ducalex
[Feature Request] Full screen artwork
Hi
Not sure if this is possible or exactly how it could look on a smaller screen but what about rather than a boxart picture displayed over the top of the text, there could be some artwork with a gradient displayed behind the text.
It's pretty easy with tools like Skraper to get custom mixes with all sorts of artwork, screenshots, logos, even boxart as well but would need the launcher to display it properly.
In my head I'm thinking something similar to this:
Theres some more pictures here: https://github.com/ebzero/garlic-onion-skraper-mix?tab=readme-ov-file#full-screen-mix
I dont know if there would be performance issues? backgrounds would probably need to be 320x240 at worse but obviously could be compressed etc however we could potentially half that if there was a stronger gradient to allow decent readability of the game list text, so maybe 160x240 for half the screen width wise and full length.
If its not gonna look great on the small screen or take way too much work to implement then its totally fine, the current setup of the boxart etc is more than good enough imo. Just a thought.
My take (with performance bias)
- Drawing an entire full screen (assume height 240, and width 160 - half screen), thats a 38K pixel buffer to paint, reset, and paint every highlight. Probably not worth it
The entire screen is redrawn on updates already (every pixel is usually redrawn, it's just not always blitted) so I don't think that would change much in that regard. But load times from the sd card (+ decompression + possibly resampling) might be an issue.
It might be worth generating a small batch of such images (possibly post-processed by pngquant) to see what kind of sizes we're looking at, and then perform some performance testing.
I've quickly drawn up something rough, the actual gradient size can be adjusted as well as the whats shown. Currently its screenshot plus logo, but could also have boxart either replacing the logo or boxart at the bottom, it'll be one single image whatever it shown. With the limited screen size, probably dont want it too busy!
I've processed with PNGQuant and by CRC for Atari Lynx since it has a fairly small library, I guess CRC would give the worst case scenario, my personal setup is matched via name and its lots quicker. If CRC is too slow but name match is ok, you could force caching maybe.
Heres some examples:
Logo size can be moved or made smaller etc.
Heres the full collection zipped:
Let me know if you need anything else.
I've made a quick branch to try it out and it's definitely promising but there's a fair amount of tweaking to be done to get the full effect:
- replace our current top banner with a smaller icon like in your first post
- possibly update the themes for a lighter font color in the list
- decide how to render the old art (should it now be behind the text too)
- your images might need to be darkened a bit wider on the left (for the text)
- decide if we show save preview (when enabled) in addition of the background, or if we show it as the background
But in any case, you can try it if you'd like: https://github.com/ducalex/retro-go/commits/background-previews/
I'd say performance is definitely not an issue with the small sizes you've achieved, as long as the CRC cache is prebuilt. Very promising imho!
Wow yeah, it doesnt actually look and perform too badly, even without any major theme tweaks. Amazing
I did wonder if it would be possible to force a theme/text adjustment if this mode was used? So if the user chooses backgrounds, it will override their selected theme format for the game lists to ensure its optimal.
I have amended the background slightly, rather than about 25% black, I've amended to about 40%. I can go higher but the gradient then tends to start to run almost to the end of the image but happy to adjust to whatever you feel is best. I can probably make it so the gradient is more aggressive too.
Heres the updated files:
As for the how it might work if you decide to go ahead with it, how were you thinking to implement? I was thinking it might be nice to have the option of both? romart folder still has the boxart and works as it it currently does but now theres a new directory, backgrounds for instance, where these can be stored.
You may not want both to be used at the same time for performance reasons but obviously the user can select between what they want without copying different files to/from the SD.
EDIT: Initially I tested on a 320x240 device so thought it best to also test on something different. Although possibly not optimal but the aspect of the VMU is probably worst case scenario but still works imo