couslev

Glad to give back guys, I'm really happy to find an active community around GameEx.

lol, yes I expected this would work as well. Unfortunately, if I select a specific template in the Theme Editor (like for one emulator in particular) and edit the image box size, it changes the image size for everything (it saves in the theme.ini under the [Layout] section). When I select a specific emulator type from the Object List in the theme editor and then resize the image, it doesn't save at all. I just want to change the size of this image for one particular emulator. Do I have to manually add a [<emulator name>] section to the theme.ini? Is the theme editor somewhat broken for version 4 themes?

I recently got GameEx, and after setting up all my console emulators, I started looking for a way to integrate my library of Steam games into GameEx. The vast majority of my Steam titles have native controller support, so the ability to browse my Steam collection and start PC games from within GameEx using just my controller is VERY nice. I know there are a few other topics out there, but they are very dated and the solutions aren't as elegant as the one I finally game to, so I thought I would share, and hopefully someone finds this useful! For starters, you just need to set up Steam as an emulator in GameEx using the Advanced Configuration utility: I attached a nice alpha blended Steam logo below that you can simply put in your current (or default) theme's ./MEDIA/LOGOS/ directory. In the emulator configuration you can set the Logo to this filename. Steam uses .url files as shortcuts to installed games, so set the Rom Filter to *.url From within steam you can right click a game in the Library and have it 'Create Desktop Shortcut'. Collect all the .url files for the games you want in GameEx from your desktop and place them into a folder somewhere. You can then specify this folder as the ROM Path in the emulator configuration The shortcuts can be launched directly, so for the Command Line you can just specify "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]" Set Map Keys to 'No', because you will likely want to press esc in game. With these basic steps complete you can now browse and launch your Steam games from within GameEx, but the difficult part of this process is getting GameEx to recognize when you have quit the launched game so that it can return to the foreground. Using the Advanced Config editor on the second page of the emulator settings will allow you to set process names that GameEx waits to terminate before reappearing. The question is, what process should we use? The older threads I saw suggested terminating the steam application itself in the Launch After and monitoring steam.exe in the Process Wait section of the Advanced Config editor. I didn't want to do this because I like to keep steam running to communicate with friends, and also because you can launch games much quicker when Steam is already running. Having to stop and restart Steam every time you run a game isn't efficient. Setting up steam as an emulator with a list of games instead of setting up each Steam game individually is magnitudes more attractive, but it means the emulator config doesn't know what the launched game's executable is, so we can't just wait on that. Fortunately steam has added some features (I think since the most recent forum topic on the subject) that work perfectly for our purposes. In Steam if you open the properties for a game, you see the option on the first tab to 'Enable Steam Community In-Game'. Enabling this option makes the game have an overlay where you can access your friends list, view CD keys or whatever. The process that provides this overlay starts and stops with each game run, so its a perfect target for monitoring when any launched game has finished. You can find this GameOverlayUI.exe right in the root of your Steam folder. Unfortunately just specifying this process isn't enough, because the GameOverlayUI process takes a little while to start after launching the Steam game, and GameEx will immediately check for this process after launching the shortcut .url, and not finding it running (yet) will return to the foreground. So we have to make GameEx wait a while before checking for this process. This can be accomplished by setting the Wait Before Keys value in the emulator configuration. Set it to something like 20000, and GameEx will wait for 20 seconds after running the Command Line even if you don't specify anything under Keys To Send. So to finish up: Using the Advanced Configuration editor, create a new config ini that just specifies GameOverlayUI under Process Wait (I disabled pretty much everything else). Set Wait Before Keys in the emulator config to something like 20000 (depending on longest time it takes for the Shift+Tab Steam community thing to appear after launching the game). I think this an elegant solution and I REALLY enjoy the results. Quite enjoyable to be able to sit with just my wireless 360 controller and browse and play any console game or Steam game with little to no keyboard/mouse input required. Oh, and for the icing on the cake, you can get the slick thumbnail images Steam uses for each game off their website if you know the appid of the game. If you open the properties of the shortcut .url for each game you'll find the appid at the end of the url. For example Crysis 2's shortcut url is steam://rungameid/99830, where 99830 is the appid for Crysis 2. You can then go to http://cdn.steampowered.com/v/gfx/apps/99830/header.jpg, and you'll find a slick header image for Crysis 2 that you can convert to a .png and stick in the Snap/Video Path (as specified in the emulator config) with the same filename as the url shortcut to have it appear in GameEx. Delicious. Thank you GameEx! EDIT: I noticed the Steam icon below will appear with the bottom half transparent in any GameEx theme that uses color key transparency (which is the majority of them) because the bottom half of the logo is pure black. You can fix this by either using a theme that uses alpha channels (not sure how many are out there) or by increasing the brightness of the png just a hair so there isn't any true black into the logo.

Wow, quick response. Thanks. If its a known issue, I can certainly wait for the next release. I'll just use opaque images in the top bar until then. One question unrelated to alpha blending... is there any way to make the snap image in an emulator game list not stretch to fit the element? I have an array of snaps that are 460 x 215. They look great when shown underneath the console logo on the emulator list, but when shown on the actual game list for that console they are distorted. Is the only way to fix this to change the image element dimensions in the theme for this particular emulator?

Hey all, I just found GameEx a few days ago when looking for a simple front end, and I was flabbergasted by it's versatility. Needless to say I registered it, and started creating a 16:9 custom theme. I started with the Dark Gloss theme, and armed with GIMP I started replacing all the color keyed images with true alpha PNGs. I ran into an issue after I created all the various buttons on the top bar. The bar I created has a bit of overall transparency with a sharp alpha gradient at the bottom end. When running the theme in GameEx, it appears that multiple images are being alpha blended together where there are state images. For example, MediaControl.png and MediaControlStop.png seem to be both rendered at all times, perhaps the only difference is the active state is rendered on top? This causes the whole region to be brighter than say TopBarMiddle.png, which only has a single layer, because of the additive blending. This makes it near impossible to manage a quasi-transparent bar at the top because the sections are of differing brightness, and they also transition to visible (like when the mouse first enters the top bar region) at different speeds because the layered regions are brighter by default. Any chance we can see a fix that will ONLY render the active state region? As I said I *just* picked up GameEx and haven't had a lot of time to look for threads about theme design, so I may be way off base with this? Maybe I just need to use a different theme as a starting point or something? I appreciate any and all feedback! EDIT: This only happens in a Version 4 theme, BTW. If I change to Version 3, the top bar appears just as I expected. I will assume Version 4 themes are a WIP, and work under the confines of Version 3 for now.