YARMan Web (BETA)

herb_fargus

Looks brilliant. I'll have to find time test the latest changes though I'll defer to Jools for the setup script integration.

daeks

@herb_fargus said in Rebranded: YARMan Web (former RetroPie WebGUI) + Metadata Editor (BETA):

Looks brilliant. I'll have to find time test the latest changes though I'll defer to Jools for the setup script integration.

Great :) - As a side note: Currently on each save in the metadata module, a backup copy will be done for the gamelist.

General Questions:

What would be the location for videos / marquees? For the time being I am uploading everything to the emulationstation/downloaded_images location.
Whats the purpose of the thumbnail tag in the gamelist?

herb_fargus

@daeks

Seems like some people put them in diff folders /videos and /marquees but I think people use screenscraper to generate the gamelists on a PC, I'm not sure if we have defined a standard for retropie

If you note the scraper module they can be put in the default location or in the ROM folder (which I'm more partial to as it means I only have to scrape once and they are in my backups with the ROMs) so it may be worth considering a setting for which folders/paths it saves?

I don't know I thought it was to scrape a lower res image faster for the pi as it doesn't have the specs of a PC and full res images can slow it down?

pjft

I'll second that.

I certainly have the videos and marquees in a completely separate folder, for organization's sake. Also, as I load things from a USB, I don't want to store them in the SD card - which is the where the default scraper folder stores things.

I know it's yet another small thing, but I would not object to having the user set the folders in a preferences tab. My structure currently is:

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/%SYSTEM_NAME%
/home/pi/RetroPie/videos/%SYSTEM_NAME%
/home/pi/RetroPie/marquees/%SYSTEM_NAME%
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/%SYSTEM_NAME%/images (as this was how it was by default, and I'm too lazy to redo all the gamelists by hand).

I suppose I left the images folder insider the systems, but this way it's easier to manage. If I want, at any point in time, to have a lighter setup I can just ignore the videos folder, for instance.

daeks

@pjft As I am not fixed on that as well, I will revert the path to be a common config parameter. I will move that to the fields definition itself on the next change with default pointing to emulationstation/downloaded_images.

Then its up to the installation later on which path will be used for uploading new media objects (common name I used for that).
Currently it is "static" in the defaults/config.json for all media objects (later on for each field with type "upload" in defaults/fields.json).

daeks

@pjft That would be my proposal for it: PR #21 Commit Diff

daeks

Anyhow, as the project progresses, I have applied some "standards" to it. The master branch is now protected and changes can only be applied by pull request if they are reviewed and checked against a modified version of the PSR2 coding standard.

Beside contributors, I think it would be nice to have some persons in place for testing changes and reviewing pull requests beside me before merging them.

J.Beau

Just reinstalled YARMan. Looking good! It doesn't display any emulators/roms at the moment. Is that correct?

daeks

@J.Beau yes you are right... I am testing with apache started with default "pi", but retropie starts the integrated server as root - sorry didnt know that :( - I updated the install script. Please retry it.

J.Beau

@daeks Worked! Just tested it with some Atari 2600 games. Started with an empty gamelist.xml. I was able to change one name, it doesn't seem to save any other changes after that. Uploading images doesn't work btw. Also, it doesn't use the gamelist.xml/images in the roms directory. They are also listed as roms. Not a problem, because I can move things over easily. I was doing everything manually anyway :) This looks very promising!

daeks

@J.Beau have you tested it only with safari? is it possible to try the upload in another browser?

I will test it with an empty gamelist :) haven't tried that. my fault.

gamelist.xml can be in the rom directory as well or have you changed anything? I am only aware of /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists as location. Interesting to see that images from the rom folder are listed as there is some extension white listing.

J.Beau

@daeks Tried it only with Safari. Emulationstation also reads gamelist.xml from the roms folder (/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/atari2600/gamelist.xml for example). I use this directory more because it is easier to move over romsets and their images and gamelist files :)

daeks

@J.Beau I believe the JQuery fileupload plugin has an issue with supporting safari. I will try to handle that and properly check compability.

Beside that, I have uploaded a fix for the empty gamelist issue. I missed the "new entry" method in the save call :)

Thanks for the clarification for the gamelist location. Currently it is "hardcoded" in a config file to emulationstation/gamelists. It can be modified later on.

herb_fargus

@daeks

So just to clarify this whole gamelist thing:

ES looks for gamelists in:

[SYSTEM_PATH]/gamelist.xml

~/.emulationstation/gamelists/[SYSTEM_NAME]/gamelist.xml

/etc/emulationstation/gamelists/[SYSTEM_NAME]/gamelist.xml

Image/video/marquee paths can be anywhere as long as they are specified in the XML

I'd have too look again at the scrapers to see where they default to

daeks

@herb_fargus thx. where exactly is system_path? in the rom folder?

herb_fargus

@daeks I'm pretty sure it's just the ROM path/home/pi/retropie/roms/system

J.Beau

@daeks said in Rebranded: YARMan Web (former RetroPie WebGUI) + Metadata Editor (BETA):

Beside that, I have uploaded a fix for the empty gamelist issue. I missed the "new entry" method in the save call :)

Works now! Awesome! I'll test uploading with another browser tomorrow :)

Arcuza

@daeks If you need free LAMP hosting (from a Azure Stack licensed data center) for a cloud service, maybe I can help. I would love to see community interaction and game recommendations based on rom set and ratings.

daeks

@Arcuza I dont think so. It is a local installation with some connections to the internet (reading retropie news, scraping, etc.).

@pjft / @herb_fargus For the time being I have changed the gamelist.xml search mechanism. I looks in the rom folder first and after that in the emulationstation/gamelists folder.

Nevertheless with the implementation of SQLite, I will change the whole gamelist/rom behavior:

Romlist will be parsed to internal SQLite database on first startup
Gamelist will be parsed to internal SQLite database on first emulator select
Changes will be saved into internal SQLite database instead of the gamelist file directly
New button "Sync" will update/import the gamelist.xml/roms to the database (in case of any external changes)
New button "Export to" will trigger a save to the gamelist.xml with some kind of dialog to be able to select which fields should be exported

Beside increasing the performance for large romsets, another example would be that users are able to maintain all metadata fields like image AND video at the same time, but can choose time by time if they want to include for video tag in the gamelist.xml or not.

Arcuza

@daeks In your web front, people would be able to set game rating and emulator compability. If we would be able to collect that information from all users into one single location together with background data like times played, time spent, days since last played, emulator used we would have a super great database were we could find issues and make game recommendations to users.

I love data mining and I have already written a recommendation algorithm that could be used for that purpose.

And it would be perfect to use the same authentication (login) as for this forum.

I just cannot see why we're not capitalizing on this opportunity.