2016-10-08, 22:04
(2016-10-08, 19:14)RazorFR Wrote: Hi Wintermute,
It is nice to see the rapid development of AEL. I am a long time user of the old AL with around 450 roms. I think I will switch to AEL soon probably along with Krypton. So I tested the addon again a little
That's not a big collection, so probably AL worked OK for you. In my case, one of the reason to develop AEL was that I had to filter my ROMs to keep the total number of ROMs as low as possible... otherwise AL speed was awful. That limitation is gone with AEL, so feel free to try collections as big as you want. Also, there is no penalty for having many launchers each with thousands of ROMs: AEL speed won't be compromised.
(2016-10-08, 19:14)RazorFR Wrote: AEL import function is working well. No errors, but I loose the roms thumbnails in the process (launchers thumbs are ok, roms thumbs are not displayed).
Looking at imported data AEL launchers image are stored in s_thumbs (displaying fine) and rom thumbs in s_title (not displayed by my skin in Kodi). maybe there is something to look at.
That's maybe an issue with the skin. You will need to do some testing. Use the ROM context menu "Edit ROM" -- "Manage ROM..." -- "Choose default ROM artwork...". You should be able to link all the assets (titles, snaps, etc.) to any kind of official Kodi supported artwork (icon, fanart, poster, banner). Some skins display the poster on top of the thumb, even if the poster is the empty string ''. If so, make sure both poster and thumb point to the same asset (title I presume) that contains your imported thumbs.
(2016-10-08, 19:14)RazorFR Wrote: Other thing is the support for multiple assets (flyers, snapshots etc...) like Hyperspin. There are really little skins that support that, And in the past skin support for games / RCB or AL has not been the highest priority. So I hope you'll get support for that from some skilled skinners.
Yes! It's not a secret by now there is something big AEL-related going on. Actually, TTBOMK Hyperspin only supports 4 kinds of assets plus trailers. AEL is now one of the most complete front-ends out there. AL and RCB had many limitations/bugs that limited their use to small collections. Those limitations have been mostly dropped by AEL. Hopefully, soon there will be some skins that fully support all AEL capabilities and I believe many people will think of Kodi as a serious front-end for general use, on par with Hyperspin, EmulationStation or GameEx.
(2016-10-08, 19:14)RazorFR Wrote: Though I am not sure I will ever use all available assets for roms, I would be much interested in having a consistent game section in Kodi similar to video or music library. Is it something that will be possible with AEL?
Someting like
+ Titles
+ Recently added
+ Recently played
+ Genre
+ Studios
+ Years
You already have the virtual launchers "Browse by Title", "Browse by Genre", "Browse by Studio", "Browse by Year". ROM Collections is similar to Movie Sets, with the difference that you have to build up your collections/sets. If you want me to add a "Recently played" virtual launcher and maybe something like "Most played ROMs" with a counter of how many times you have played each ROMs that something I can do easily.
Having a "Recently added" in AEL does not make a lot of sense... if you have a big collection. I mean, if you don't use the scanner and add your ROMs one by one, then it could be useful. However, if you use the scanner and scan a MAME collection of, say, 4000 ROMs, then in my opinion it does not make sense to have a list of the last 100 added... what do you think?
Keep in mind there are two kinds of AEL users: A) The ones that have small, carefully curated collections. Usually user A) also has all kind of artwork (maybe even downloaded by hand on a ROM by ROM basis) and B) Users that have full No-Intro collections (thousands of ROMs per launcher), that download whole collections of artwork, and maybe have 2 or 3 different launchers (emulators) pointing to the same ROM directory (for example, I have retroarch picodrive, retroarch genesis plus gx and MAME pointing to my genesis No-Intro ROMs). I have to keep happy to both kinds of users!
(2016-10-08, 19:14)RazorFR Wrote: Right now for me, because of Kodi lack of a "program" library, it looks like below
+ Consoles
+ PC platforms
+ list of available genres
watch gallery
I don't understand what you mean... Is that picture a mockup of how you want AEL to look?
