Menu uses stock icons that every theme must use. There is no easy way to change the RetroPie icons in a theme installer. So using Carbon-specific icons would have made other themes' RetroPie Menus look rather out-of-place to be honest. Users can put their own icons in the place if they are comfortable with the linux command line. The icons on the RetroPie menu can be compared with the game box art. They are in the same location, and they do not follow any sort of coloring or design scheme.

Now if you're suggesting mono type icons, that can be discussed with the developers. The icons will need to be multi-colored because each theme uses different colored backgrounds. So a white or black icon, alone, will not show on all themes.

Please note that the Carbon theme can now have the color changed quite easily. Please read the documentation in the theme folder to learn more. Developers preferred the red look, so that is the color it comes default in. Font size information is also available in the documentation. Font size and face were chosen based on the developers wishes.

Thank you for your suggestions!

Please think of releasing your theme for the community to use. More choices is always better.

Rookervik

@qrayg As far as I know, I already completed the TG-16 controller and it's included in Carbon. Your picture is very nice though. Good job.

Rookervik

I was thinking about re-doing all of the controllers in detailed SVG but it takes a while to create them. I did vector the PSP console... but weighing in at 1.5MB... just for vector... I thought it probably wasn't a good idea. Vector art can be pretty realistic though. :D

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mattrixk

I'm calling your bluff @Rookervik, that's just a photo of a real PSP.

Jokes aside, that's pretty darn impressive. Ironically, an actual photo of the console would probably have a much smaller file size.

Rookervik

@mattrixk Hehe, yeah it looks really close to a photo. :D

Turns out, using a PNG or JPG for a controller would actually be easier on VRAM. No matter how large you stretch a picture, it uses the same VRAM in ES. But since an SVG can be scaled indefinitely, ES creates a canvas for the SVG at the size you specify... taking the amount of VRAM it would require for a PNG of that size. >_< Otherwise we could make NBBA work just with vector :D Alas, you see the pixels from a stretched PNG. @herb_fargus would break. LOL

Used the mesh tool a lot to get the shadows and gradients. Background I threw in from photoshop.

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lilbud

Good thing I still have my PSP, Don't want my pi to explode while trying to emulate it

mattrixk

@Rookervik

No matter how large you stretch a picture, it uses the same VRAM in ES

Does that mean that if you have a small image and stretch it to fill the screen, that uses the same VRAM as if you had just displayed it at it's initial size?

eg: your Pixel theme MegaDrive console.php is 120x69, so stretching it to take up half the screen won't use any more VRAM?

Rookervik

@lilbud Pi actually does a really surprising job emulating the PSP. Overclock the Pi2 a little and with some of the games, you can get smooth 1080p playback. I know Hotshots Tennis I was able to play smooth except for some crowd cheers being choppy.

Rookervik

@mattrixk

Correct. Once an image is loaded into VRAM, that's all it will take. The images in the background on Pixel are what, 480x270? They get stretched to full screen.

You can find the same thing on the Simple theme. The wallpapers are 720p. If you reduce them in size, by a power of 2, you can actually avoid the white screen of no-ramminess. But you see the pixels since the image is stretched. In Pixel's case, that's perfect. :D

mattrixk

@Rookervik That's great news. Speaking of your Pixel theme, I've been plugging away at it, and I have something to show:

I'm contemplating making the top images smaller so you can see the background around them, or maybe moving the console image to the top-middle and making the description go full width.

As you can see I'm using all of your graphics, except for the borders. I tried creating my own backgrounds, but they just don't look as good as yours.

The Detailed view is still very much WIP:

The basic placement of everything is where it should be, now it's just tweaking metadata placement, making room for Kid-Friendly icons and recreating your background with the larger squares.

Also for some reason I'm completely unable to get the gamelist to be lowercase, even though I have forceUppercase set to 0.

Once it's all done and ready for use I'll be making a post for it so others can download it.

qrayg

@Rookervik

Awesome. I love creating realistic vector art. Here's a PS Vita I made for the OpenEmu community... 100% vector:

qrayg

@Rookervik said in Carbon Theme Suggestions:

Please think of releasing your theme for the community to use. More choices is always better.

This will probably not happen. I renamed all of the themes to scope them, pcengine is now nec-turbografx and I added a nec-tuboduo for CD based games since they should not be merged... every system has been scoped and logically named along with my rom folders so everything is consistent and appeases my OCD. So even if I did release it, it would not be usable unless people edited their es_systems.cfg to point to the scoped theme/rom folder names. I also do not want themes for PC, Apple, Amiga, etc. so I removed them. I just want home console emulation so my theme just supports what I need.

Rookervik

@mattrixk That's looking pretty slick! I hope the extra graphics on the system select don't end up going over the 128MB vram barrier. Still looks very neat!

You you might need to check several places for capitalization. ES loads the pixel.xml and each theme.xml from the system folders. The theme.xml will take priority so if the theme.xml has uppercase in the gamelist, it will overwrite the pixel.xml.

PS. Love those box art/screenshot combos!

Rookervik

@qrayg That, sir, is very pretty! Sounds like you have your hands full in the other communities. :D

I've also been thinking about the icons for the retropie menu. I'll probably try a set of "modern" icons and submit them to the devs. See if they like em. Just have to find a way to get them seen on both light and dark backgrounds, and not conflict with other themes' designs too much.

qrayg

@Rookervik Here's an example of simple clean icons (can be exported to vector too) that work on both light and dark backgrounds.

I just whipped this up in a matter of seconds. If we really spent some time on it we could make some high quality flat-ish icons that would work nice for any color scheme. This example uses transparency so it blends in with whatever color scheme is active.

Rookervik

Yeah those look nice. Transparency works fine in ES. Don't necessarily need the shadows. Seem like badges. Yeah I can make a series of those. Or something similar. They'll end up looking similar in scope to what Pipplware already has.