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Hide game info if theme is available, show if it isn't.


MacklinB

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I've looked around and made sure that this isn't a thing that can already be done, but excuse me if there's some way you can actually do this in HyperSpin.

Right now in HyperSpin you have a per-system option to either show info for all games (as in the Genre, Year, Manufacturer, Title shown in the lower left by default) via "remove_info_text". For games using the systems Default theme, this is completely fine -space wise- but more often than not, themes makers will try to stuff lots of art into a space that is restricted by text that - to be honest - is useless when a theme exists for the game, given that themes usually exhibit the title of the game and/or the manufacturer. Since remove_info_text is false by default for all newly installed systems, themes tend to either be designed around all this extraneous text - which limits the amount space actually used for art - or designed in a way that completely ignores all the UI placement, which ends up with UI text overlapping artwork, logos, videos and whatnot. Not good. I sometimes find myself manually editing many user-created themes so that the art and videos contained withe them isn't obscured by game info.

Take for example:

post-75400-142870587074_thumb.jpg

One simple way to avoid this is to add a toggle-able option which will hide or show info_text and info_wheel depending on if a theme exists for the game or not. Think of it as fullscreen themes - leaving the user to experience the entirety of the theme, rather than having obscuring text. It's a matter of personal preference, really. Maybe alternatively there could be an option to fade in said information after the theme has finished animating in or after a predefined amount of time? Sure, I don't see this option being overly time-saving when looking for one game in thousands of themed games of a system - as you'd need to wait until after the theme has animated in until the game information appears. But I'm sure most people can quickly determine what a game is by its wheel art - and besides - with the upcoming search feature you won't have to do that!

I also just noticed that in HS1.3 "remove_info_wheel" and "remove_info_text" does pretty much nothing in my MAME wheel. Does it not do what I'm assuming it does?

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Remove Wheel Info - Removes anything in parenthesis after the description, for text on the wheel

Remove Textfield Info - Removes anything in parenthesis after the description, for the description textfield

So it only eliminates the first set of text that is in parentheses either for the wheel text or the text that appears over the theme. So if the rom name and description are Castlevania (USA), it will only show it as Castlevania. However it only eliminates the first set of parentheses so if it's something like Castlevania (v1.1) (USA) it's going to look like this: Castlevania (USA).

Having said that, I'm not aware of any way to completely eliminate the text that will appear over themes other than editing the xml files. But I really wish there was because I completely agree with what you said about the text distracting from the theme artwork. Maybe there's some way to do it still?

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You can remove the text, you just have to edit the settings files for each system. My hyperspin setup is text free and to me looks way better.

But are you able do it the way I've explained? What I'd like is basically to show text only on games that do not have a theme (and therefore need text as they're less unidentifiable) and hide text on games that have a theme (and are therefore more identifiable) so that the theme art isn't obstructed by text.

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  • 2 months later...
I've looked around and made sure that this isn't a thing that can already be done, but excuse me if there's some way you can actually do this in HyperSpin.

Right now in HyperSpin you have a per-system option to either show info for all games (as in the Genre, Year, Manufacturer, Title shown in the lower left by default) via "remove_info_text". For games using the systems Default theme, this is completely fine -space wise- but more often than not, themes makers will try to stuff lots of art into a space that is restricted by text that - to be honest - is useless when a theme exists for the game, given that themes usually exhibit the title of the game and/or the manufacturer. Since remove_info_text is false by default for all newly installed systems, themes tend to either be designed around all this extraneous text - which limits the amount space actually used for art - or designed in a way that completely ignores all the UI placement, which ends up with UI text overlapping artwork, logos, videos and whatnot. Not good. I sometimes find myself manually editing many user-created themes so that the art and videos contained withe them isn't obscured by game info.

Take for example:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]25461[/ATTACH]

One simple way to avoid this is to add a toggle-able option which will hide or show info_text and info_wheel depending on if hid kits theme exists for the game or not. Think of it as fullscreen themes - leaving the user to experience the entirety of the theme, rather than having obscuring text. It's a matter of personal preference, really. Maybe alternatively there could be an option to fade in said information after the theme has finished animating in or after a predefined amount of time? Sure, I don't see this option being overly time-saving when looking for one game in thousands of themed games of a system - as you'd need to wait until after the theme has animated in until the game information appears. But I'm sure most people can quickly determine what a game is by its wheel art - and besides - with the upcoming search feature you won't have to do that!

I also just noticed that in HS1.3 "remove_info_wheel" and "remove_info_text" does pretty much nothing in my MAME wheel. Does it not do what I'm assuming it does?

There is nothing like removing text you can just edit some settings nothing else.. I think there are some options to make your hyperspin better. Check it..

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