User Experience in RetroArch

General Development
#1

Hi all,

first time writing to the community. Great job guys! :slight_smile: I am UX designer and I would gladly like to explore and experiment a bit with the UI of RetroArch, seeking for potentials in its user experience.

By following the documentation - really helpful indeed - I managed to build and run the repository locally. Now i wanted to explore the content files to find out more of the data structure. I did find the “ui” folder, from which the *.c files are imported and I also managed to open the Qt projects - though i could not build them, but apart from that, I cannot really tell anything. What I am trying to do first is to find the PS3-like menu structure and how the UI elements are arranged on the screen.

Could someone give a hint; is there a documentation part that I might have missed?

Thanx a lot!

#2

Unfortunately, RetroArch’s UI is all written in C and is admittedly a big, interconnected mess, where you have to touch a dozen different files just to add/remove a menu item. I believe we have a plan coming up fairly soon to make a menu API that should greatly reduce this issue, so you might be best off spending the short term to plan things out and wait for that API to materialize before actually approaching any code changes.

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#3

@kdrachtidis you might find that this doc gives you a starting point for exploring the current XMB UI code: https://buildbot.libretro.com/.docs/tech/new-menu-options/

#4

Hi @markwkidd, thanx a lot!

#5

@kdrachtidis The XMB menu driver you’re referring to is in menu/drivers/xmb.c, and the other files in the menu/ folder also contain the driver-agnostic parts of the menu. Those Qt files you refer to are not used at all.

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