Author Topic: Arcadeflow theme v 17.1 [Release] Updated 22 March 2024  (Read 548474 times)

blinkybill

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #480 on: July 02, 2019, 05:11:10 AM »
in display-menu mode i couldn't enable video thumbs from the settings.
i had to change it in this line:
   prf.THUMBVIDEO = false

on the layout.nut

is it just me?

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #481 on: July 02, 2019, 05:41:55 AM »
in display-menu mode i couldn't enable video thumbs from the settings.
i had to change it in this line:
   prf.THUMBVIDEO = false

If I got it right from your description this is the intended behavior: when you use AF as displays menu layout, video thumbs are disabled because usually you don't have video thumbs for displays artwork. But then if you enter a display you should see the video thumbs for your games.

What you want is to have video thumbs in the displays list? I can enable it in the next version so you don't have to tweak the layout.nut

dukpoki

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #482 on: July 02, 2019, 08:37:59 PM »
There is a bug for me in 4.9.

Here's the steps to reproduce it.

Should be fixed in this layout.nut, with the side effect that you can't wrap around the list in history view or when going next_page/game, prev_page/game with hotkeys. At least it doesn't break the list.

That fixes it so it doesn't glitch out.  Thanks.  I like that you can zoom through the games by just holding down a direction even though page up/page down is disabled.  You've made this theme so polished.  Good job!

blinkybill

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #483 on: July 03, 2019, 09:19:30 AM »
in display-menu mode i couldn't enable video thumbs from the settings.
i had to change it in this line:
   prf.THUMBVIDEO = false

If I got it right from your description this is the intended behavior: when you use AF as displays menu layout, video thumbs are disabled because usually you don't have video thumbs for displays artwork. But then if you enter a display you should see the video thumbs for your games.

What you want is to have video thumbs in the displays list? I can enable it in the next version so you don't have to tweak the layout.nut
that will be awesome, as emumovies has nice system videos.
another issue i have is random crashes when inactive, but im still not sure if it's AM thing or a theme thing, still checking. any suggestions?

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #484 on: July 04, 2019, 05:10:43 AM »
that will be awesome, as emumovies has nice system videos.
another issue i have is random crashes when inactive, but im still not sure if it's AM thing or a theme thing, still checking. any suggestions?

I'll add the modification to AF 5.0, I'm working on it but I need to squash a bug in the cropping of smoothed backgrounds, this theme is so complex now that sometimes I think it works in a way but it doesn't :D

As for the crashes, does they appear during the attract mode when videos are played? It would be helpful if you could run it as attract-console.exe and send me the output when it crashes.

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #485 on: July 04, 2019, 07:32:26 AM »
Added a "colorization" filter for Game Boy games that have black and white videos or snaps... Code could be cleaner (and will be cleaned soon hopefully) but looks good...
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 06:39:03 AM by zpaolo11x »

arthurvalenca

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #486 on: July 06, 2019, 06:55:50 AM »
Great job but I have noticed that when I use in my 19 'inch motif from 4.3 in 1280x1024 resolution I enable the low resolution function with only one horizontal line, I notice that the central art box sits on top of the scrollbar , and also does not give me the option to put the 3 horizontal lines for games, even though I put the maximum resolution of my monitor in Resolution WxH, it still does not give me more game viewing boxes.

PS:Without enabling low resolution it becomes normal.

PS1:Wonderful job for game boy!!!!


tasio

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #487 on: July 08, 2019, 11:56:56 AM »
It was fantastic, thank you for creating and keeping this wonderful theme always updated and improving every day. So I would like to put one more opinion, maybe in its next update could develop the same theme with compatibility to machines that have weaker hardware, so they can also run the smooth theme free of crashes. But so far my opinion for my machine works very well in every way.

Thank you for the comments. I know Arcadeflow is very demanding, and in the past all the tests we did on the forum to adapt it to lower spec machines like the Pi were unsuccessful. There are a couple of things that make low specs machines struggle: the number of (nested) surfaces used by the thumbnail grid, and the number of GLSL shaders and effects used in Arcadeflow. While I can strip back GLSL effects somehow, and even reduce the surfaces, that would change a lot the look of the theme. I'm wondering if the new Pi4 has enough power to run AF, but I don't have a Pi myself to test.
There are some settings in the layout that can be used to disable some effects and hopefully improve performance, but the surface issues still remains.
I've been thinking of a way to streamline the layout for some time, one of the options is, instead of using surfaces for each tile, to use a single surface as big as the screen and apply dynamic shadows to that, but I fear that would be a heavy GLSL shader for lower spec GPUs

I have installed this nice theme in a i7 machine with a 970 graphic card and works fine but if I enable the FPS counter I can see that moving through the game library can go under 30 FPS.
I tried it as well in a laptop with integrated graphics and even disabling all I could the FPS still below 10 and GPU usage 100 even if I'm not doing anything. Does it make sense to use that much GPU even when nothing is moving and no video playing?

I understand that the requirements for this theme are high but I got the impression that when nothing seems changing or moving GPU should be more relax so I decided to write this post in case it helps with fixes or improvements  ;D
By the way other themes I tested seems working fine but I haven't test many and I would love to use this one or something with a similar grid view
« Last Edit: July 08, 2019, 12:30:04 PM by tasio »

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #488 on: July 09, 2019, 01:27:30 AM »
Great job but I have noticed that when I use in my 19 'inch motif from 4.3 in 1280x1024 resolution I enable the low resolution function with only one horizontal line, I notice that the central art box sits on top of the scrollbar , and also does not give me the option to put the 3 horizontal lines for games, even though I put the maximum resolution of my monitor in Resolution WxH, it still does not give me more game viewing boxes.

The overlapping issue is a known one, it wasn't an issue before adding the labels list because it didn't actually overlap the scroll line, but in labels list mode it is an issue. I'll check it thoroughly and update v5.0 to avoid it.

In low resolution mode there's only one row, this is by design, the idea being that in low resolution screen more rows won't be clearly visible. Now that I think of it, I should leave it as an option...

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #489 on: July 09, 2019, 02:03:33 AM »
I have installed this nice theme in a i7 machine with a 970 graphic card and works fine but if I enable the FPS counter I can see that moving through the game library can go under 30 FPS.

This usually happens because while you scroll through the library thumbnails need to be updated and images need to be loaded. The larger the files (snapshots can be pretty small, box art are way larger) the slower the update. On my Macbook I moved most of the snaps to a RAM disk to improve scrolling performance since the SSD was slowing down things a bit. Also consider that when you enable FPS count there's a hit on the CPU since the screen is continuously redrawn to calculate FPS, so don't keep it on all the time unless you like the sound of fans at max power ;D

Quote
I tried it as well in a laptop with integrated graphics and even disabling all I could the FPS still below 10 and GPU usage 100 even if I'm not doing anything. Does it make sense to use that much GPU even when nothing is moving and no video playing?

Thank you for the heads up regarding GPU usage, I did not know you could check that in Win10 (I'm a Mac user at home, and Win7 user at work). I'll do some tests but 10 fps seems pretty low. What are the specs of that laptop? My MacbookPro late 2013 with integrated graphics card can do better than that and on i5 (2018) and i7 (2017) with integrated cards it works pretty well around 30 fps (but as I said, I'll check it better).

Now let's discuss performance and why AF is so demanding... Grid themes are inherently more demanding because they show and update more thumbnails each time you move to a new selection. AF in 2 rows mode usually shows 10 tiles on screen, plus 8 off screen as safeguard areas during scrolling. All the tiles need to be updated each time you change selection, and a couple of snaps needs to be loaded from disk when you move. I continuously try to streamline the code, reduce the need for updates etc but this is intrinsic in themes with many tiles on screen. For example if you turn AF to single row layout, it will be incredibly faster because the number of tiles is cut by half. On the contrary in vertical layout with three rows it's a bit slower.

When nothing is moving it should be less hungry but if, for example, you keep video snaps turned on then something is always moving and that will require resources (on my Macbook where AM doesn't support hardware decoding videos push the fans to hurricane blast mode :D)

Now the GPU issue. I'll check with the resource monitor on Win 10, but AF uses GLSL shaders _a lot_ in a way most themes don't do. Shadows under the logo artwork are generated with GLSL, blurred backgrounds are GLSL shaders, there are multiple nested surfaces that can tax a GPU, plus glow effects, colorizing effects, some of the artwork cropping are done with GLSL shaders. For some reason even the visualization of letters in the scroll list and the visualization of genre icons, players icons etc use GLSL shaders to obtain some effects.
When I add some glsl shader to something I always check that the system is not severely affected, but with the growth of the theme I may have missed something, the resource meter in Win 10 will be helpful in this regards.

This long answer is not because I was offended by your considerations, on the contrary, I always try to improve AF, so please keep using and checking it, the feedback from the group was very important to improve AF. If you have poor performance let me know the specs of your system.

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #490 on: July 09, 2019, 02:18:02 AM »
I tried it as well in a laptop with integrated graphics and even disabling all I could the FPS still below 10 and GPU usage 100 even if I'm not doing anything. Does it make sense to use that much GPU even when nothing is moving and no video playing?

Ok, just tested this on a Win 10 laptop. When no video is playing (Video Thumbs disabled from AF options) I get 0% GPU usage in AF. When video is playing (or something else is moving) it goes to 100%. If you turn on FPS counter, that pushes the load to 100% again but you should not keep it on by default.


tasio

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #491 on: July 09, 2019, 04:22:32 AM »
Ok, just tested this on a Win 10 laptop. When no video is playing (Video Thumbs disabled from AF options) I get 0% GPU usage in AF. When video is playing (or something else is moving) it goes to 100%. If you turn on FPS counter, that pushes the load to 100% again but you should not keep it on by default.

That makes sense, was the FPS counter what set the GPU to 100%.
Still to heavy for my laptop even without the FPS but now at least it makes sense, it wasn't a bug.
I found another themes that might be enough for my setup but I think your views on design and UX are great :)

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #492 on: July 09, 2019, 04:59:47 AM »
Still to heavy for my laptop even without the FPS but now at least it makes sense, it wasn't a bug.
I found another themes that might be enough for my setup but I think your views on design and UX are great :)

Thank you, there are some things that can be disabled to make it less heavy but they are not game changers. I'm thinking of implementing a "reduced" version with less effects and maybe less surfaces to boost performance on lower spec systems.

rand0m

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #493 on: July 09, 2019, 05:53:00 AM »
Still to heavy for my laptop even without the FPS but now at least it makes sense, it wasn't a bug.
I found another themes that might be enough for my setup but I think your views on design and UX are great :)

Thank you, there are some things that can be disabled to make it less heavy but they are not game changers. I'm thinking of implementing a "reduced" version with less effects and maybe less surfaces to boost performance on lower spec systems.

Showing snaps which start playing vid after a second (if selected) might be less taxing on systems.

zpaolo11x

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Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019
« Reply #494 on: July 09, 2019, 06:09:05 AM »
Showing snaps which start playing vid after a second (if selected) might be less taxing on systems.

That's how it works right now (you can choose the video loading delay from the options), but I think the most taxing element is the large number of nested surfaces. A simplified edition with no more than one surface per tile could be much faster, reducing drop shadows.