One thing you may want to look into if you haven’t done so already, is to use the Follow Layer feature on the image layers of the cabinet to follow the tube. If it is set up like this then if you want to scale up/down the cabinet without affecting the background you can just adjust the screen size and everything following will scale and move along with it.
Can you do this with the bezel as well? I have the bezel on a separate layer, so I would need the bezel to follow the tube and the cabinet frame to follow the bezel.
It has a 6 pixel red border that let’s me accurately scale to the correct size. Then I replace it with the border-less image after I save the preset.
This becomes even more necessary when the Device layer is larger than the viewport. (For drop shadows etc.) Without the guide I would only be guessing. (In this circumstance, any layer that would follow the Device also has to share it’s dimensions.)
The setup would involve layering all the images and set the Device to follow “Full” or “BG”, to get the screen scale and position right, then changing the Device to follow the tube and re-scaling just the Device. (The other layers would follow the Device.)
These topics will all be covered in my eventual Advanced Image Layer Guide.
I guess this is a bit of a feature request, but I was wondering if we could have an image point to the file named after the preset. This would save an enormous amount of trouble for things like bezel images, which are all named differently, as opposed to a background image that is just background.png (or whatever).
For example, it might look something like CabinetGlassImage = “…/…/…/Mega_Bezel_Packs/bezels/%filename%.png”. The %filename% would mean it would look for a bezel named after the file name of the preset. That way you wouldn’t have to edit the bezel file name over and over.
Interesting, what I was planning to do is to allow the preset creator to add tokens like this in the name which would be replaced by info coming from Retroarch.
E.G. If we load up the arcade game Magic Sword, and in the preset we had a path like <game>_Marquee.png then when loading the preset Retroarch would try to find an image named msword_Marquee.png and if that is not found it would look for default_Marquee.png
This way you could have just one preset which could automatically swap in the images if they exist
That sounds pretty similar to what I was thinking. Maybe it would be even easier to set up a universal command, like %filename% matches the preset name, like Pacman.slangp, then the shader would look for Pacman.png for the image.
You guys will definitely know the best way to solve the problem. I’m just a guy hoping we can make the work easier. We are all working on the same stuff, so it benefits us all.
FWIW PowerGREP is my search and replace tool of choice. It can use the both the parent folder name
%FOLDER<1%
and the filename with no extension
%FILENAMENOEXT%
as regular expression replace variables.
So you could make 300 copies of the same preset, name them the same as your graphics, (Using a mass rename tool that supports manual lists. (Like the one built into Altap Salamander file manager.) and do a single search and replace to change the name of the graphic in the text.
It gets really easy once you get the hang of it.
Just the other day I did 1545 MAME overlay overrides in under a minute.