Kid-friendly Retropie/ES (UI modes, favorites, hiding items) [B-TESTERS WANTED!]

[LodanZark]

[quote=112099]@robertypop
My script clones zigurana’s repo with all current and future changes. Don’t run this script within emulationstation. I don’t think you can update emulationstation if emulationstation is running. If it is not working post your build log (/RetroPie-Setup/logs/). There could be a bug or error.
[/quote]

That solved my problem, previously I did run the script over putty when the emulationstation was running that’s why didn’t worked.

[robertybob]

Right, reinstalled this from the script and I can now have the framerate shown in Kiosk mode. However, I am still unable to change from Full to Kid mode. I ran the debug over Putty so was only able to copy and paste the following

http://pastebin.com/hXMMVsGg
and this is my es_settings.cfg

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<bool name="BackgroundJoystickInput" value="false" />
<bool name="DrawFramerate" value="false" />
<bool name="EnableSounds" value="true" />
<bool name="FavoritesOnly" value="false" />
<bool name="QuickSystemSelect" value="true" />
<bool name="ScrapeRatings" value="true" />
<bool name="ShowHelpPrompts" value="true" />
<int name="ScraperResizeHeight" value="0" />
<int name="ScraperResizeWidth" value="400" />
<int name="ScreenSaverTime" value="300000" />
<string name="Scraper" value="TheGamesDB" />
<string name="ScreenSaverBehavior" value="dim" />
<string name="ThemeSet" value="carbon" />
<string name="TransitionStyle" value="fade" />
<string name="UIMode" value="Kid" />
<string name="UIMode_passkey" value="uuddlrlrba" />

Changing <string name=”UIMode” value=”Kid” /> to <string name=”UIMode” value=”Full” /> allows me to get back into Emulationstation. The only downside is that once I change this – when I press F4 to quit Emulationstation pressing any key doesn’t bring up the commandline, it just loads ES again.

[zigurana]

@robertybob:
What i think is happening: there are no Games that have the Kidgame tag set to true, so the system tries to populate based on a list with no content (size=0,hence the out of range error) .
Could you try with at least 1 game kid enabled?
I’ll put this on the todo list anyways, because there should be a way to catch this case gracefully.

Thanks for the bug-hunting!

[LodanZark]

I was thinking about the usefulness of the “restart system” option in the “kiosk” and “kids” mode, and over my experience I didn’t use it at all since there are no available settings in those modes that requires restart, maybe quit section would became straightforward to shutdown system or even show up a pop up”are you sure you wanna quit? yes/no”

[zigurana]

Well, if we combine with the power menu proposed earlier, the whole menu item can be hidden.

[zigurana]

Update (GUI_MODES_v3)
So I’ve just crushed the robertybob’s bug where playing with a clean install of this ES branch would land ES in an infinite loop because there was nothing to show.
Now the user is confronted with an image like this:

[robertybob]

Great news!

[InsecureSpike]

[quote=112146]I was thinking about the usefulness of the “restart system” option in the “kiosk” and “kids” mode, and over my experience I didn’t use it at all since there are no available settings in those modes that requires restart, maybe quit section would became straightforward to shutdown system or even show up a pop up”are you sure you wanna quit? yes/no”

[/quote]

well quit it useful if you plan to update roms etc on a regular basis, imho

[robertybob]

[quote=112172]

LodanZark wrote:

I was thinking about the usefulness of the “restart system” option in the “kiosk” and “kids” mode, and over my experience I didn’t use it at all since there are no available settings in those modes that requires restart, maybe quit section would became straightforward to shutdown system or even show up a pop up”are you sure you wanna quit? yes/no”

well quit it useful if you plan to update roms etc on a regular basis, imho

[/quote]

I update roms via WinSCP so I could always remotely restart the system , but I suppose some people do use the USBRom service?

[zigurana]

[quote=112172]

LodanZark wrote:

I was thinking about the usefulness of the “restart system” option in the “kiosk” and “kids” mode, and over my experience I didn’t use it at all since there are no available settings in those modes that requires restart, maybe quit section would became straightforward to shutdown system or even show up a pop up”are you sure you wanna quit? yes/no”

well quit it useful if you plan to update roms etc on a regular basis, imho

[/quote]
Sure, the restart and quit features are useful in a full ui context, but in a reduced/protected mode not so much.

[robertybob]

Going to load all my roms onto my Pi tonight so should hopefully be able to find some more bugs (!). Do you have any timescales for implementation of new features (from the other thread)?

[zigurana]

Well, I hope not, but if you do find them, let me know. :)
As for the other feature requests, I will focus first on the leftovers for the UI modes feature:
-mechanism for theme where favorites, hidden, and kid status are shown
-example of such a theme, based on carbon
-maybe: look at automatic scraping of ESRB ratings and set the Kid filter to one of those levels

And timelines, well, it proceeds at its own pace, depending on unforeseen issues, availability of time, presence of christmas, etcetc.

[jeffdamann]

Have any of you figured out a way to get this version to load automatically on boot in place of the one included with retropie?

[robertybob]

[quote=112976]Have any of you figured out a way to get this version to load automatically on boot in place of the one included with retropie?

[/quote]

It does for me :) Used the modified RetroPie setup script.

[rastendo]

I just installed this. The only issue I have so far is that there is no option to add games to favorites or kids by pressing the X and Y buttons. It doesn’t even show the buttons in the controls at the bottom.

[jeffdamann]

From what I gather you have to add it to the theme, but I haven’t installed this yet so Im not sure. Its somewhere in this thread though I believe.

[rastendo]

[quote=113325]From what I gather you have to add it to the theme, but I haven’t installed this yet so Im not sure. Its somewhere in this thread though I believe.

[/quote]

This is all that I could find regarding the issue, but I don’t see any instructions on how to enable X and Y to toggle the new tags for favorite and kid.

Another thing to remember is that the visualization for these tags are NOT included in the current themes out there. They are easy enough to add, but it will need to be done if you want to see the status of these tags in the detailed-list view. In his/her original pull request, kaptainkia suggested to increase the xml version to 4 to indicate the availability of the new favorite tag. I would agree with this approach. At least from the ES side of things, you can then keep on using the old themes, without anything breaking. You will just not be able to see the values at a glance, or toggle them quickly using x for favorites and y for kidgames. When you open the metadata editor though, they are shown and editable:

Do I need to increase the XML version? Or am I missing something?

[zigurana]

Hi!
This is a sign of life post, I am working hard on an update, but a nasty segmentation fault is throwing me off schedule.

[quote=113405]
This is all that I could find regarding the issue, but I don’t see any instructions on how to enable X and Y to toggle the new tags for favorite and kid.
[/quote]

Yeah, sorry about that.
I was planning to opload an updated theme together with the next code update, as the situation will be different after that.

What I am planning is this to use icons rather than a textual representation of the new metadata boolean types Favorite, KidGame and Hidden. To do this, I had to extend the theme handling in ES.
How that looks like is something like this:

Hopefully stating the obvious here:
Heart = Favorite
Teddybear = Kid friendly
Eye = hidden
(Now, of course this is a weird situation – why would you want to hide a favorite game? But this was for illustration purposes only).
These images are toggled, based on the metadata value true/false, so they will not be there when the value = false.

To know the paths and screen locations of these images, ES looks at the theme. In my theme I have added the following:

		<image name="md_hidden">
			<pos>0.17 0.165</pos>
			<path>./art/hidden.svg</path>
			<maxSize>0.06 0.045</maxSize>
			<origin>0 0</origin>
		</image>
		
		<image name="md_kidgame">
			<pos>0.10 0.16</pos>
			<path>./art/teddy.svg</path>
			<maxSize>0.06 0.06</maxSize>
			<origin>0 0</origin>
		</image>

		<image name="md_favorite">
			<pos>0.03 0.165</pos>
			<path>./art/heart.svg</path>
			<maxSize>0.045 0.045</maxSize>
			<origin>0 0</origin>
		</image>

The corresponding images are in a folder ‘art’, which will be either system specific, or set globally, depending if you want to have system specific images or not. (Looking at the memory issues we had in the past, I guess not).

Again, I am planning to update the carbon theme with these new values, so people can have a go. It just that everything always takes longer than expected, so bear with me.

And if anyone can get me up and running with debugging segmentation faults using gdb or something else, please let me know.

[robertybob]

Thanks for the post! Look forward to the next version :) (sorry I know nothing about Linux, otherwise I’d offer to debug for you)

[zigurana]

UPDATE (Gui_Modes_v4)
I’ve just pushed my latest changes to my repository. If you run the install-script via retropie-setup -> option 4 ‘Experimental Packages’ -> option 306 emulationstation-kids, you will be able to download and install it.

This update includes the visualization of the metadata items Favorite, Hidden, and Kidgame using simple icons:

To see these changes, you will also need to update your theme(s). To make a start, I’ve updated the Carbon theme to include these new elements (had to push things around a bit).
You can download it here (I hope this does not break my Dropbox account due to over-usage ;-) )

In any case, it is not perfect, but I am not really the artistic type, I leave that in the good hands of other willing to play. Make sure you increase the xml formatversion number (specified on the second line) to 4.

I would be most gratefull if you could give this a try, and report any difficulties/bugs you might encounter.

Known issues:

• Somehow, with my setup, the binding of x and y gets lost and I need to rebind the buttons via “Configure Input”, if I want to use these buttons to quickly toggle the fav / kidgame values. I would be interested if others see the same behaviour.

[robertybob]

Thanks ! I hope to install this at some point this week :)

[dankcushions]

is it time this was used in retropie instead of ‘normal’ ES? only that project has been dead for ages and the owner doesn’t seem to be available to approve other people’s pulls. zigurana has done some great fixes and it would be great to have an interface that’s under active development! :)

[efraimsangil]

I am agree with you, Dankcushions.

[InsecureSpike]

some theme development would be awesome! please, there’s a few things that need fixing & modifing.

[zigurana]

As soon as ppl have had a chance to trie this out, and no dirty bugs pop up, I will create a pull-request on de RetroPie – ES branch. Then others will be able to have a more explicit look at the code, before accepting it into the general build.

Re: Improved theming for ES, i’ll have a look at that in due time. It certainly is on my list!

[InsecureSpike]

awesome, thank you

[zigurana]

Update UImodes v5
Ok, this is probably going to be my last update for this particular feature.
Actually this was supposed to be a separate feature, but I got stuck. So I descoped it untill it was at least usable and stable.
What the hell am I talking about?

Random games! (also known as useless feature #1)

The original plan was to get a random game starter that could be triggered as some sort of screensaver, and act as a stand-in for an actual attract-mode. So I got to work on getting file lists (of course taking into account all the filters that I had introduced for UIModes so Hidden and Kid games). I got it working up to the point where it is an option in the guiGameListOptions (what you get when you press ‘select’ while in a game-list view):

This will change the view focus to a new random game, in any of the systems that have games that are visible given the current UI mode. This takes place in the viewcontroller code in ES-app.

So far so good.
Then I found out that the screensaver mechanism is implemented in the ES-core side of things, as a low-level function for the ES window. The problem now is that ES-core works as one giant include for ES-app. As such ES-core is completely unaware of anything that goes on in ES-app. This is by design, you could say that ES-app is just a particular implementation of ES-core.

Anyways, lets stop this over-technical detour by concluding that there is no clean way to add a new screensaver mechanism to ES that depends on higher-level functions, without a redesign bigger than I am willing to do right now.
So we are left with a rather meager harvest for all this digging: just the menu option that you need to call manually.

I’ve updated my repository, and installation via the script should work fine.
Let me know what you guys think. The next update will probably on something different again.

[robertybob]

Can’t wait to try this out!

[efraimsangil]

Nice work!!! :)

[zigurana]

I’ve created a Pull Request to the RetroPie/Emulationstation branch for this: https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/32

[robertybob]

[quote=116555]I’ve created a Pull Request to the RetroPie/Emulationstation branch for this: https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/32

[/quote]

Awesome! Are you hoping this will be the default Emulatiostation, or do you anticipate this being added as an ‘Experimental’ module for further testing by users (like what happens with new emulators)?

[zigurana]

Well, the first step is that the set of changes needs to be looked at carefully and considered for merging into the RetroPie branch of EmulationStation.
Previously (when the main branch of EmulationStation was still under active development), this PR would have gone to Aloshi, who would be able to judge it on its merits and see how well it fits with the rest of the code, as well as any future plans he might have.

Nowadays, ES development is most likely to come from ‘third parties’ like me. It must be difficult for the RetroPie team to judge the code without a spending considerable amount of time on it. So I’m not expecting an answer anytime soon.

In any case, it might be outside the scope / too large for what the RetroPie team is willing to take on and support, especially taking into account futures where RetroPie uses a different Frontend altogether. We’ll see.

I wish these types of discussions would take place more in the open though. We all have a stake here.

Send from mobile, please excuse any brevity and typos.

[zigurana]

Ow Darn!
Just found a bug.
If you delete a game via ‘edit this games metadata’ ES will crash (and restart after 5 sec).
I’ll have a look today, and update asap.

[herbfargus]

This should have been recently fixed. Try basing your changes on the latest updates retropie has done.

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/28

[zigurana]

Will do that, thanks.

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