RetroFE forums

Cheers!  Although I've reassessed my menu and I'm not sure I want to fade the current video out when scrolling anymore, the option for an "onScrollFinish" animation is still very relevant to me.

Automatic playlists are still on the to-do list.

Nice! Definitely near the top of my list of anticipated features

Animations can be interrupted for menu scrolling, but not for selecting a game or menu entry.

Unfortunate, but not unexpected.

Somewhat off-topic, but I'm interested as to what other big planned features are currently in the works?

Oh yeah, I remember reading that menuScrollReloaded got added but haven't grabbed the new executable yet. Must do that now. In regards to new theme features, how difficult would it be to have horizontal reloadableScrollingText to only scroll when the length of the string exceeds the length of the container (you know, for those pesky longer titles). I'm sure there's more useful features but I can't think of any at the moment.

Would it be possible to implement playlists where, instead of having to type out every game of a particular category, such as genre, you could simply mention the variable(s) which should be included and RetroFE could construct a list of games on the fly.

For example, for a "Zelda Games.txt" playlist file, it could be structured like this:

title="Legend of Zelda"
title="Zelda II"

where "=" refers to if a title includes a particular string. Therefore, each game with either of the strings "Legend of Zelda" or "Zelda II" in their title in a collection will be displayed when the playlist is loaded.

Alternatively, and more usefully, this could be used for genre playlists.
E.g. "Sports.txt" would include:

genre="Sports"
genre="Sports/Snowboarding"
genre="Sports/Basketball"
genre="Sports/Soccer"
etc,etc.

Thus every game of these genres would be displayed upon loading the playlist.

Finally, this functionality could be extended to other labels such as numberPlayers, rating, year, etc. All of this information would be sourced from the meta.db of course.

Hope I was clear and no rush Pieter - I'm sure you've got a long list of planned features already. Keep up the great work! 

Ok thanks. Looking forward to it

I'd say just include them for those who want to use them. I wouldn't mind creating universal and system specific genre videos for use in my own theme and others if such an option was made available in RetroFE.

How about, upon pressing a dedicate genre key, it loads a separate menu, with entries either defined by those in the genre tags of the system xmls, or alternatively from individual genre xml files (e.g. RetroFE\meta\hyperlist\genre\%SYSTEM_NAME%\Strategy.xml).

By doing this we could use the genres already compiled by the expansive hyperlist project.

 If a game is listed in a dedicated genre file, that should take priority over the system xml's. If a game is listed in multiple genre xml's, it should be displayed in both genres in the menu

A universal layout for the genre menu could be defined using genreMenu tags in the main layout.xml, and could feature dedicated reloadableVideos,images, logos,etcas the themer desires (could be found in _common\genre_artwork or "collection name"\genre_artwork depending on mode attribute)

Alternatively, each system could have a unique genre menu set up, loaded from layouts\"layout name"\collections\"collection name"\layout\layout.xml or a dedicated genreMenu.xml (i'm not sure which would be better).

Upon loading a genre (e.g. Strategy), it would use the same assets and layout as the current collection (just as if we had loaded a collection from the main menu with all games displayed), the only difference being that all games which do not possess the correct genre are filtered out and not displayed.

Favourites could be displayed in the genre menu as well (perhaps at the top), but, as before, can also be accessed easily through the nextPlaylist control (which seems to only load the favourites playlist and not any genres, maybe it could do with being renamed for clarity, but keeping the old name for legacy purposes) and games can be added with the addPlaylist (addFavourites) control.

Perhaps we could also get a general "favourites" control, which overlays a (customisable) menu over the current view with the option to view favourites or add the selected item to favourites, it would help to make the options more visible and understandable to general users, without having to clutter a theme with many control prompts.
This functionality could also be used to add an optional "exit menu" upon pressing the quit key on the main menu, although I would definitely prioritise the genre features.

Sorry for the long post. I'm not sure if this would fit the needs of all users, and i don't expect anything similar to be coming any time soon. I just wanted to share some ideas and let everyone else discuss what they think should be done. If you need me to clarify anything, just ask and I'll try to reply explaining myself.