Messages

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 5.0 [Release] Updated 18 July 2019

« on: Yesterday at 07:46:03 AM »

Thank you all guys for the comments and positive feedback, I”m glad 5.0 is working better! Now I can relax on the beach while I think of new features and improvements

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 5.0 [Release] Updated 18 July 2019

« on: July 18, 2019, 02:01:34 AM »

Arcadeflow 5.0 is out, list wrap around, low spec mode, game boy colorizer. Enjoy and report bugs!

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 17, 2019, 05:31:10 AM »

What is your favorite Game Boy screen? Pocket? Classic? Or Light? In Arcadeflow 5.0 you'll be able to chose the color correction you prefer

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 13, 2019, 01:47:49 AM »

So, performance wise, I reduced the impact of the shaders to the minimum, the only one that was slowing down the system was the one working at native screen resolution while all the others work on low res surfaces. Now this shader had an impact on my Quadro equipped rig because I pushed the resolution to 5000 x 3000 to have fps less than 60
On other rigs where the resolution is more "normal" the impact of this shader is not so heavy and the real issue are the multiple surfaces. I'll see if it can be improved a bit.

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 12, 2019, 11:08:26 AM »

Ah interesting. When 5.0 release happens I will try it in the other less powerful computer where Arcadeflow with normal settings runs almost in slow motion

You can try the attached layout.nut file, it should improve a lot the performaces (at the expense of most visual effects)

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 12, 2019, 05:03:31 AM »

Working good here with your code change, thx so much again.

Looking forward to 5.0.

Very good! 5.0 is almost ready, but following the latest feedbacks regarding performances I'm experimenting a bit with the shaders. It seems I found a shader that can reduce the fps from 60 to 45, I'll try to fix it if possible. I'll be on vacation from the 20th of this month so hopefully I'll release 5.0 next week and then go to the sea lol

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 12, 2019, 04:54:01 AM »

It's strange that if i exit  arcadeflow and enter again all back to normal ... it's like as something running on th background ... but i've checked the task manager and all processes are closed ...

-- Update ! ---

On another PC with I7 and GTX 1080 works like a charm ... so i think the problem is my NUC that has no power enough ...

The only thing that can kick in after some time in Arcadeflow is the "attract mode", that is the layout starts showing random videos of games. You can try disabling it in Arcadeflow options.

Glad that it works better on your other system but if it runs at 60 fps on the NUC it's really strange that it slows down so much, maybe it's a thermal throttling problem?

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 11, 2019, 07:53:23 AM »

I'm getting a weird problem, maybe a bug that noticed just now. When I click the "exit picture" from AF display menu, instead of exit frontend it loads the system/romlist that exists before the "exit picture".

Found this, it was my mistake. I'd share an updated layout but I changed so much working for 5.0 so it's better that you change it yourself: look for this code snippet:

Code: [Select]

   if ((sig == "select") && ((prf.DISPLAYMENUON) ) ) {
      fe.set_display(fe.list.index)
      return true
   }
and change it with this:

Code: [Select]

   if ((sig == "select") && ((prf.DISPLAYMENUON)) ) {
      if (fe.list.index < fe.displays.len())
         fe.set_display(fe.list.index)
      else
         fe.signal("exit")
      return true
   }

On the log there's an error there that gives an hint of the possible issue:

AN ERROR HAS OCCURED [remove() failed]

CALLSTACK
*FUNCTION [on_transition()] D:\Attract-Mode - Arcadeflow\layouts/Arcadeflow_49/layout.nut line [3615]


When I check that line in the layout, it seems to be related to the Exit command because it's part of the code starting with line:

// cleanup frosted glass grabs when exiting AM

Hmm let me know if with the modification you still get the error, it's something that happens when Arcadeflow cleans the temporary snaps used for frosted glass effect. Maybe you have some snapshots with non-sequential progressive numbers?

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 10, 2019, 07:09:54 AM »

When i start Attract mode on Arcadeflow theme for MAME, i don't have issues and all run at 60fps ...But when i quit the game and back to the frontend, the framerate go to 25 - 30 fps . If i exit Attract-Mode and restart it , all back to 60 fps ...

Are you using version 4.9 of AF? This is a strange issue, I'll check if I can replicate it ASAP. Does it happens even if you start the game and quit it after a very short amount of time, or only when you keep it running?

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« on: July 10, 2019, 06:32:53 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

I've tried to strip Arcadeflow of many visual effects. On my laptop this brings the framerate from 44 fps to 60 fps. There's still a lot to change and tweak but if anybody interested in a low spec version could check this layout and report feedback that would help a lot.

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« 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.

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« 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.

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« 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.

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« 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

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 )

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.

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Themes / Re: Arcadeflow theme v 4.9 [Release] Updated 27 June 2019

« 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...