[c0ldmeth0d]

No worries, glad you are enjoying it.

[c0ldmeth0d]

[quote=97060] @c0ldmeth0d

Your Theme looks amazing. I’m pretty new to Retropie and think that the default simple theme is in fact a little too simple for my tastes. Do you have a new revision of your theme with better readability ?[/quote]

Thank you, and yes see OP.

[quote=97060]I wonder if there is another way to browse through the systems. For example a screen that shows all the systems at once, so you wouldn’t have to search for the system you would want to play like in the simple theme.[/quote]

I think you are talking about grid view, I’m fairly certain this has been discussed but not implemented yet.

[quote=97060]On another note. How do you get covers for the games to show ? is there something built in to EmulationStation that visualises covers ? Or even better, is there a way to automaticly download covers (that would be absolutely awesome)?[/quote]

As labelwhore said there is a scraper built into ES. If you don’t get the results you are after you can do them manually.

[quote=97060](Sorry my english is crap but i hope i was able to make my thoughts clear)[/quote]

Your English is better than a vast majority of native speakers that I come across… certainly not crap.

[quote=97100]Thanks for this skin, btw, it looks amazing and is really easy to customize. Toss is a new BG image, change the text color and the line at the top and bam! I made mine match the Kodi Amber skin and it looks really great.[/quote]

Glad you enjoy it, check the fonts I have made it easier to swap them out as well.

[quote=97100]I do have one question though, is there a way to keep the background image on the system select screen from sliding left/right or fading when you’re switching between systems? I think it would look even better if that background were static, but I only see the two options in ES.[/quote]

I think this is hard coded in, I couldn’t find an option, this also drives me up the wall. If @nilsbyte could chime in we could lay it to rest and either get over it… or plead for an option to be implemented in a future release of EmulationStation.

[c0ldmeth0d]

Do you mean will this theme be added to RetroPie?

or

Have I updated the theme with the above changes?

[c0ldmeth0d]

People that theme can’t help themselves, I wasn’t going to touch the Pi, two days in I was looking to see what could be done. I am my own worst enemy.

Okay, so everything went to plan. Readability is at a supreme, I’m pretty happy with it, just need to make a few changes and I’ll put the new one up. I just wish I could take better screen shots. The potato quality shots don’t do it justice. I might look at something to remote view the interface. Taking photos of a monitor is akin to using whiteout on the same monitor to correct typos:) IMO.

As you can see from the screenshot now you could put any image in the background and it won’t affect readability. I also reduced the opacity of the header so that you can see the whole image (although depending on feedback, I may revert).

As for the guide, I had a look at the one you posted above. It looks like a good concise guide that I wouldn’t change, there is nothing of value that I could add to enhance it further. But if I do come up with something useful I will be sure to tack it on.

Oh yeah, where is this Zelda theme you speak of… I would be interested in having a look.

[c0ldmeth0d]

I’m not sure how people can restrain from customising the interface to suit themselves, for me I get as much fun out of modifying as I do from the end purpose of the machine.

I had planned on adding additional fonts, colours and backgrounds into the initial release but wanted to gauge interest before doing so, the plan was to give fonts a generic name e.g. description.ttf & gamelist.ttf so that the user could just rename a font, dump it in the asset folder restart… done. Only issue being font size as they vary greatly. The same goes for the background, as long as the new image is of the same dimension, rename to the generic name overwrite the file… done. As for the small amount of code that needs to be changed for customising colour, I would just clone and modify the xml and have the user overwrite the existing xml.

As you will see I have moved all code for visual customisation to the global xml for ease of customisation.

I considered adding the code in then commenting out, but I wanted to make it as easy as possible for those that aren’t confident in modifying the xml’s.

As for the background, you have given me an idea that may give me the result that I want without compromise. I will give it a go when I get a chance.

I have Illustrator but used Inkscape in this case, when possible I will sit with Adobe and see what I can come up with. But if you are correct in the scaling of the themes I think I would stick with png’s as from my perspective they aren’t as time consuming.

[c0ldmeth0d]

Thanks for the feed back, constructive criticism doesn’t bother me and most often than not is useful.

I understand exactly what you are saying and labored over the thought of adding smoked out boxes behind the text. The reasoning behind not adding them was; I wanted the background to be easily interchangeable, so this ruled out hardcoding anything into it. The other option was to create SVG’s then scale and position them behind the text, unfortunately my SVG experience is limited to modifying existing images so that ruled that option out.

If yourself or anyone else with experience could point me in the right direction I would be happy to correct the flaws in the theme.

Another thing I was looking at was the Banner/Header, the jpg is not ideal and would prefer this also to be an SVG. You would have also noticed my laziness with the branding as well, once again a png is not ideal I feel an SVG would better suit. Ideally it would be nice to be able to place a background of any colour/contrast/shade behind the text and not have to worry about readability.

My original thought was for backgrounds, fonts and colours to be easily interchangeable for ease of customisation. That way the user isn’t locked into how I think it should look.

Your thoughts/experience are appreciated.

Cheers.

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