Progress Bars when loading/closing?
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This is probably not within the realm of possibility, since it's not really a RetroPie issue. Loading and closing EmulationStation can take a long time if you have a lot of systems installed. I get it, that's how it works. I've gotten around this for the time being by simply not scraping metadata for my games. But that's not pretty, and I like pretty. :) I just scraped everything for the first time on my new install then rebooted. Boot up was quick, but then I did a REBOOT so ES would write all the metadata into memory (or cfg files, or wherever it stores it's info). Reboot took FOREVER before it actually restarted. This got me thinking. The screen was black the entire time. We should have some kind of shutdown screen at the least that shows "Shutting Down" or "Rebooting", so you know your system is doing something. But take it a step further... why not have a progress bar during loading and closing of ES, so we can get an idea of how much longer the process will take. Simple enough idea, but probably well beyond the capabilities of a RetroPie dev. This would probably have to be a feature request for ES, and on their own GIT. But since this is the "forum of ideas", I thought I'd drop it in here. Maybe we can at least get a close out screen.
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@hansolo77 As far as I knew, this PR reduced the loading time, and this one reduced the saving metadata time on exit. Both PRs were merged about 3 months ago and maybe the RetroPie 4.1 already has these improvements. But you can try to update ES from source and see if you get some reduced time.
If you don't care about the "last played" and "times played" info, you can reduce your reboot time by disabling the "Save Metadata on Exit" option.
Oh! About your suggestion. I agree. :-) I would be OK with a simple message (it can be on console) saying "Saving metadata..." when shutting down the ES.
Cheers!
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I plan to do a simple message on exit.
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I only had the really long shut down the first time. It now only takes about 15 seconds. In fact, before I rebuilt my SD card from scratch, It usually took about 45-50 seconds to fully boot with metadata. Now it's taking around 25 seconds. So my splash screen video I'm using now takes longer to fully play than the system does to load up. Still, I think even a simple progress bar on the "EmulationStation Loading" screen would be a nice thing to have. But something like that is going to require more than displaying a simple static splash screen.
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