Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas

jacobfk20

This update is mostly small things towards stability and clean up. It changes how Tiles are aligned so if things aren't appearing correctly for you after updating to this build you may need to remove grid_margin, or change it slightly (It acts more like padding now) If this change breaks your design, especially if beyond repair, please let me know. If you use a negative grid_margin it will be broken and you may want to wait for the next update.

Here is a quick list of noticeable things:

Fixed bottom row tiles disappearing when selected from a diagonal angle.
Grid no longer renders tiles when exiting that system. (this fixes problems where tiles would overlap in other system views)
Folders are now fully functional. @lilbud
Added an icon just for folders
Tiles will now be perfectly aligned inside the specified grid size on both left and right sides. @herb_fargus
Under certain conditions a segfault can be encountered, which is more likely in a system with folders, if a user quick changes a system while moving the cursor and the grid is unloading tile textures. This would throw the loaded texture list off and would cause the dynamic loader to unload textures that don't exist. This has been fully fixed and the main reason this update took so long.

As always there are x86 and arm builds available on my drive.

lilbud

@jacobfk20 Is scrolling titles and descriptions working on grid view? Because nothing will scroll. Could it just be the Material Theme itself?

jacobfk20

@lilbud I have never noticed the description wasn't updating. I'll get that fixed. Title scrolling may be a way off.

pompitousofseth

@jacobfk20 I've been having trouble trying to get your version of emulationstation to work. I have copied your file from your drive, changed the permissions and copied the material.xml file to the material theme folder. Once I load ES it dumps me out the the terminal saying "Segmentation Error" Am I installing this wrong? Do I need to be on the latest RetroPie Install? Do you have instructions on how to exactly install your version? Any help would be great! Thanks!

jacobfk20

@pompitousofseth You didn't need to copy that material theme over. I just put that in there for a one time thing and I will now remove it. Go update your themes, especially material, in the retropie setup script and get the newest versions. If it still crashes on boot then please send me a copy of the es_log so I can see what is happening. located at ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt

pompitousofseth

@jacobfk20 Okay I will give it a try and let you know how it goes. I have to reload a backup first.

jacobfk20

@pompitousofseth You can just launch the setup script outside of ES.

pompitousofseth

@jacobfk20 I did something else to my pi, that stopped it from booting. I make regular backups so I can revert to before I changed things!

pompitousofseth

@jacobfk20 That did the trick. I have one question though. Changing the grid size (small, normal, big) doesn't change the grid size. It that in the theme files or is it in the code for ES itself?

jacobfk20

@pompitousofseth glad to hear it worked. Grid size must be supported by the theme. It'll default to 4x2 if no size is defined. Will be adding defaults for big and small some time.

lilbud

I updated the material theme, I'm slowly getting back into working on it. The selected background is solid and will match the system color in due time. And all metadata is added on the sidebar. Description still doesn't scroll. But who ever wants to test, (or help me apply these changes to all the systems besides Game Boy.) Just update through the setup script

jacobfk20

@lilbud I currently have the description scrolling. It will be in the next update I post. I will also update and check out your theme here in a few. :)

pompitousofseth

@lilbud looks great, one suggestion though, add color to the md_rating field in the material.xml file so the stars match the metadata text.

Also what did you need help with? I've edited all of the files so the colors match.

jacobfk20

Time for a new update! This one mostly focused on fixing boxart aspect ratio from being broken.

Boxart Ratio scaling is fixed (expanding and shrinking)
Grid Tiles no longer break boxart aspect ratio (Maybe by a few pixels in some scenarios)
Grid_margin works better. (note: Increasing margin will shrink Tiles so they will fit into the defined Grid size)
md_description will now scroll
Increased texture loading speed. (this could cause slowdown. Let me know)
Missing boxart icon is now changeable in theme. See "missing_boxart" in GRIDTHEME for info.

You can grab the update from the drive. (ARM and x86)

lilbud

@jacobfk20 Well, good job. You single handedly screwed up my theme. The right side bar no longer exists, grid view is back to how it was when you first released this mod. And what ever you did to ninepatch gives be the basic white theme for ES

jacobfk20

@lilbud I just updated to your latest theme and you have a <color> property in a rating element. ES, vanilla or this mod, does not support <color> in a rating element. Remove that and it'll work just fine.

lilbud

@jacobfk20 But what about ninepatch? I get a wall of text on the console about ninepatch. Does the gamelist have a right sidebar with the metadata?

pompitousofseth

@jacobfk20 do you have the last version in your drive. My theme I made doesn't work at all. :(

Did you get rid of the small, normal, big grid sizes? I was using the big size to change the number of tiles.

Also I get the color error for the ninepatch elements, but I can't see anything in the themes anyways.

jacobfk20

@pompitousofseth I do have older versions on the drive but I think only I can access them. I didn't remove small, big, or large. Also, this is kinda weird but in order to have backwards comparability with vanilla ES use image instead of ninepatch if you use the <color> property. Can you send me your theme so I can see what is happening?

@lilbud I didn't touch any theme options for Grid Tiles so I don't know why that's happening. I'll get it ironed out.
Here is what your theme looks like for me after removing the <color> on rating:

dudleydes

@jacobfk20 Thank you for the latest version of your ES grid view binary. I have tested it with systems with portrait (Atart 2600, NES) and landscape (SNES) box art. The aspect ratio is faithfully maintained.

I am having problems with the Arcade system. If I leave it for a minute or so, ES quits to the console with Floating Point Exception error. I can't type at the command line so I have reboot via SSH.

For the Arcade system, I am using wheel art images which are 400 pixels wide (though three are not). The heights do vary, though, from 31 pixels to 175. Could these variations be causing the issue?

es_log.txt has the line lvl1: OptionListComponent too narrow!. Could this be relevant?

I did not have any of these issues with the last binary you built last week.