[Wintermute0110]

Apologies if my note came across wrongly. I am hugely appreciative what you and other developers are doing in terms of addons and more broadly. No specific issue arond RCB or AEL. It's great the addons exist and seem well maintained with larger group of loyal fans.

No offense taken, so no need to apologise. I am genuinely curious about what you think about this matter.

Let me elaborate though what led to my comment: in general, I prefer a native implementation for something that should be the very core of Kodi such as the library function. Besides that, I prefer to keep all artwork local together with my files (NFO, poster.jpg and fanart.jpg together in my folder). This allows me to add the library to another Kodi device or allow me to rebuild a library within seconds. Also, I prefer clean views and poster and maybe fanart seems sufficient to me.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. First, having some functionality into Kodi core does not necessarily mean it's better. For example, a lot of functionality in Kodi Leia that was previously into the core have been moved to new binary addons. I agree with you that having the library into the core allows you to share the library among several devices, if you use a remote database server.

Talking about games (or ROMs), generally it is a bad idea to have the Icon, Poster and Fanart in the same folder as the ROMs. There are tons of reasons for this. In my opinion the most important one is that the artwork is named with the same filename as the ROMs. This is the non-written agreement in the emulation community and if Kodi doesn't follow it in the future games database it would be a tremendous mistake in my opinion. If artwork is named as the ROMs, it cannot coexist in the same folder as the ROMs because of filename collision.

For example, have a look at the Libretro Thumbnail collection. Here, the artwork for different systems is organised into category directories (named Boxarts, Titles and Snaps) and there is a directory for each platform. AEL follows this convention, with the addition that AEL supports not only these three types of artwork but some additional ones.

Also, note that Icon, Poster and Fanart are media center artwork types created for Movies, TV Shows and Music. However, games (ROMs) are completely different. Most games (99%) do not have Fanart. Usually only arcade/MAME ROMs have a Poster (named Flyer). The approach AEL follows is to define a set of standard games artwork types: Boxfront, Boxback, Titles, Snaps, Flyers, Clearlogos, etc. and then map these standard types to Kodi types: Icon, Fanart, Poster, Banner and Clearlogo. Note that the user can change the default mapping on a per-launcher basis but the defaults should be fine (and also the skin designer should expect a more or less unified artwork mapping to Kodi default asset types). I designed this approach after a lot of thinking and I expect that Kodi will do something similar when the games DB is implemented.

Finally, you can create the NFO files with AEL using the information of the offline scraper (a games database included with AEL, still in development but working very well for some platforms). AEL is able to scan a launcher having thousands of ROMs, including the NFO files and artwork, in a matter of seconds. Also, the Launcher configuration can be exported to an XML file, so if you need to rebuild your setup from scratch you can be done in a matter of minutes (much less than a minute per launcher in your config).

By the way, another difference between Movies/Music and Games is the size of the collections. I guess not so many users have more than 100 Movies, maybe a few will have 1,000 movies. However, in Games it is normal to have full No-Intro collections (about 40,000 ROMs in total for all platforms). A full MAME collection contains 140,000 games in total (40,000 MAME machines plus about 100,000 Software List items). I am telling all this to make the point that what works for Movies/Music may not necessarily work for Games, for things as simple as the sheer numbers.

Best way to describe it that Aeon seems to be the most loved skin with many mods and deviates. I still prefer Estuary for its cleanliness and not using too many extra artwork beyond the core. That's how tastes are different.

Talking about skins, everybody has his preferences. I also like Estuary for its cleanliness. However, there are other simple and elegant skins, for example Lyrebird by Rufoo or Aura by Jurialmunkey. The skin I provide in the AEL thread, named Estuary AEL, is just a test skin to demonstrate AEL's capabilities and I admit that the views are a little bit overloaded with artwork. That's on purpose to test AEL! However, Game views on Lyrebird are much more refined and use less artwork per-view, for example, Clearlogo, Title, Snap and Boxfront.