What I'd love to see in a frontend one day

[Mike]

I was thinking about what would be a really usable and cool looking in a frontend and I came up with what I'd like to see. I was going to keep it quiet and code it myself but I just haven't had time as I've been traveling too much with work. Basically It's a knock off of the wheel. And your going to have to visualize this as I don't have time to do a mock up. But basically it would have an arcade cabinet in the center of the screen. This could be just a flat picture displaying the screen shot and marquee or could pull in the 3-d model if you have it loaded then in like what I guess would end up looking like an eclipse you'd have the screenshots like rotate around the cabinet like they are moving on a wheel but of course it will be like 3 dimensional.  And the front one will be the selected one and kind of pop out so it's a little larger kind of like what ed did with arcadefx. And underneath it it would display the name of the game. Then on the sides and the top and bottom. You'd have 4 different ways to filter games in the wheel. Like one side would be year, the top could be genre, the right could be manufacturer and the bottom could be like number or players or some other option. Now no clones appear in the wheel. When you select the game you want to play it launches if there are no clones, if there are clones the wheel displays the clones and you select the one you want to play. The clone will should also default to the clone you selected last next time you go into it. The categories on the top, sides and bottom would be controlled just with the second player joystick you hit up you move the top category, right you move the right side category and so forth. The wheel could be controled with the spinner or player one joystick. I know you couldn't really skin much more than the background with a layout like this but I think it would be so cool and usable that it wouldn't matter. Anyways I just wanted to throw it out there in case someone else had time to code it, if not I guess I will eventually get to it myself.

[)p(]

i am not sure if  i picture this right but it sounds similar to cylarcade mode in my fe...

peter

[Mike]

I think your thinking a tad different. are you referring to your arcade cabinets in a circle? I'm more saying one cabinet that changes as the game is selected but there are screen shots or marquees or what ever you wanted to use to go around it. That way it isn't quite so processor intensive. Yes your FE is where I get most of my ideas but taking a lot of your stuff from director to like C++ is huge work.

[)p(]

I think your thinking a tad different. are you referring to your arcade cabinets in a circle? I'm more saying one cabinet that changes as the game is selected but there are screen shots or marquees or what ever you wanted to use to go around it. That way it isn't quite so processor intensive. Yes your FE is where I get most of my ideas but taking a lot of your stuff from director to like C++ is huge work.

ok i see... no that does not work with the current skinner...but internally it can do that also...

i think hc might surprise you soon also with something  

peter

[Mike]

Yeah i know howard has something up his sleeve. Dragon King, while nice, certainly could have been done without directx. So I figured had some plans to really utilize it.

[Howard_Casto]

My goal on getting this in is october, but eventually every single element in my fe can be represented by a 3d model.  So you could build what you say quite easily, at least in theory.  

[Lilwolf]

Mine is kinda like that... But the cab doesn't change based on the year (but they type of game)..

The screen rotates in the cab (and the marquee also does).

then there are rotating cubes at the bottom that move around when you go up / down to the next game.

Then there is special animation based on pageup/down and random.

But all this... and I haven't had time to play with it in a week.  I have most of the parts working, but not all put together..

That, and I have to modify the models by hand (because I haven't figured out transparencies in gl4java yet and the rotating screenshots need the existing screenshots to be removed...

I'm hoping to make these go into another file, so that I can do this without changing any of the original file (to protect the authors work)... Or (and more likely) I will ask permission for each cabinet to add... And put them into the code so that you cant just add new cabinets (since you probably cant anyway).

[visciouslymamed]

I actually had something very similar setup using EmuTron. It had a cab in the center with a snap/movie and marquee. Then titles were drawn in a carosel type effect around the cab. I was having problems with a second display event for the clones though, so I just axed the event from the script. I didn't have the filter options, but gamelists were easy enough to change out.

Two major problems with this script though

1. To get recognizable screens and maintain the illusion of the carosel, the resolution had to be very high (xga only). I think it ran 1280x960, but it may have been as high as 1600x1200.

2. It was too graphic intensive. The gamelist refresh was too slow because of all the image loading/processing.

If you want, I can look around and see if I still have the script somewhere. It is still a wip, but if you dropped the number of screens you might be able to get it to run smooth and at a lower resolution. I just didn't like how the lower res carosel looked and since I decided to go with an arcade monitor... I lost the motivation to find a way to fix it. Proof of concept I guess, it did work.