Hey, this looks pretty good I like it.
New GUI idea (with box art)
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08-19-2012, 07:45 PM
Instead of directly creating this interface in Dolphin, I think you should create a front-end for Dolphin first, so that everyone can test the interface with ease.
With all due respect, I don't see the box art interface to be very practical. The current interface is near perfect and allows me to see my games more easily with more details at a glance. I'm not saying you shouldn't continue with this type of interface, I'm just saying you should include it as an option among more interface styles. If you're deciding to create a front-end (for the time being atleast), you'll have more freedom as to where you'll place the elements. The separate window idea is a bad design IMO. It'll become a real hassle having to X out the window every time you miss click or for whatever reason. Seeing as this could also potentially be used for HTPCs and the like, I think having the game description appear in the main window would be the better choice. Having controller and hotkey support for navigation would be a major plus. Is this a project you want to do solo, or are you ok with people joining/contributing?
Artist, you are not. You said so beforehand so it's fine. I'll going to leave my artist snobbery to that statement.
Now, as for the design, outside of your specific execution (leaving a little room to make it prettier down the road). I gave to the mac guy a few weeks ago a response that I still think is valid. Where do all the covers come from? GameTDB usually fails for everything but the absolute most popular and/or newest titles; it's niche Wii selection is bad, and it's GameCube selection is horrific. If you want both a good scan and resolution higher than 300x300 and not JPGed to death, more often than not you have to go hunting. And with GCN, Wiiware, Wii, Virtual Console, and all their different versions for NTSC, PAL, JAP, etc etc, you are talking thousands and thousands of artworks. The only alternative to that is to just get what you can from the wiki and gameTDB, and be fine with blanks. And if you have blanks, all the benefits of that model are thrown out the window, because you can't rely on the covers for the blanks and have to fall back on names. The same issue is applied to the descriptions. Someone has to either make it or collect this stuff, and it's a lot harder than you might think. I bring this up because as someone that makes wiki articles, I both get covers and make descriptions regularly, and it's rarely easy. The main problem I have with the covers model is that adds more time mucking about the interface. In theory, the perfect interface is so natural is almost disappears, small and out of the way, and yet when you need to find something it is easy to find. With the covers model, you have big pictures taking up lots of space, so you are adding interface time with scrolling and looking for games. Plus, you have it set up that you have to click the game to open a details window, then hit play. So it adds two additional time suckers to the interface. But what does it give? The main benefit is that the covers are recognizable. Recognizability cuts down time looking for stuff, so that's good. The game bars that are in dolphin now aren't as recognizable, but you learn them quickly and the same effect is achieved while taking up alot less space, so in the end it's benefits generally outweigh covers. As for descriptions, I can't really justify that, because gamers already own these games so they know this stuff already. And I know you aren't a designer, but the biggest problem I have with the current UI isn't the list of games, it's UI controls at the top. The fact you have the very old fashioned file menus and big buttons, duplicating functionality and taking up space. That urks me. And you didn't touch it... So there you go, my views on it. I figure with all the criticizing I keep doing with these, one of these days I'll have to stop avoiding it and do a mockup. But eh, laziness wins for now. Intel Xeon w7-3465X OC | Asus Pro WS W790-E Sage SE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 8x16GiB G-Skill Zeta R5 DDR5-6000 | Windows 11 23H2 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 13
My aim with this was to make it feel more like a cabinet of games than a list of ROMs on your computer. That was mostly it. As for the description and the time wasting MaJoR was talking about, I think the easiest solution to that would be:
- add a search function (for people with larger collections like me) - make an option in Config or something to launch a game from the grid versus going to the info screen I do think, looking back, it makes more sense to use the same window for game info and everything. If this could be controlled with a gamepad (where "b" is back as usual and "a" is select kinda thing) then it would be great. The box-art I think is most easily taken from GameFAQs (if they don't just deny service) because they have all of the games I searched for with a consistent picture size. This could just be dumped to a server (or the user's computer) and be run through a jpg->bmp converter (yes I realize that jpeg is lossy but no normal user really notices anyway). The buttons on the top will have to be redesigned by someone actually good at this kinda stuff, not just some random programmer. I think this could make a great front end for multiple emulators so it will probably go in that direction. I'll probably make a project on Google Code for it so if anyone else is interested in developing they can.
Desktop:
OS: Windows 7 64 bit CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K @ 4.4 GHz GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Factory OC'ed) RAM: 16 GB @ 1600 MHz Dolphin Revision:3.0, 3.0-784, 3.5, latest 3.5 08-20-2012, 06:29 AM
What should the project be called? I honestly have no idea what to call it.
Desktop:
OS: Windows 7 64 bit CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K @ 4.4 GHz GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Factory OC'ed) RAM: 16 GB @ 1600 MHz Dolphin Revision:3.0, 3.0-784, 3.5, latest 3.5 08-20-2012, 06:36 AM
Yeah, it's pretty much dead (although I guess it could always be revived, I don't want to deal with that personally ).
I'm ready to make the project on gcode now, I just need some idea of what to call the thing. Also, I think the GUI should include both list and grid views (where list view would look sort of like Dolphin's only a bit more refined to have a better "notes" column). A search function would also be nice as I said before, but that can be implemented later. EDIT: I'm just calling it dolphin-gui-front-end for now. Here's a link to it (although it is completely empty right now and it was put together rather hastily): http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-gui-front-end/ If you want to join the project to help develop, pm me (and if my settings don't allow that post here to tell me that). I'm making other people owners so that people more familiar with gcode can add developers and whatnot. EDIT 2: If this ends up working, I'll probably clone it and make it into a Movie front-end as well (that would work with VLC Media player, which has a CLI). The idea to this would be that, essentially, everything would be very similar, only some stuff that goes on in the background (like finding movie descriptions and info) would need to come from different websites.
Desktop:
OS: Windows 7 64 bit CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K @ 4.4 GHz GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Factory OC'ed) RAM: 16 GB @ 1600 MHz Dolphin Revision:3.0, 3.0-784, 3.5, latest 3.5 08-20-2012, 11:47 AM
Quote:This could just be dumped to a server (or the user's computer) and be run through a jpg->bmp converter (yes I realize that jpeg is lossy but no normal user really notices anyway). Why convert to BMP? I'm not a programmer, but isn't supporting JPG pretty easy? It is an old format, standard everywhere, and highly documented. Intel Xeon w7-3465X OC | Asus Pro WS W790-E Sage SE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 8x16GiB G-Skill Zeta R5 DDR5-6000 | Windows 11 23H2 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 13
08-20-2012, 12:27 PM
I've just found bmp is easier to deal with for the stuff I've done with images, and there is more support for it (for example, the GUI mock-up tool I used only supported bmp).
Desktop:
OS: Windows 7 64 bit CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K @ 4.4 GHz GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Factory OC'ed) RAM: 16 GB @ 1600 MHz Dolphin Revision:3.0, 3.0-784, 3.5, latest 3.5 |
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