Announcing Pegasus Frontend

tronkyfran

Well, my theme is not progressing a lot, sadly. I'm trying to get my head around QML programming but Im afraid its something to spend a lot of time. Im not being capable to understand the inner workings of the netflix theme(Im using that as a base for learning), probably because I overestimated my programming skills, and its a bit depressing.
Its a pity because I got to make blend modes work(separatedly) and finally got to load a 3d model textured, but damn, I wish I had more time to dive in this.
So, if someone with better programming skills wants to lend a hand, or team up with me on making a theme for this would be awesome.
The possibilities are ENDLESS, and I think this frontend deserves a lot more attention and love than its given right now.

herb_fargus

@tronkyfran said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

So, if someone with better programming skills wants to lend a hand, or team up with me on making a theme for this would be awesome.

If only I had better programming skills ;) perhaps one day... Might be helpful to have a mock-up/proof of concept so people have an idea of what you're going for with your theme idea

tronkyfran

I suppose that would be nice!!!!, I can even make an animated mockup if thats useful. I cannot program but I do can design :P jejeje. Ok, Ill go that router, lets see if I can inspire some computer wizard :D

fluffypillow

@omnija Sure, that's a good idea. I'm working on improving the look and feel at the moment though, so if there'd be a new video, I'd like to show that too in it when it's done :)

@tronkyfran I should really write that theming guide one of these days... Something that might help with the Flixnet theme is to follow the commits from the beginning in chronological order. The theme is not the most beginner-friendly (like, there's vertical axis that modifies horizontal axes and such), but I've tried to create commits that are more or less clean and implement only one thing. There's indeed some learning curve, but yeah after that you can do pretty much anything with it :)

AndersHP

Got my entire keyboard mapping arranged to work both with ES and Pegasus now, so I can begin some proper testing. 3 questions:

I tested FBA games, but had to move the images to the rom/media folder, since I guess Pegasus doesn't read the subfolders in the downloaded_images folder? (that's where UXMLS places them, in this example home/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/fba)
What about the other metadata, i.e. the games description? These doesn't show up for me.
Is it really true that every photo from UXMLS has to be renamed, in order to match the supported suffixes? That's a lot of work...

Darksavior

@andershp Unfortunately, there is no scraper that's specially made for Pegasus. I just made it so:

For boxart/game description:
I scraped what I could to get box art. You can use whatever scraper, Pegasus will read it. I used UXS on my pc and made the gamelist.xml point to my usb stick since I'm storing my games there. Doing that gets me boxart/descriptions in ES and Pegasus. Some games no scraper will see so I had to look them up manually. A proper gamelist.xml is required if you want boxart/descriptions. The -image.jpg boxart it scrapes are in home/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/yoursystem

For logo/screenshot:
I'm sure you can get the gamelist.xml to show logo and screenshot and whatnot, but it's where I got tired of scraping, and would probably need to do the xml manually, which I'm not doing. I used UXS again, ignoring the xml it made, I just want the logo/screenshot art. I used a batch renamer on my pc and I renamed the -image.jpg files to -logo.jpg, scraping again to rename to -screenshot.jpg and stuck those in home/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/yoursystem and called it a day.

My results are:
ES shows boxart/descriptions
Pegasus shows boxart/descriptions/logo/screenshot (the one that covers half the screen).I think video previews are still broken so I'm not using them. You can also exit Pegasus to the terminal to see what gamelist.xml's it's loading.

tronkyfran

@fluffypillow Yeah, I can see the potencial to do almost anything and its a Big pro. Im sure that after you make(if you find time) that tutorial people is going to make pegasus shine even more. Meanwhile Ill do as you say and take a look at those commits. Thx a lot for your work again!!

fluffypillow

Aand here's the weekly changelog! Continuing with the UI changes from last week, the Settings menu got a complete redesign, and changing languages and themes should be faster. There's also a new fullscreen mode setting for desktop users. The redesign is not yet done, I'll likely do some fine tuning next week. I've also copied some of the "documentations" scattered around the tread into the wiki; will turn them into proper pages eventually.
In addition we've reached alpha3+100, so I've reset the counter and Pegasus is now in Alpha 4.

AndersHP

@darksavior Thanks for the guide. I just cannot get it working. Everything looks nice in EmulationStation, but Pegasus doesn't show descriptions and only some (very few) artworks.

When exiting Pegasus, I can see the gamelists it reads, and when I compared the gamelist for games that work and doesn't and cannot find any difference. I can also see that there is descriptions in the gamelist, and I renamed the artwork to <gamename>.jpg and <gamename>-logo.jpg (both the files in downloaded-images, and in the gamelist). I can get images to work if I copy them to roms folders under media subfolder, but that still doesn't add the description.

And as mentioned, everything works in ES.

This is probably getting too specific and off topic, so if anyone are willing to take a look at my game lists, maybe I can mail them to you?

Darksavior

@andershp Try the latest version. Alpha 4.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

If it still doesn't work, feel free to open an issue so we can discuss what could be the problem.

Alpha 4 didn't work, so I opened an issue on GitHub, with photodocumentation of filenames, gamelist references, etc.

Darksavior

@andershp Just by taking a glance at your gamelist.xml, your boxart doesn't have -image at its end. UXS and sselph's scrapers do -image by default. Looking at your ES pic, it looks like you used that combo box art of boxart/screenshot/logo and not the "default" of just box art. Maybe that's the problem. Not sure what else you might've altered so descriptions and the rest of the art aren't showing.

Try what I said in my previous post: Scrape JUST the boxart and not a combo of pics of what you've done.

It might also be a pegasus problem on reading the xml too.

AndersHP

@darksavior Thanks for the screenshots. I renamed the files and gamelist manually to get rid of the -image part. That's all I did. I will try again, following your example more closely, but I don't see what difference it will make, although maybe Pegasus fails because of the code in marquee and video areas in my Gamelist.

BTW: is this the right place to discuss or should I open a new thread if I still cannot get it working?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP thanks for the screenshots! Turns out there was a bug in handling the <path> tag in Pegasus, and so the absolute and $HOME-relative paths didn't match the actual games. Just pushed up the fix, should work fine now in the latest version (alpha4-2).

fluffypillow

Also a summary of the asset loading, to make it hopefully less confusing.

Pegasus is searching for assets in two places:

[rom directory]/media/, where the role of the files (eg. "game logo") is indicated by the suffix (eg. -logo). If a file has no suffix (that is, simply [romname].png/jpg), it is assumed to be the front box art (or the video for video files). -image is not a recognized suffix (I find it somewhat redundant calling an image file "image"), but you can replace it with whatever you want with any batch renamer tool or the linux rename program (see @Darksavior's nice guide ~10 posts earlier for scraping tips).
if there are no matching files in the media directory, then the <image>, <video>, and <marquee> tags of the ES2 gamelist are also checked (again, <image> is used as the box art). No other/custom tags are checked for assets, and downloaded_images is not scanned either.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@AndersHP Just pushed up the fix, should work fine now in the latest version (alpha4-2).

Booya! This totally did the trick! Awesome work.
Although I still cannot get logos to show, unless I copy them to the media folder and rename -marquee to -logo.. Another bug, or should I scrape like @Darksavior does?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP no, that's normal, the default theme uses the -logo files for logos only. You can rename the files and replace -marquee with -logo in the gamelists, to make it work with both Pegasus and ES.

fluffypillow

No big changes this week due to lack of time. I've fixed the ES2 XML parsing bug (above), and also updated the translation files.

AndersHP

Got an excellent Pegasus setup, after running Universal XML Scraper with boxart, "wheel" art and videos. Only thing I had to do, was to rename -marquee images as @fluffypillow mentioned above, and in the same manner rename -marquee references in the gamelists. I used Bulk Rename Utility in the downloaded_images folder and Notepad C++ replace function to do this. Pegasus looks excellent.

A few bugs:

A few times I have encountered an issue with portrait-boxart previews to suddenly looking square, cutting off the bottom of all images.
One time I have had Pegasus quit to terminal after I exited a game. Had to do a hard reset. Error message on the screen was "Segmentation fault".
When exiting Pegasus I have 10-20 error messages saying something like "No volume control". Forgive me as I forget the words exactly.

A few requests:

~~I'd love for Pegasus to support "page up/down". It takes a long time to scroll in large Collections of games. Maybe a way to scroll through letters also (without having a keyboard attached).~~ Already on the Github, sorry.
~~I love the easy way to filter by favorites, but cannot get around to adding games as favorites. Perhaps this could be done with a buttonpress?~~ Already on the Github, sorry.
In the more "nice to have" department, I'd like the code to be hidden upon launching a game. In ES it jumps from frontend to launching image directly to the game (and back when exiting). That makes the experience more seamless.

Apart from this, I think I'm about to change my bootup sequence to Pegasus permanently. It's just great! Good Work!

fluffypillow

Sorry, no updates this week either (job/other projects). I'll likely have some more time next week though!