Dan Patrick

The greys you're using look really good. Especially on the details view. The right side of the box art views is the only part to me that is a little low in contrast. Maybe use the brighter grey gradient used in the details page. I actually like that you removed the three icons that were at the top right too. This is incredible! Yeah dude, I've got nothing else to say! I see you took several thoughts I had and the adjustments you made to the layout look super great! I'm hyped to use this! Thanks thimolor!

Cool stuff thimolor! I'm going to give a couple more thoughts here if that's alright with you... 1) You showed that game details view. You nailed it there! The first image of the two gets my vote because I love how the box aligns with the right details. I also enjoy the little gap in the vertical line. Keep that! I studied that page and really tried to be critical (sorry lol). I edited the screen shot and wrote some stuff on it. I was being really really nitpicky so obviously just ignore whatever you don't like out of that. 2) The text views you just showed are (to me personally) a step in the wrong direction. That's a little too bare bones imo. I'm mainly talking about color (the layout seems fine). From previous versions I liked the very subtle gradients and the left section being noticeably darker. I liked how you initially had the gradient line about twice as thick as your other grey lines. I personally like that (only for that one line). That to me gives it some extra oomph and if its thinner like the other lines it's not quite as strong. Basically the styling I show in these images I included here is how I personally want it to be styled throughout. Basically I think it should be bare but with just enough oomph! Hopefully I haven't come across too negative here. I truly do love the theme! I'm just being really nit-picky. Again, these are just my personal thoughts. This is your theme, do what you want with it. Thanks for allowing me to give my critical eye to this! Keep going man! Appreciate your hard work!

Very Cool!! Glad you liked my feedback. Looking good! Couple of tiny things...On the text view: I'd personally align the year/developer/genre part to the top of the game title. I'd also make the rating number grey and not white (totally a preference). The navy selection bar I feel should butt right up against the main right section (in other words, no tiny black gap). On the box art view...That looks super cool! I say have two versions of box art views, One that's the round carousel style you have there, and then a second one that's more "bare bones" that has a flat wheel like you had before but just add a similar glow effect. Obviously the stuff I'm mentioning is just thoughts. You do you!

I personally think your icons should all be the grey like how you did number of players and play count. In other words, the star(and text by it) and the favorite and trophy icons should be that same grey. That's just my opinion. I like how the only colored thing besides game media is the line and that navy in the text view. The general lack of color fits the bare bones aesthetic! I love it! On the box art view, it's not clear enough to me what box is selected. Maybe the boxes around it should desaturate slightly or maybe the selected box should get slightly bigger. I'm sure you'll work that out. I know it's a work in progress. On your text view, I agree that the box art would look better if it was larger. How about this...The year, manufacturer and genre go to the right of the game description right aligned with the video, The box art can scale to the full height of the video then. It's a thought! I don't know if I fully like the data on the right side but it's not too bad. The first screenshot shows my alignment suggestions. The background isn't supposed to be all blocky so ignore that part of my example. Your theme is absolutely great looking! It will probably become my instant new favorite. Looks great Thimolor!

Oooh this looks promising! Fast classic became dirty old. This is going back to that original minimalistic vision. I like what I'm seeing. I'm all about this simplicity. Just a few views is plenty. Excited to see more of this! Thanks for all your hard work.

This is almost done now! Hopefully within a week! I keep adding more logos and perfected others as much as I can. I also recently found archive.org has tons of great manual scans so I've been using that for logo references now too.

Truly amazing work! Everybody needs to try this one!

These banners look great! Nice and simple. I like the images you're using for the hardware there. It's looking really dope!

This is looking really great! Love the animations! That really adds a lot of polish to it. I also like the circles for the rating. That muted texture effect for the backgrounds is really well done. I can't wait to try this one! Looks like one of the best themes yet! Thanks for your hard work on this.

Thanks! Still working hard on it. Getting closer to being done!

I'm currently creating/modifying a full(?) set of platform clear logos. By creating I mean literally DRAWING FROM SCRATCH in Adobe Illustrator in vector! One logo can range from taking one hour and go up to FOUR HOURS to perfect! Of course many of the logos have great versions already available and I won't be drawing those from scratch but simply examining thoroughly and touching up those if necessary. I will release all of these in extreme quality as well as my original vector drawing files. I don't want to take full credit for my upcoming collection because a lot of them will be essentially the same vector svgs used by the emulation station community. I'm combing over all of them though trying to fix flaws and redrawing logos if necessary. All of the ones shown here are either heavily altered or brand new drawings! Thanks to Pit's Arts on the forums for the TeknoParrot PNG that I traced from. I also drew a new arcade classics logo just for fun. The goal of this upcoming platform clear logo collection is to make all of the logos we use for platforms simply more accurate and higher quality. This is not to knock others who have worked hard to create currently used versions in the past but simply to improve upon that hard work further. Hopefully I don't come off as pretentious! I just want to make our platform logos the best they can be! This whole process started because I am also making a theme which needs accurate logos for a collection of hand drawn icons. I was touching up so many logos along the way that I decided to actually focus on just the logos for a while and get them fixed up some. I have spent around 90 hours doing just the logos as of right now! I know that this is not something people care too much about but I hope you can get some enjoyment from my labor of love once I release the full logo set. As a sneak peek of my theme's art, I'm going to show off a couple of my Icon backgrounds here for the first time. The theme will be called "ICONIC". I've been working on it everyday for nearly 3 months . The reason it has taken so long is because I wanted to draw all of these icons very accurately. It will support only about 40 to 50 platforms because It's just not reasonable to do more than that for me. The backgrounds scroll and loop continually through the magic of the theme creators animations. Currently it has a Nintendo style look with greys, reds and white. I know it looks really red but In the theme it's not too overpowering the way I'm using it. I plan to make a more neutral version as well. You'll see more of the ICONIC theme later. I have made a few long Youtube videos that show my tedious logo creation process in action! Feel free to skip around them because they aren't the most exciting videos in the world. If you take a peek at the (rough/unedited) recordings you can feel the vibes I'm putting into these logos. The logo collection will release very soon. The ICONIC theme will release....not as soon but still soon.

That sounds cool! Thanks.

Hello CMOSS. Yes! It is possible to have an image wider than the screen. This is what I'm currently testing on my theme. I’m creating scrolling backgrounds essentially and they are wider than 4k. The image was originally created that way and then I when I load it into the theme creator I picked the scaling option uniform to fill. So it kept the aspect ratio. I set my starting point to a negative number and then move it to a positive number in a left to right animation. The kicker is, I created the image at a wider aspect ratio, not 16x9. I tried it at 32x9 and yeah you can do that. But the image was created that way outside of the creator and then brought in. You simply can't set an image to a resolution wider than your screen though. Make the image wider outside of the theme creator. Do it in photoshop or something. Then use that “uniform to fill” option.

Thanks for your reply! Well, I haven't tried that and maybe that's what I need. The kicker is, would this have to be set per console because every box shape is different? I would like it to be a rounding setting and I say y'know 15 pixels and that works on each box regardless of its shape. Even within one system there can be different box shapes. For instance if you have a Japanese GBA game amongst your US GBA games then the box will be more of a rectangle than a square. I have already found that it's possible to "fake" an outline. It's imperfect but it does work. I had my box art where I wanted it and added a second slightly larger box behind it tinted 100% opacity white and then it gave the outline effect. The problem is that some of my games have more than one box art that was downloaded for it and it will load one box art for the visible box and and a different box art for the "outline box" that sits behind it. It does work 95 percent of the time. But I just want my theme to look polished for every user so I have since not wanted to use that idea just for that reason. I know you're really busy making so many more major changes such as the parent/child situation which is very smart. I was hoping you'd add that. I'm listening to that stream on my phone while I'm at work today lol!

Y2guru, I have a request... For my current theme I would like to have a simple outline around boxart and be able to set the pixel amount and color of the outline. I would also like the ability to round corners on box art. I love how the rounding corners works for frames. The rounded corners may be difficult to do because theres the box art container and the actual box art image within that container. I, of course, am referring to rounding the box art itself not the container. So therefore, that may be terribly difficult on your end. I don't know! But I think that would be a super cool feature and super useful! Thanks so so much for the many hard hours you have put in theme creator! The hard work really shows!

Yes, UI scaling is a little strange. I've noticed that it's best to start the theme with a 100% scale so that all the backend files initially create the files at 4K or whatever res you want. I actually lost some progress because I started a theme at 4k at 225% scaling and I was confused by why all the measurements were saying I was essentially at 900p res. I then realized that I needed to be at 100% scaling and you can't change it in the editor (the xaml text files won't show a difference if you change windows scaling) once it's initially created. So I forced to to be 3840x2160(4k) by editing on line in the xaml text file but this then threw off my entire theme because it got way smaller in the editor. So that's why I say start your themes at 100% scaling! What sets the resolution is that initially starting resolution and scaling of your theme. If later you then want to have the larger UI scaling for the editor and go to say 225% at 4k then the backend xaml files will still be 3840x2160 (4k) but sadly the measurement numbers will still be showing a lower res based on your scaling amount. So what I now do is this...once I set me theme initially at true 4k 100% scaling, I then set it back to 225% like i prefer for the ui scaling to be more readable. The pixel count of element sizes will still be off (but scaled proportionally so it still will stay in place with scaling changes) but the background xaml files will still say 3840x2160(4k). Once I have my theme loosely where I want want it I will then switch my dpi back 100% to do the precise movements and measurements. It's a bit of a pain but at least I understand it. Ideally, it should set the background xaml files and usable pixel measurements at 3840x2160 without it looking at your dpi scaling of windows. It should only be scaling the UI of the editor and not the theme element measurements. This is probably quite a hard issue to resolve I would imagine. I've also noticed that at times animations seem to be smoother at the initially set resolution and scaling. Sometimes when I change my scaling from 100% to 225% and test my theme the animations are a tiny bit laggy. But switching back to 100% they will be perfectly 60fps again. That doesn't always happen though so I'm still not sure what's up there. Maybe that's just me. On an unrelated note, just as a tip, I'll say this; If you are making custom art for your theme I have found it will only be fully clear if it's exported/created at 72ppi. At work I commonly export things at 300 dpi for print files. 72ppi is for web/screens generally. Anyway, I was drawing all these custom icons for my new theme (which I have yet to reveal) and was exporting them at 300ppi and when I tested them in my theme they were all super blurry! I was going crazy trying to figure out why. Then when I went back and reexported the files at 72ppi they were showing the real resolution and not a blurry mess. So I just scaled them up in Adobe Illustrator (they can scale because it's vector art) so that they'd still be pin sharp at 72ppi.

Y2GURU, If your reading this, I want this feature too! Ideally on the list of animation triggers there should still be a general "during selection" animation trigger, but there should also be a "during left selection" and "during right selection". Good luck mgerety!

No problem! Don't worry about it!

That is an interesting problem! I have put about 15-20 hours in the theme editor so far on a theme that I'm cooking up. What you are asking is doable I can assure but it may not be easy. I don't fully know how you would do this but I have have part of it solved in my head. Instead of having something trigger which animation plays, I think it would be more doable to have two separate wheels in the exact same location. The animations would be set to "During Selection" and there would also be some clever opacity switching so basically if you had just used the left one, the right one would instantly fade in and the left would fade out. The real problem is...how does is know you've done right or left? I think this will have to require some small amount of code. Some sort of "if, then" statement or something (I'm not good at that sort of thing). To do this without coding anything will require serious clever thinking.