Add grid support (kinda)

[Dobli]

Hey,

I recently started playing with my own theme. I first started of with a normal grid design, but was not content with ES placement of various tile sizes when using game boxes of different shapes (or rather the adaptions necessary for each system). I also wanted to place game art more prominently and therefore shifted to a 1 row grid instead. As it took shape I started to think about an according system selection and realized that epicnoir would fit perfectly here, especially since it does not have grid support yet. I decided to further adapt the style to closer match the one of epicnoir and provide it as a PR here.

Like I already said game selection is at the bottom in a line, game art is displayed full size on the right, fading out to the left. If available it will play videos otherwise use screenshots of the game. I placed them in a way that centers them in the visible area as in most games this contains the interesting parts. Fonts for game info data is the same as in the system selection of epicnoir, similarly I added help indicators in the same style at the bottom.

Here are some screenshots:

As it not perfect yet and I want collect some feedback I opened it as a draft. My open points are the following:

• Where to display the system/logo name. I thought about the upper right corner, but this often conflicts with in game overlays on the screenshots/videos.
• What data to display, I currently do not display all meta data
• As game boxes have different shapes there are templates (in ´_templates/´) to adapt the grid a little (e.g. showing less items for wide boxes), these need to be referenced in the system theme.xml files. Portrait box art is default and does not require adaption. For the systems I use I provided examples. As this is probably necessary for more systems, but checking the fitting format for each system may be time consuming, I think it is okay to just start with these and adapt as soon as someone notices there is something off.

[byDimax]

Loving it! I will be trying epicnoir soon on my pi4 and would love to see this there as well.

Regarding box art issue / different box sizes for different systems, you could consider showing the game name decal instead. I mean the gif/png with the game name that you can download from many game databases alongside marquee, etc.

Maybe you can show the box art where you currently show the screens and video (first the box art, then video if available, then screenshot). Just an idea :-)

[c64-dev]

Indeed amazing work Dobli.
About the system logo and the meta data, I would suggest to tighten up the current (4) meta data lines and add the system logo on top and a couple more lines to the data.
I would go with less is more; not everything needs to be displayed necessarily.

As for the box art, I agree; not everything needs to be formatted from the get go. If some system doesn't show up the art properly we can come back to this.
Looking forward to the final release. I feel that your presentation is even better than what we currently have on the project.

[Dobli]

Hi @c64-dev unfortunately I did not continue on the theme changes, as I wasn't really happy with the grid handling of ES, especially when working with box art of different shapes. Instead I found a better fitting approach for me personally was to use cover art from SteamGridDB, as these come in the unified portrait format that Steam expects. This helps greatly to get a streamlined more condensed look for the cover grid, I also think this would fit the epicnoir astetics quite well.

As my main target was my SteamOS PC I adapted the theme to somewhat resemble the look of the new SteamDeck UI (using SteamGridDB art) to have a smoother transition between the two UIs (see the screenshot below), but ultimately I stopped using ES altogether as I started to just launch everything through Steams new UI (with the addition of easy button remapping and streaming for emulated games).

So feel free to just merge my changes and adapt it to your liking, for questions or in case you need additional resources (like the theme below) just ask, happy to provide them. I guess I could also provide the epicnoir changes in my branch, but with the grid structure like on the screenshot below (so more condensed, white selection frame, aimed for use with SteamGridDB, but at same position at the bottom of the screen).

[c64-dev]

Thank you for the detailed responce and the merge offer @Dobli.
I will review the changes and see if we can adapt them further to the theme in due time.
Great work!