Time Before Loading Art

[theherooftime796]

Hi. I'm currently working on a theme (or i guess resuming a theme i started almost a year ago and gave up on  ) and was wondering something:

See, every time a system is selected on the main menu, there is a delay while the art, etc. is loading. This delay doesn't really bother me, as it is only 1 second or so.

The unfortunate thing is, every time i am scrolling through my menu, retrofe stops to load the art for a system i never planned on playing, which makes the whole experience far too sluggish, and i am mash the arrow keys when selecting to stop the art from loading in.

I am hoping that it is possible to increase the time between scrolling (i.e. a single press of the arrow key, and the art for the collection loading), so that i can freely scroll at my leisure and only load in the system artwork when i want to play said system.

If this feature doesn't exist (and you can understand what i'm talking about despite my horrible description  ), is it possible that it would be included in a future update?

[Pieter Hulshoff]

First things first: which version of RetroFE are you running? Assuming it's the latest, please read on...

To start: loading times depend highly on the quality of the artwork (size) and the speed of your HD (SDDs are a lot faster).

Now to the details. When scrolling through a menu, RetroFE does the following:
- Scroll the menu
- HighlightExit animation
- Load art
- HighlightEnter animation

If you press the previous/next button before the menu scroll is complete (speed depends on the menu settings in your theme), RetroFE will continue the scroll before starting the HighlightExit animation.
If you press the previous/next button before the HighlightExit animation is complete (duration depends on the longest onHighExit animation), RetroFE will restart the scroll, and not load art.
Once RetroFE has started loading the art however, it will first finish loading the art before looking at any new key presses.

So, all in all: as long as you're quick enough with your key presses (and quick enough is defined by the theme settings), you will not need to wait for art loading.

[theherooftime796]

First of all thanks a lot.
I am running the latest version
You mentioned that "quick enough is defined by the theme settings", where exactly is this setting located that would allow me to increase the time before art is loaded. (i.e. slower key presses in succession without art loading in)

[Pieter Hulshoff]

First of all thanks a lot.
I am running the latest version
You mentioned that "quick enough is defined by the theme settings", where exactly is this setting located that would allow me to increase the time before art is loaded. (i.e. slower key presses in succession without art loading in)

The scrollTime and scrollAcceleration parameters in the <menu tags define how quickly the menu scrolls; increasing the scrollTime will give you more time, but will also slow down the scrolling of the menu.
The <set duration tag for the onHighlightExit animation define how long the HighlightExit animation takes. The longest duration over all elements determines how long it takes before the art is loaded. If you don't want to change the current animations, you could simply add an <animate type="nop" tag (basically a do nothing animation) with a longer duration to delay the loading of the art.

[theherooftime796]

Ok thanks!