[PLUGIN] Game Info Plugin

[Adultery]

I mean, anyone can customize the imagery to their liking in any way they like. It's really up to the designer how it'll look... Unless I missed the question.

[Draco1962]

@Adultery - I am thinking that he is wanting it to see it change with each "theme" that is available for each program as Krakerman's Game Room theme does.

@Starbuck - Plugins, by nature, are not designed to change as is being requested. Since it would likely require a huge undertaking to rewrite the code to accommodate and add quite a bit to the processing load to refresh and change the images for each program "theme," I would say not possible.

I would recommend creating a Game Room Theme default set of images for the plugin that would work well across all individual program themes being created (probably based off of the Start Page image for the theme).

[Adultery]

If that's the case it would indeed be a lot of work for me (would need a suitable way to load themes, write a block that picks that image, etc).

I think Drac said it about as well as I could.

[starbuck]

I'll have to hook up a secondary monitor and run your plug-in. Based on what the demo shows, when you switch to a different game a different theme shows. Contra, super mario or whatever. Since Kraks themes are only a png file It seems to me that it would be simple for the plug in to use that png on the second monitor. I'm sute i'm not thinking about this correctly so excuse me for my stupidity.

[Draco1962]

You can also configure it to run at the bottom of your primary monitor. Once you have used the plugin and selected from the available themes, you will probably understand a little better how the plugin works and its limitations.

[Adultery]

Indeed.

The themes I make are universal to all systems regardless of the game. So you run a Contra based theme for Game Info, but it's the same images no matter what the game is that's playing (except the game snapshots that is).

Here's a theme I made for Duck Hunt. I haven't posted it on the theme download topic yet but I will in a second. This shows the banner while it's searching online for Last.FM data:

As you cans see, it's a Duck Hunt banner no matter what it's doing based on the image paths I specified in the theme's XML.

I put an assload of work in to make the plugin compatible with GameEx in windowed mode recently, so you don't need 2 monitors to use it (although that's what it's made to do). Feel free to play around with it.

Edit: Here's the Duck Hunt theme I mentioned up there:

[starbuck]

My thansks for the answers. My goal this week end is to hook up that second monitor. Has anyone played a second monitor on the wall above their flatscreen tv. Would love to pictures of that running.

[Krakerman]

I have 3 monitors 1 above my 47" HDTV which on a shelf and the HDTV is mounted to the wall and another monitor is to the right of my workstation on a side table. The one above my HDTV is for Future Pinball backglasses and the other one if for playing vertical shmups, custom Visual Pinball backglasses and well as custom images that I made for my games in GameEx since that monitor can rotate I have it set @ 1050x1680.

Gotta say it looks really cool.

[Adultery]

Here's a Castlevania skin:

You can download it from here:

Enjoy!

[Adultery]

Updated to 1.1.5:

I probably wouldn't have put this out as an official version since it was only a couple minor bug fixes and I tuned up the LFM module for error reporting. I noticed the old version that comes with GameEx keeps being overwritten with 1.1.1 (which breaks compatibility with the monitor assignment fix I initiated in 1.1.2) when Tom updates GameEx, so before I had him add this into the GameEx install I wanted to make sure your build was current.

This will be it for a while. Holidays, school, etc... Not gonna have much time to work on it (and what time I do have will go into adding the control panel viewer).

Happy holidays!

[Adultery]

Playing around a bit...

Pressing SHIFT+SPACE will bring up the new Control Panel view during your game. You can specify your theme's CP background image in the theme's XML, and the viewer allows you to set a default panel to show if you don't have one specifically for that game (the name of the image must match the ROM name of course). The display stays up for 15 seconds, or until you hit SHIFT+SPACE again. Here's a shot of mine:

Essentially I suppose you could put any image in there and it'll do the same thing, but it was really made for your controls screen. I'm thinking of adding a text reader form too for FAQs and whatnot. Maybe.

[Draco1962]

SPACE INVADERS GAME INFO THEME - Looks great with my original Space Invaders theme and the full 1080P updated version I have been working on and off for a while and will be releasing soon.

SpaceInvaders.zip

[nullPointer]

SPACE INVADERS GAME INFO THEME - Looks great with my original Space Invaders theme and the full 1080P updated version I have been working on and off for a while and will be releasing soon.

Way to drop the bombshell on the 1080p Space Invaders theme! I'm looking forward to seeing that. Your original Space Invaders theme has always been a personal favorite of mine.

[Adultery]

SPACE INVADERS GAME INFO THEME - Looks great with my original Space Invaders theme and the full 1080P updated version I have been working on and off for a while and will be releasing soon.

Damn fine Drac! Not sure how I missed this gem!!

[Draco1962]

I think you've been pretty busy as of late! Thanks!

[KRC]

Game Info THEME

GameEx For DD (Dulcis Domus) but is quite universal.

GameEx_DD-Game_Info_Theme.zip

[Adultery]

Hello everyone! I just want to let you all know that there have been some pretty hefty updates in my plugin as of late. In addition to the updated Game Info website, I have added a theme section, a comprehensive overview of all the features available, a nice write-up for theme creation with a sample XML, and I added a link to my Last.FM patch so you can download it directly as opposed to PMing me. And here is the changelog info with a pretty fair feature list.

Here's a list of the new features in 1.1.6:

• New Control Panel Viewer
  • Pressing SHIFT+SPACE in game brings up a Control Panel viewer, which is set up in the plugin's configuration.
  • You can specify a backdrop for the image to overlay on
  • Set a default control panel image for any emulator
  • Specify a set of controls on a per game basis by naming the image the same as your ROM file
• New menu dialog forms for browsing in GameEx
  • Each menu you select now displays a dialog form (IE Netflix has a Netflix dialog, Emulated Games has one, Last Played has one, etc)
  • The image displayed is the same image as the one in your theme's logos folder (Default - Default is used if the image cannot be located)
  • All the dialog text is localized based on your GameEx language setting (including the Custom option), although I don't think the Japanese text will work since the font set doesn't contain a Japanese character set
  • In the future I plan on adding customized text for all the label fields as well (Playing, Artist, Album, Genre, Dev, Bio, etc), making this my first multi-lingual application
• Fixed a bug where the plugin was crashing when the network was connected but the Internet wasn't available
• Using the MegaMAME Extreme Game Info theme has a hard coded direct link to the artwork in the MegaMAME GameEx Theme regardless of what theme you use in GameEx
• Moved all network based initialization settings to a thread to drastically improve GameEx's loading speed when the plugin is enabled
• Fixed a bug where Random Game was not initializing the Game Info after the game was launched
• Fixed a bug where the plugin could not find info in the settings when launched from Most Played or Last Played

The next thing I'm gonna add is an FAQ Text Reader, which is a simple text reader that may be useful for reading walkthroughs. I might also add a map viewer option to take advantage of EmuMovies Maps (could be used to display an overworld map for Final Fantasy for example).

Thanks again to everyone who supports my developments, and kudos to all of you that use my software.

[nullPointer]

You've been busy there Adultery! Fantastic job. I can't wait to check out the new enhancements particularly that control panel viewer. If I could hit the Like button several times for this I would.

[Adultery]

Thanks to Tom's BIG 13.00 update, I added some functionality to the Attract Mode label! You can add variables to the Attract Mode message now. Here's an example:

Attract Message: [GAMENAME]: DEMO MODE!

Displays:

Now that looks really cool IMHO.

[Adultery]

A little more involved:

ATTRACT MESSAGE: ATTRACT MODE! PRESS A KEY TO EXIT![-LF-][GAMENAME][-LF-][DEVELOPER] ([YEAR])

RESULT:

EDIT: Without my toolbar blocking the view.

[KRC]

Kick Ass work as per usual !

[Adultery]

I added Draco's Space Invaders, PFTW, and Blue Neon LCD themes, and KRC's DD theme to the Game Info website (sorry it took so long), and also added them to the theme thread.

Thanks guys! They look great.

[Draco1962]

Glad to be able to contribute to a great plug-in!

[KRC]

Always good to contribute to a worthy cause !

[Adultery]

So... I Scrapped the demo label. I think this looks nicer! You can customize the bg, it fades in and displays for 30 seconds, then fades out. Thanks to Tom, it will show each time the attract mode runs a new game.

Working great for me so far but there's a bit more testing to be done (CP viewer and FAQ Viewer). Sorry to tease ya... Just really pleased how this came out.