Pixel Theme
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@mattrixk I'm planning on changing it so you can use the old logos and I use the new ones. :P
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I've been toying around with the theme just to see if I can teach myself it. I'm having a hell of a time getting the videos to appear in the upper right hand box and the game box art to show up in the lower right hand side. I figured doing it would be much easier, I was wrong.
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@ebtalk I believe when a video is found, the box art is ignored. But I can't be sure until I play around with it more, myself.
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@Rookervik said in Pixel Theme:
I'm planning on changing it so you can use the old logos and I use the new ones. :P
That's what I was thinking of. You've put so much effort into the new logos, it doesn't feel right to update MetaPixel to use them too.
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Game & Watch had quite a small logo. Fixed that up...
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Finally finished the logos. Took days. Some were completely re-drawn.
Added Mac Plus system. Now just checking to see if I can do something with those tetris blocks that won't make CrazySpence cry like a 2 year old.
Oh, and add video previews.
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@Rookervik awesome. Can't wait to see the finished product!
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Got video previews working. I don't think I want to add marquees. Trying to decide if I want to combine the metadata version and the regular version, or keep them separate. They shouldn't be hard to just keep as they are. Adding video previews makes the XML a heck of a lot larger... but it still seems to run just as fast. So that's good.
Toying with removing the oldschool "3d" effect of the backgrounds. Might make it look a little better. I don't know. Cast your vote.
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@Rookervik Do you have an example of what it'd look like without it?
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@ebtalk That screenshot shows the background without the highlight effect "old school 3d". Instead of the 3D effect, it just has black lines between each square.
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@Rookervik i think i prefer the 3d effect. one thing that might be cool is making those background colour/shade variations as tetris blocks :)
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@dankcushions Hahaha, tetris is what I was trying to avoid. The entire theme is a big tetris game :D
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@Rookervik I kind of agree. It's very tetris-y
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@Rookervik I like the 2D backgrounds. It makes the new 3Dish logos really stand out. I'm curious what the Detailed View background would look like though.
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Turns out that ES's scaling kind of makes single-pixel lines look like poop. So I wont' be changing the background to this:
I do have this for a replacement for the tetris crap. Don't mind the metadata... it's not set up in this hacked version of Pixel. But it does show the background, and the colored lines in the background that are different per system.
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@Rookervik I prefer the latest one "genesis" screen than tetris effect, seems more clean, but it's just my opinion, like we say in my country, for tastes... colors... that means that if something likes to me, not necessary likes to other.
But i doesn't like that blue semi-circles at sides of gamelist, for me, everything else is perfect.
Your new version of the pixel theme still have video support?
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@Nismo I might just update the logos, and ship it with the logos and video support and call it good enough. I like these new screens, but I'd probably need to release it as Pixel2 instead of changing the current pixel to this.
Video support is already in the pixel update I am working on. Took me a while to find the forum post saying you need to set background as a default object and not an extra. How video was implemented is kind of crazy, and not really documented very well, yet.
And I haven't updated ES on my pi yet. I'm really scared to update since I have my system set up the way I want. Any time I update something, something else breaks. So I'd like to get another SD card and put the newer ES on that and test out the theme there.
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@Rookervik You can test the theme on windows. That's what i do. I don't have retropie.
Also i think you can create an "image" of your retropie install to restore it if you need.
And yes, i think it my be named pixel 2, and keep the old one and the new one.
About the theming I think it's easy enough and well documented here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5823/looking-for-testers-for-es-video-preview-on-raspberry-pi/2?page=1
And yes any extra images will be on top of video. Why you need background to be extra?
Also if you need some help you can always ask to me and don't loose a lot of time looking for posts. why you didn't ask to me? I'm glad if I can help...
Happy new year.
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@Rookervik said in Pixel Theme:
How video was implemented is kind of crazy
fieldofcows here who implemented the video theming. Haha - yes it seems a bit crazy doesn't it?!
However, it is how it is for a reason - I wanted to put the video and marquee tags into the 'detail' view but the way ES works is that they would then be mandatory in the detail view, i.e. if you don't want to support video in your theme but your gamelist includes video tags then the video would start playing even if your theme didn't support video (you would get the sound even if the video is off the screen). Hence the new 'video' view and all the extra work theme makers have to endure.
Same goes for the background object. The render order is fixed in ES and not themeable so in order to support translucent images on top of video you need to carefully configure the background and extra images.
I say this here in this thread because as an expert theme designer I welcome your suggestions on how to improve the theming of video (or anything else for that matter) because I have my own ideas but would love to hear other suggestions. If you can think of any improvements then let me know - maybe in the original video preview thread.
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@fieldofcows Ah, I didn't realize some of those points. The fact that background needed to have 'extra="true"' removed boggled me. Because themes will not load if you do not set the background to extra in the basic and detailed views.
It wasn't too hard to get things working after I found that bit of information.
@Nismo If you check the screenshots, you will see that I do use the Windows version of ES to create and test my themes. But that isn't always the best way to make sure a theme works. Windows doesn't care about the letter case, while Linux cares very much. So I could point to files that wouldn't work on Linux, but they do work on Windows. Also, this is not necessarily the same version of ES that the RetroPie fork is. So I need to make sure to test it on the pi before I release it.
As far as screwing up my retropie build... my card is a 64 gig card. And it's the only 64 gig card I have. But you are right, I should back it up. I just hate to use 64 gigs to back it up. :D
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