New Comic Book Theme!

Zigurana

TMNTturtlguy

@Zigurana @fatelvis1 and others interested

Here is the link to the 4:3 version. ComicBook 4:3 Github Link

This has been up for a couple of weeks and works well, it just is lacking updated systems and has not had all of the background images converted to the much nicer looking 720 images. Take a look at the readme for the file, it is up to date with what is in the theme.

pjft

Finally installed it - looks wonderful! :)

A comment: the Master System logo in the system view seems to have a slight border on top and left being rendered.

It's also visible here:

https://github.com/TMNTturtleguy/Comic-Book/blob/master/mastersystem/art/system.png

Other than that, looks stellar, and performs much better than the previous one, where I used to have some white screens! Well done :)

Thank you for a wonderful theme!

EDIT: I ended up getting some glGet error 505 after a while. It's not in any way related to your theme in particular, but it likely means we'll need to look into the texture loading code to see if we can track it down and fix it for good. :) If someone can successfully, consistently, replicate it, send details here or in a separate thread and mention me / @jdrassa / @fieldofcows / @Zigurana.

Cheers! :)

TMNTturtlguy

@pjft thanks for the update. I will add the master system logo to my touch ups for my next release. As for the glget errors. How many systems are you running? Have you adjusted your vram up or down? Before this update I had to adjust my vram or I would get glget errors, but with this update I have been running smooth at 100. @modmaster also tested the build on his pi several times as we developed this so I am Interested to see what others experience.

pjft

@TMNTturtlguy not a problem :)

I wouldn't worry too much about it, as it is certainly a problem with ES, and we should be fixing it anyway. It's just elusive!

I'm running a few systems but not too many - off the top of my head, maybe 20 or so?

Anyways, it happens more frequently after I launch a game and come back, for instance. Some of the backgrounds that were showing prior to that end up having a problem when loading.

My suspicion is that when loading the game and sending ES to the background, the memory manager might, if necessary, release some textures, and then when we reload we just can't find them in memory even though we assume it's there.

It's just an assumption, as I don't know a lot about that particular area of ES nor about memory management on Raspbian, so that's why I'd love to be able to consistently get ES into such a state, so that I could investigate properly and fix it.

Still, as I said, it's not a problem with your theme. This will likely happen to more themes especially as they start becoming more and more complex. :)

Syhles

@TMNTturtlguy
I'll switch to this thread then lol.

I'm not sure what system you are writing the theme on but, I work on Ubuntu and you can open the xml in firefox and it will let your know if there is any syntax errors and where they are located if you're interested. You could post the theme with the new xml here for me and I could troubleshoot.

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles I am running on a pi3 install.

You can use the Comic_book.xml. You can see in there I have a line for the system info to have the shokapow text. I wanted to apply <backgroundcolor>Ffffff99<backgroundcolor> (sorry I am on my phone so I can't get it to type exactly right. When the background color is there, it breaks old ES installs. When you remove it, old installs just ignore the font type info. @modmaster tested this for me. I wanted to make this a feature, so I added the feature lines, still didn't work. We just deleted the background color, so the color is the standard grey, Es v2.1.6rp should have shokapow text and ES v2.1.5rp or before should see standard text.

Syhles

@TMNTturtlguy
I'm pretty sure I fixed it but you would have to try it on an older es build as I don't have one also I had to move the help section of your system on comic.xml and move it to the theme.xml I'll post the code for you to test in a minute.

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles in the theme.xml? Really?

Syhles

@TMNTturtlguy
You have one sitting right next to the comic_book.xml in the main folder.

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles yes, they do different things though...the one in the folder next to the comic_book.xml is just a generic of the .xml that are loaded into each system folder. The one next to comic_book.xml does not do anything.

Syhles

@TMNTturtlguy
This code works on 2.1.6rp

This is what the system field on comic_book.xml should be left you extra code so you would have all the fields I know and more options for what you could do its commented out and you can delete it after you have it all set up like you want.

  <feature supported="carousel">
<view name="system">

	<carousel name="systemcarousel">
		<type>horizontal</type>
		<color>8d8d8d50</color>
		<logoScale>1.5</logoScale>
		<maxLogoCount>3</maxLogoCount>
	</carousel>

	<text name="systemInfo">
		<backgroundColor>8d8d8d50</backgroundColor>
		<color>000000</color>
		<fontPath>./art/Shaka_Pow.ttf</fontPath>
		<fontSize>0.035</fontSize>
	</text>

</view>
</feature>

Also any code that you want to work for the system screen on older versions of es need to have there own <view name="system"> so you'll need two <view name="system"> fields for your theme.

Edit: The forums broke my code aligment...... the feature fields have less tabs or spaces before them then the <view name="system">

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles thanks, this makes some sense now, I added the feature but not a second copy of the system info. I figured since the base files don't require any info, I wouldn't have to put a duplicate for the old versions of ES. I will test later and see if @modmaster can help test on his older version of ES.

Syhles

@TMNTturtlguy
As far as I know using the <feature supported> is the same as commenting that section out for old versions of es anything inside that will be invisible to old es, so if you want to have shaka-pow as the help font you'll either need to add system to one of the the views that already have the help code or add another <view name="system">.

Also if I optimized your code and made it simplier, would you use it?
Because no offense you could simplify some of the code and merge sections of it to make it easier to work on without losing how it looks or functions.

I'd be more the glad to help out and do it, I just don't want spend the time if you for sure aren't interested in it.

Love the theme by the way, the only reason I didn't already have it was because I was waiting until it was more done, been following the thread since it started.

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles thanks! Appreciate the kind words.

What do you have in mind as far as simplifying? This was my first theme and I started it before the theme helpers were available. The .xml was based on carbon, so I just worked from that.

As long as the theme looks and functions the same I will definetly use it if it simplifies things some.

dizmodawg

How do i add this to retropie i tried winscp but in home pi there is no .enulatiostation folder and inside that is suppose to be a themes folder. I am using retropie 4.2

Syhles

@TMNTturtlguy
It's a nice theme it deserves compliments.

As far as the simplifying goes, I was just going for example the help section is currently in three different places in the theme and I'm pretty sure the code is identical in each place it's just one is in the system section, one is in the basic section, the detailed and video section share the last one.

I was going to merge the help into only one instance instead of three and just generally tidy things up.

dizmodawg

Ok i turned on show hidden files and it works but where do i place the game videos at?

TMNTturtlguy

@dizmodawg there should be a folder within .emulationstation named themes. If there is not a folder named themes, create this folder and place the theme within that folder.

TMNTturtlguy

@Syhles Sure, if it is not to much work and the theme looks the same that would be great! I am side tracked right now, I was backing up my current build to my computer so i could make some new changes to it, and when i put it back into the pi, it wouldn't boot. Put it back into the computer and it says it is write protected.....spent the last 2 hours trying to salvage the card, i was finally able to break the write protection and reformat, but now it errors out about 2 minutes into writing an image to it....Not to happy tonight.