Epic Noir - Dark Mode Theme

nil06

Did anyone call my name? :)

I am thrilled to be seeing such great response to this new project.
From the initial idea by Nico to the final development it took a lot of work but the result is worth it.

Among other things, one of the things that I'm personally quite proud about is the optimization of the theme. With the old Chicuelo theme I found that it was very heavy on the little Pi, and I wanted to try to optimize this one to run as fast as possible.
As a result, all the code has been written from scratch and although it is fairly graphics-heavy, all the images have been optimized using algorithms to reduce their sizes (some by even 70%), while keeping the image quality as high as possible.

As @chicuelo said, we are waiting to hear your comments about it! :)
Hope you enjoy.

SP

@chicuelo So, it's designed just for retropie? Because it doesn't work properly on my pc. :(
Pics:

I restarted emulationstation and the saturn background appeared. I restarted it again and it disappeared.

It appears that it has to do with my laptop's display settings. The recommended display setting for my laptop is 125%. If I leave it at 125% then all themes won't fill the entire screen, but it will properly display all of the artwork. Pic below:

I have to lower the display setting to 100% so they all cover the entire screen.
It's on my end. I apologize.

Mr. Berlin

@SP try to download it again , theme's folder size should me 44.50 mg

SP

@Mr-Berlin I'll give it a shot. The one I downloaded is only 18mb.

Mr. Berlin

@SP yeah i don't know what wrong with github today it . download speed is 17 kb and i hate that

SP

I re-downloaded it, but the zip file was the same size.

With my display settings at 100% every system background except for the nintendo 64 displayed correctly.

Edit: I added more games and now every system I have does not display the background.

I changed my display settings back to 125% and the theme works properly.

Mr. Berlin

@chicuelo @lilbud , as always sorry for my bad English :" but the theme is a peace of art , i like artworks so mush , how it all blend together and how it's look like so gentle and classy , it really shows that it take alot of work a time so thank you for both of you

for cons , it miss a lot of systems like cps1,cps2,cps3, Naomi, Atomiswave, satellaview, sufami, amigacd32, PC-88 , PC-98 , Sharp X1 , odyssey2 and videopac+
i hope u can add these in the future
the dots panel on right which change when you change system , i have ocd and it's make me really angry , i hope they move with sequence and not being a static part of system art
At last it's a great theme , easily one of the best so a lot of thank for you both and keep the good work up

chicuelo

@Mr-Berlin Hey, more systems will be added on a future!
The dot indicator works fine, you just need to rename the images properly, if your first system is mame, you have to rename the indicator with the first white dot as mame, the second as your second system and so.
In my build I have 16 systems, retropie, power and favorites so they match perfect with the indicators.

chicuelo

@SP I had some font issues on my pi when I was testing, If I set a big size it will not display. By chance can you change Emulationstation vRam to 150 mb? On my Pi3b I have splitted memory to 512 mb and increased ES vram. That made all display fine

chicuelo

@SP I think those are font size issues. Lets ask @nil06 that he has more knowledge than me on this

SP

@chicuelo Unfortunately, it did not work. I set it to 150 and restarted emulation station, but did not work. Then I set it to 600mb and it did not work.

chicuelo

@SP The theme goes fluid? are you using pc o raspberry? How many systems do you have?
I think the issue is caused by the fonts not by the performance of the pi, let me make some research. In my build it goes flawlessly

SP

@chicuelo I'm on PC.

I have NES, SNES, GBA, GB, GBC, PS1, N64 and Saturn.

Mr. Berlin

@SP @chicuelo when i download theme from GitHub using zip method that happens for me so i double checked and i found that downloaded zip was only 17 mg so i open Github and found that the theme is 44.50 mg , i downloaded it using git clone and it works for me

i try to attached screenshot but it tells me the max size of photo should be 1 mg ,

chicuelo

@Mr-Berlin @SP I will check with Nik what's happening, we both have the theme working fine on our builds.
BTW replace this text on your SNES xml. When I have size troubles I reduced a bit and worked fine.

<theme>
<formatVersion>4</formatVersion>
<include>./../theme.xml</include>

<view name="basic, detailed, video, grid">
  <text name="nameLabel" extra="true">
    <text>Super Nintendo</text>
  </text>
</view>    

<view name="system">
  <text name="sys_line1" extra="true">
    <text>Super</text>
    <fontSize>0.048</fontSize>
    <origin>0 0</origin>
    <pos>0.12 0.142</pos>
    <size>0 0</size>
  </text>
  <text name="sys_line2" extra="true">
    <text>Nintendo</text>
    <fontSize>0.18</fontSize>
    <origin>0 0</origin>
    <pos>0.12 0.16</pos>
    <size>0 0</size>
</text>
  <text name="shortdescription" extra="true">
   <text>1990  ·  16-bit Console</text>
  </text>
  <text name="longdescription" extra="true">
   <text>Nintendo's second home console introduced advanced graphics and sound capabilities compared with other systems at the time</text>
  </text>
 </view>
</theme>

Mr. Berlin

@chicuelo yeah works fine for me too

chicuelo

@Mr-Berlin then we will have to update some xml files, maybe now you notice the name is lefter than the other info

cobragra

This is a really pretty theme, well done! My only request would be how can I make the game list fit better on 4:3? The longer game names don't fit. Can I make the font smaller or give the list more horizontal space? Thanks!

chicuelo

@cobragra its a 16:9 theme, so it wont be well displayed on 4:3 screens. Maybe in a future we make a 4:3 version

nil06

Let's see if I can help out a bit here. :)

First of all, one important note to @Mr-Berlin and everyone: @lilbud had nothing to do with this theme. I don't know why he keeps being credited for creating the theme, but the theme was built by me, based on Nico's @chicuelo amazing original idea and with him supplying the artwork and testing the various versions and it would be nice to have proper credit for one's work.

Ok, moving on to the various questions:

@SP the theme works on ALL systems. Pis, PCs, etc. I developed the theme on a laptop running Linux and Nico has been using it on his Pi without issues.
If the theme is not running properly, then the likely problem would either be resolution (the theme is meant for 16:9 screens), or a low memory issue.
(Simply go in RetroPie settings menu and increase the VRAM to 150-160 MB)
As I mentioned earlier, this theme has been significantly improved from the past with extensive optimization of images etc, so in theory it should run quite fast without needed much VRAM.
@cobragra everything on the theme is customizable. If you want to change a long system name (eg Sony Playstation 2) simply go into the relevant folder (eg ps2) and open the theme.xml file. Simply change the system name on sys_line1 and sys_line2 to whatever you like and it will appear when you reload your Retropie. Also, fonts etc can all be made smaller by changing the main theme.xml.
The theme can be modified to run on a 4:3 screen. If there is enough demand I can work on it.
@Mr-Berlin the proper theme size should be around 17 MB zipped and 19 MB unzipped. I just checked my GitHub page and the sizes are correct. Where did you see that 44.5 MB figure?
About the dots panel on the left, as Nico already said if you want the dots to move in sequence you simply go into the indicator folder and rename the dots you want to use for your particular systems.
(The theme has been set up for the dots to move in sequence if you have ALL the available systems installed)

Thanks for the good words guys and keep the comments and ideas coming! :)