Forgive my ignorance but I I’ve been trying to figure out what Assets are. Yes, I have search the forums the best I could and used Google without success.
I also searched for an answer here: https://docs.libretro.com/ but found nothing specifically detailing what does updating Assests do.
Thank you
They’re mostly used by the XMB menu to make things look pretty. You can see what happens without them by temporarily changing your assets directory in settings > directory.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond.
What is XMB?
Do you mean assets are just interface files?
Does “Update Assets” also update Cores and Thumbnails?
Thank you
Thank you brother. Much appreciate it.
I’ll just summarize what happens with the Assets folder…
When the menu works properly, it looks like this:
If the Assets folder is missing, it looks like this:
with the fallback font, and black boxes everywhere an icon should be.
what is the default folder for assets? I changed mine but forgot
I definitely think the entry should be renamed into “Update the XMB menu assets” or something like that.
“Update assets” is so generic to be confusing. Everybody is clicking on that anyways lol, but for the sake of having a knowledgeable user base…
Look in the directory and you’ll see that there are plenty of non-XMB stuff in there too, so that change does not make sense.
The entry does not even have a sublabel, which could easily say that assets are graphical menu stuff etc.
No, but perhaps adding “menu” in a more general sense would. At the very least, I guess we could add a sublabel explaining that it’s icons, etc. needed by the frontend.
Yeah I realized it’s also related to the glui menu is affected (the fonts are ugly by default before you update those assets).
I agree that “update menu assets” would be clearer, or maybe “update GUI assets”.
Btw why aren’t those shipped alongside with the base package anyways? It’d make it bigger for sure but people are going to download them anyways so the network requirements on both the clients and the servers would be alike. Very, VERY roughly speaking, indeed.
They usually are. Which case are you referring to? Linux packages?
Yes; and Android too (the one version fetched from the website, not either of the play store ones)
They both - Linux and Android - look quite poorly until I “update assets”.
hmm, yeah, probably oughtta put the assets in with the apk. that’s not a good look.
I am wondering if it may have any sense to have that “update assets” at all, after all, if you’re going to ship all the assets alongside with retroarch anyways.
One update RA, they also update the assets. No more need to update 'em by hand and (most importantly) to have one more menu which is unclear, probably, to 99% of the user base.
Thanks for caring 
On some platforms, that’s certainly the case, but on most of them you can (and many people do) update only the executable, so there needs to be some way to update the assets, as well.
