Add a default background for roms without images?

[jrsconfitto]

One of my frustrations with this app when I first started was that I had games in the right folders, but I didn't see any of them show up. I added backgrounds to the images folders and then they would show up.

It was pretty confusing to have roms but not see anything show up. A flood of doubts overwhelmed me 😢 (ok, ok, I exaggerate), but I started to question whether I had set something up wrong, didn't have libretro working, or if kart was just broken.

I think having a generic image would be helpful if there's no image already. I've been using the geopatterns stuff in other projects of mine because they're easy and look good. I can use those when there isn't an image for a rom already present.

I don't mind coding up a PR, just wanted to get your thoughts. What do you think? Did you have other ideas for this already?

Way later down the road, it would be nice to allow the user to find a good image for a rom through a Creative Commons search.

[maddox]

So, the original idea was that by manually adding the art yourself and there being a requirement that all roms needing to have art exist, it was a form of curation. This means that you don't have to show all of your roms if you don't want to. It also of course ensures that it always looks good.

Now, of course, you can just curate by only having the roms you want in the roms directories, lol. So I'm not sure I'm that married to the original decision.

I'm a bit torn though. I'd hate for people to fire up Kart and just use shitty patterned images instead of getting the best experience they can, but it's also a lot to ask to go fetch images for every rom JUST so you can actually play it.

Ideally, there'd be a scanner of course. But that means having an actual good source to do look ups to. And neither http://consolegrid.com or http://steambanners.booru.org are very complete. http://steambanners.booru.org has a lot to choose from, but god is their search indexing terrrrible.

I also don't feel like getting into the library management game via node and js, even if its just to look up art. Though it might not be as bad as it seems.

Anyways, thats the history of why its like what it is and the goals and pitfalls I want to avoid. I'd love to hear more thoughts.

[maddox]

So here are some more thoughts:

Console Grid

Consolegrid is probably the best source to scrape from. Here are its biggest issues:

Some games are missing art

Not a terrible big deal since its probably like 10% of the games. And welp, sometimes you just gotta go digging yourself and go make your own. That's how these things work sometimes.

Some art is the wrong size

This is a worse problem because if we get the wrong aspect it'll wreck the UI due to the way the layout is done with percentages to maintain everything well.

I have a node module in there that can check image sizes, so we can just download the image and check it's size and if it's not 460x215, we don't add it. So we could def ensure bad art doesn't get applied.

Scanning

We could avoid bad art coming though by not even having a "scanner" and instead just UI to click and update the art, a la the collection adding modal.

• User clicks an icon to update art
• Modal pops up showing potential art that can be used
• Modal also includes a url field to add an image by url

That'd be pretty simple to spin up.

[jrsconfitto]

Wow, i'm glad i asked first. You've given this a lot more thought than i have.

i'm cool with the curation aspect of the app, if people are installing their own emulator they probably care about their games and want to put time into it. That said, i'm all for facilitating an easier way to get the images you want for your roms.

Were you thinking about providing a way to add a rom into the app and pick an image from ConsoleGrid while you do that? That makes sense to me.

i ran into the image size issue because i got some weird ninja gaiden image (apparently there's a new game out) and it borked the layout.

I also don't feel like getting into the library management game via node and js, even if its just to look up art.

For a second, i considered writing a music management app using atom-shell so i could get off of iTunes but i think i felt something similar to this stopping me.

[maddox]

So, I think I'm 👍 on this now.

If we want to make a way for a user to add art, the rom needs to be there in the first place. So to do that, we'll need SOMTHING there. So I think the combination of your suggestion of geopatterns, which i'm a huge fan of, and then a modal to pick art, it'd work out.

So yeah, if you want to spike a pull that gives all roms without art a geopattern image, I'm 👍 on it.

I can work on doing the art picker modal at the same time. Then they can come together and work pretty well.

From what I gathered in a quick lookover of that node module, it looks like it will provide image data, and not just a css pattern. This is a big deal, because we'll need to actually do that to handle the sizing of everything. The images themselves actually play a part in the aspect of everything and sizing. So it'll def need to be image data.

I'm thinking something simple like, a image method on Game that returns the image data of what's on disk if it's art exists, or just returns the generated geopattern imagedata. Then the app can just basically be stupid.

[jrsconfitto]

OK, i'll give it a shot. Thanks for giving me a little direction with where to start 😄

[maddox]

Np. 👍 👍 👍

I have years worth of ideas on what this should be in my head :)

[jrsconfitto]

haha! awesome!

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 10:16 PM, Jon Maddox notifications@github.com
wrote:

Np. [image: 👍][image: 👍][image: 👍]

I have years worth of ideas on what this should be in my head :)

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