Announcing Pegasus Frontend

[fluffypillow]

@GeekOB Actually I do plan spending one of these weeks with creating themes (gotta show the power of Pegasus!) but then always end up working on things less visual. Please bear with me until then :)

In other news, I've changed the URL of some pages in the documentation (in case someone has links/bookmarks to them). Also rearranged some contents and added a few new pages too.

[fluffypillow]

Yet another announcement, keyboard keys will likely change in the next release. Currently the game details panel is opened with Ctrl and the filter panel with Shift. I'd like to free these keys to avoid interference with eg. text editing, so instead the new keys would be I (as in info) and F (as in filter/find) instead. Would this cause issues for anyone?

[herb_fargus]

@fluffypillow these would just be deafults no? Are. There any plans to be able to configure menu controls like with ES?

[fluffypillow]

@herb_fargus yup, just the defaults... except you can't change from these defaults yet :) There are plans to also make keyboard keys configurable, it just haven't got implemented yet.

[EctoOne]

@fluffypillow I hope custom controls are not too far away. My cursor up key is broken and that's what's why I haven't spent much time with Pegasus. Using a virtual keyboard is just annoying sometimes.

[herb_fargus]

@fluffypillow yep sounds good to me. Defaults don't really matter to me if they can be changed.

[GeekOB]

@fluffypillow Do you plan on supporting subfolder structure for the media directory as created by Skraper?
Examples:
<gamedir>/media/images
<gamedir>/media/wheel
<gamedir>/media/marquee
<gamedir>/media/steamgrid
etc

I used to scrape with Universal XML Scraper V2 but I switched to Skraper as I like the UI and process management better, but it doesn't use (to my knowledge) the <game>-<suffix>.jpg format

Thanks!

[fluffypillow]

@geekob yeah I really should add support for that. It's a pain opening directories with several thousand assets...

There's one corner case I'm afraid of is how should assets be recognized for games in subdirectories. Like, let's say I have /game.rom and /subdir/game.rom. Then, when checking for assets and there's a /media/game.png and /media/subdir/game.png, it's clear which asset belongs to which game. With subfolder support for media, there could be files like /media/whatever/something/game.png -- to which of the games should this asset belong then?

Of course, there's also the choice of making some drastic changes like replacing the whole logic with something entirely different/new. I'm open to ideas/comments about this topic too.

[GeekOB]

@fluffypillow I understand your concern, I'm not sure if that is the case with Skraper though.
EmulationStation displays the assets correctly, I don't see why Pegasus wouldn't?

Skraper defaults to <gamedir> then creates a media folder with subfolders for the different types of media, all the files within those folders have the same name as the rom file.
For example:

arcade/
├─ game1.rom
├─ game2.rom
├─ game3.rom
└─ media/
.....└─ images/ (this folder content is actually being recognized by Pegasus)
.........├─game1.jpg
.........├─ game2.jpg
.........└─ game3.jpg
.....└─ wheel/
..........├─game1.jpg
..........├─ game2.jpg
..........└─ game3.jpg

Would this pattern match all games/platforms in your experience?

[fluffypillow]

@geekob So I was thinking a bit more about this issue...

The way asset searching implemented currently is to go trough the files in media and decide the asset's type based on the additional suffix, and the game it belongs to based on the hierarchy of the files, which matches the game dir's.

The way you propose is to have a layer or directories for each asset type under media, decide the assets's type based on which of these "main directories" the file is, and the game based on the hierarchy inside each of these main directories.

Both ways are fine on their own, with different pros and cons. Mixing them will likely not end up well though, in my opinion, as well as being error prone and way too many corner cases to take care of. So we should choose one then; I think

• The first one is easier to manage per-game, as all the assets for an game are in the same directory, so you can select/move/edit them together. It is plain simple to use (ie. drop into media and done) and the files usually clearly match exactly one game. On the other hand, the suffixes can be annoying/ugly and not always clearly decideable (eg. things like when a game is called as a suffix). The media dir is also unorganized and can end up with a large amount of files (also taking more time to open).
• The second one is better organized, with the asset subdirs and the hierarchy in them looking up games is also easy and always clear. The suffixes don't clutter the file names, so loading times could be a tiny amount faster (the suffix guesswork can be removed). On the other hand if I want to modify all files for a game (eg. because I renamed the rom), I have to visit each asset dir one by one. The files also have the same name in the different directories so they can't be just copied directly into a common folder.

Based on this I'm actually leaning towards option #2 (less code + performance yay!), but I'd be happy to hear the opinion of others.

Also, just a crazy late night idea, but another option could be to have a directory for each game, which would then contain the different kind of assets. It would provide fast lookup for games, readable file names and easy editing. It'd be totally incompatible with the current scrapers though, but that wouldn't be hard to fix with a script. Well, at least this is just an idea.

On another topic, the keyboard layout changing might be simpler than I thought, it might come in the next update.

(sorry for the long post, it's late and I should probably sleep already)

[GeekOB]

@fluffypillow thanks, I wish I could take credit for option #2 but it's the way that Skraper organizes all the media, I "migrated" from the suffix-naming method because I liked the former better.
Pegasus looks amazing and I can see it can only get better. Once again, thank you for your disposition to receive feedback and the attention to detail.

[EctoOne]

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

Also, just a crazy late night idea, but another option could be to have a directory for each game, which would then contain the different kind of assets. It would provide fast lookup for games, readable file names and easy editing. It'd be totally incompatible with the current scrapers though, but that wouldn't be hard to fix with a script. Well, at least this is just an idea.

I was hoping that ES would adapt that for a while now. It would be the same method that Kodi uses for movies. The folder has the same name as the movie, same name also for the nfo file with all the metadata. The images are named after what they are (poster.jpg, fanart.jpg, thumb.jpg etc.). It would make adding/removing games so much cleaner, but I guess as long as we don't use some sort of internal database, that can be filled with data from several files, it won't happen.

On another topic, the keyboard layout changing might be simpler than I thought, it might come in the next update.

Awesome.

[Darksavior]

@fluffypillow Are custom sections themes in the works? I'd just about given up setting up the arcade section with the default "cart" layout. Flyer art makes it difficult to recognize a game and I can't find marquee art for every game. I'd like to have ONLY the arcade section like this:

[fluffypillow]

@darksavior each theme is standalone, with their own looks, logic and data handling, so they can't be mixed together in a general way. However, it is entirely possible to create a theme that does provide a different style for a particular collection.

[tronkyfran]

@fluffypillow In fact, if you are more or less comfortable programming you can do almost anything with QT and Pegasus, damn, I can do only trial&error and can get things done!!!!

[GeekOB]

Hey there @tronkyfran do you have any themes available for Pegasus? I'd love to try it/them out!

[tronkyfran]

@geekob Sadly, not yet, I have one "test drive" with an amstrad only theme but its not really ready for release. Im kind of slow making my art and, on top of that, I have to fight with my inability programming, hehe!!

[GeekOB]

@tronkyfran

[fluffypillow]

The good news: keyboard layout changing is almost done, I'll still need to fix some UI issues and make tests. The keys can also be queried in the themes, so it's no longer necessary to hardcode certain combinations.

The bad news: it is not possible at the moment to use keys other than the arrows for navigation. They're hardcoded in some lower level code and would require digging deeper to fix that.

[Newellj79]

@fluffypillow
Changing the keyboard keys was all I've been waiting on to make the switch. Can't wait!