Wishlist

[cassette]

As I've been using and theming RetroFE for a while now, I'm gonna list the things I've found that can be improved or added, maybe you guys agree. Of course I love RetroFE, I find it to be the best FE out there, but these are the things missing for it to be perfect according to my use (listed from most needed to less):

1. Recognize controller after RetroFE has started - It's annoying how sometimes I forget to turn on my controller, and have RetroFE open, but because it won't be recognized, I gotta close it, connect my controller, and then open it again. Could help make the experience more seamless. For reference, Kodi has this feature.

2. Brief screen when opening game - I find it ugly how when launching an game, RetroFE minimizes, you see my desktop for a solid two seconds, and then the game appears on screen. Takes you out of the "experience"... I would kill for it to just be RetroFE > game. Perhaps if this is just the way Windows works, adding something to RetroFe that will load a black image taking the whole screen until the game loads (so that one sees that instead of the desktop).

3. Layout hotkey - Instead of having layouts be permanent, with one loaded on startup, you could change it on the go with a hotkey. For reference, Kodi has this feature and I use it a lot there for movies because they show different aspects of the current object selected (for example my current RetroFE skin doesn't show boxart, so it'd be cool to change from a logo based one, to a "coverflow" of boxart on the go), or just because one gets bored of having the same one all the time.

4. Grouping elements - This is a design idea that concerns games or systems that have extensions. The idea is that, for example, instead of having 4 entries of "Final Fantasy VIII" (for each CD), you have one that, once entered, replaces the playlist with the 4 CD entries. Could be great for DLC games, multiple-CD games, or systemswith add-ons (example after "entering" the MegaDrive, the wheel is replaced with "Mega Drive", "32X", and "Mega CD")

5. Randomize game on platform startup - It gets tiring to see the same game every time you start a system, so it could be a good idea to break the eternal monotony by making the platform randomize the first game seen when entering. Sorted alphabetically, there's no way around it: your first arcade game will always be "88 Games" - will I have to see its logo and video every time I launch "Arcade" for the rest of my life?

6. Immediate rating - Not sure if there's a rating system implemented yet, but it'd be great to be able to quickly rate by pressing the currently selected item, like "Ctrl+1", "Ctrl+2" and so on. Then we'd be able to see how we rated a game on the UI, sort the games by rating, and so on.

7. Adapt size when changing resolutions - In line with how RetroFE loads stuff at startup and then not any more, it happens that I have my computer connected to both my desktop monitor and my TV, and I'd like to launch it on my desktop, then move to the couch and play games there, but if I do that RetroFE launches with the resolution of the desktop monitor, so it looks bad on the TV. For reference, Kodi has this.

8. Don't cut when adding favourites - When you add a game to favourites, the video resets. Looks inelegant.

9. Disable input on certain menus - Small, borderline obsessive annoyance of mine, in that nextPlaylist, and letterUp, work on the system menu, which is awkward because I don't list them by alphabet (so letterUp doesn't make sense using there), nor I have a playlist of them. It's easy as not pressing those buttons, but knowing pressing them could unleash brief chaos (nextPlaylist > only arcade and NES listed) is annoying.

10. Odd characters - RetroFE won't recognize the collection if they have foreign characters on their name. These are the ones that I had trouble with: Pokémon Mini, NEO・GEO CD, Odyssey². I named the folders in ways that would make them get recognized, but I'd love to have them with the "actual" names rather than a workaround (so that I follow my organization standards).

11. SVG support - As I tried to fill the missing logos, I found many of them were most easily accessible as .svg vectors. They undoubtedly have superior quality to .png too, so it'd be great to have support for it.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

I'll have a look, and see what I can do. I was planning on implementing some new features soon again anyway.

[Ripper006]

Nice list.

[cassette]

Thanks for the support guys. Really excited for any improvements, whenever they come.

Assembling all the notes I've typed down, I'm adding some more ideas I forgot mentioning last time (I believe these are all):

12. Slide effect - To have the slide effect from ES for the background/logos (you can see it here: https://youtu.be/td_SgaiecCw?t=3m10s). This would actually be my #1 request as I both love the slide effect, and hate the fade one.

13. Blur effect - Would be great to have for the background image, instead of having to manually blur every image in Photoshop. Very useful whenever the image randomization feature is implemented, as I'd assume most people will have lots of images per system, and the blur effect on it is a popular look for the background image (RetroArch and ES both have images with blur bundled with the programs)

14. Scale - An option to scale images so that "aspect ratio is kept, and the image is scaled up so that it fills the box, with any portions that lie outside the box being cropped off" (paraphrasing this from Kodi's scale feature).

15. Rendering - So I'm trying out these clean outline-only logos, and they look very unfit when scaled down. All antialiasing seems to be gone, but you can see the image I'm using has it - click on the black block at the top to see it: http://imgur.com/a/kbRjU

16. Custom reloadable image - What I'd like to do with the logos is that when they're on focus, they gain colour. So the idea would be having a "logo.png" (the one displayed normally), and then "logo_color.png" both in the same folder, and that when the logo is hovered, "logo_color.png" is seen.

17. Attach image to element - Many skins have a space for displaying the gameplay video, and it's often awkward because the video changes aspect ratio per system, or per game, so this video-zone always has empty gaps on the sides or top/bottom. The idea would be to attach an image (the border) up/down/left/right to the video, so that the border is rendered in relation to the aspect ratio of the video, and so there'd be no gaps. A less effective take on this this would be to have the scale feature mentioned above (or stretch, but it'd look bad for many videos), and then having the border layer (say, a TV screen) on a higher layer than the video, so that the video would occupy the whole screen, but the downside is parts of it would be cropped off, so I still think it's better to assemble the border in 4 parts and attach them side side by side.

edit: one more, maybe it's doable right now since the functionality is there but I'm not sure how to handle it on this specific manner:

18. Randomize video/image - So I know this is planned but what I'm referring to is to randomize elements from item_artwork on the main menu, so that when I have, for example, the Lynx on focus, the background image is not background.png, but a random gameplay video that rotates every time I hover the system.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

14 is already supported, and even somewhat used in the Aeon Nox theme. I think what you want could be achieved by a combination of minWidth, minHeight, and container parameters.

[cassette]

Nice! How would that one go? I recall I tried specifying only one of the two parameters height/width, but it still stretched the image.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

You could use one of the following combinations:
- minWidth + minHeight (never tried this one actually)
- width + maxHeight
- maxWidth + height
One of these should properly scale your image. You can then clip the image using the container parameters.

[cassette]

Thanks!

[ginzu]

Hello 
Long time no see.
I am happy to see how Retrofe evolve day after day!
I am always very happy with it and i just saw that there are new release and improvment.

I am agree with firewater for lot of his ideas. He is going far away than what i expect from retroFe.

For my part, i really love these features: (sorry if i don't saw somewhere that they already have been spoken in the forum).

1.a music of our choice when navigate in the main menu and the possibility tu mute it. (Or a playlist)   

2.a feature to search any game like hypersearch that we could launch directly with the joystick.

3.the feature to create multi-system game list sort by kind.
I mean: whatever the system is, i can navigate in a racing list of game for example.


And keep up this good work.

[billyc666]

i know it's an old thread but layout hotkey sounds like a good idea, be very useful if a config file with last used layout per system was used, this way systems that lack box art could use logos instead in a different layout