First release, a major update to the application compared to the RetroPie version on which it is based. This includes new gamelist sorting logic, new game media handling and an updated Windows port as well as a macOS port. The menu system has also been completely overhauled and the scraper has been expanded to support multiple media types as well as providing detailed scraping configuration options.
Full navigation sound support has been implemented, and the metadata editor has seen a lot of updates including color coding of all changes done by the user and by the scraper. Favorite games can now also be sorted on top of the gamelists and game collections.
OpenGL GLSL shader support has been added (not for the OpenGL ES renderer though) and there are multiple effects implemented such as scanlines for videos, blurred background when opening menus etc.
A new default theme rbsimple-DE (based on Recalbox Multi) is bundled with the application and is part of the installation package/installer. Themes created for the RetroPie EmulationStation fork will still work correctly.
Many bugs have been fixed, and numerous features that were only partially implemented or broken have been updated to a fully working state. The application runs much faster as well due to lots of optimizations.
* Improved input device configuration and default keyboard mappings are now applied if the keyboard has not been configured by the user
* Reorganization and general overhaul of the menu system, hopefully making it more intuitive to navigate and easier to understand the menu entries
* New game media file logic using a media directory with files matching the ROM names instead of explicitly pointing to the media files from the gamelist.xml files
* GUI-configurable option to sort favorite games above non-favorite games
* GUI-configurable option to flag favorite games with star symbols
* GUI-configurable option to sort folders on top of the gamelists
* Added volume sliders for navigation sounds and game videos to the sound settings menu
* Added support for OpenGL GLSL shaders (OpenGL 2.1 renderer only, no support for OpenGL ES 1.0 renderer)
* Added multiple animations and shader effects, such as when opening menus, playing videos in the gamelists and via the screensaver etc.
* Added a gamelist info text field displaying the game count, any applied filters as well as an icon if a folder has been entered (requires theme support)
* The emulator core location can now be defined relative to the emulator binary using the %EMUPATH% variable in es_systems.cfg (used extensively on macOS and Windows)
* Core locations can be searched from a configurable list of directories if defined in the es_systems.cfg file using the %COREPATH% variable (mostly useful on Unix where there are no standardized core directories)
* No more attempts to open files directly under /etc, instead only the install prefix directory, the ES-DE executable directory and the home directory are used
* Speed improvements and optimizations, the application now starts faster and feels more responsive
* Added new component GuiComplexTextEditPopup to handle changes to configuration file entries and similar
* Added full UTF-16 (Unicode) support on Windows
* Removed the PowerSaver
* Game counting is now done during sorting instead of every time a system is selected. This should make the UI more responsive in case of large game libraries
* Updated the CMake/CPack install and package configuration files to work as expected (can now generate DEB, RPM, DMG and NSIS installation packages with correct dependencies)
* Large text sizes at higher resolutions (such as 4K) would crash the application as fixed-size texture buffers were used which weren't big enough to hold the larger font textures
* The scraper didn't handle error conditions correctly
* The metadata editor insisted that changes were made although nothing was updated. Note: The editor will still ask for save confirmations after automatically rounding fractional game ratings to half-star values, but any time such a rounding has taken place, the rating stars will be colored green in the metadata editor to nofity the user
**The issues below are relevant for ES-DE v1.0.0.**
* On Linux, running games or emulators that switch the screen resolution may cause problems if ES-DE is run in Normal fullscreen mode, most likely due to driver bugs or possibly issues in SDL. Only a white screen will be shown when returning from the game and although the application is still running, attempting to navigate blindly will lead to a crash. Using the Borderless mode resolves the issue but removes the ability to switch windows using Alt-tab. Running ES-DE with the --window flag is another workaround, but that leaves the window border intact around the application window. Hopefully this issue will be worked around in ES-DE v1.1 as improving the fullscreen mode is planned for that release.
* On Ubuntu 20.10, the included VLC version 3.0.11.1-2 is broken so ES-DE will crash when attempting to play videos. This can be fixed by manually replacing the file /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libvlccore.so.9.0.0 with the corresponding file from version 3.0.9.2-1 from Ubuntu 20.04. Make sure that the /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libvlccore.so.9 symlink points to this file as well. Hopefully this issue will soon be patched in libVLC so that this manual workaround will not be required.
* On Linux, libVLC does not properly release memory when stopping the video player, leading to large memory usage for ES-DE. The memory utilization does not grow indefinitely though so it shouldn't make the system run out of memory and it shouldn't make ES-DE crash. As this issue is not present on BSD, macOS or Windows the assumption is that VLC is somewhat broken on Linux. The plan is to move from libVLC to FFmpeg for ES-DE v1.1 which will avoid this issue altogether.
* The input configuration can be a bit glitchy on some devices, most notably the setup of trigger buttons for Xbox and PlayStation controllers. Once configured everything should work fine though. This configuration issue will hopefully be resolved in ES-DE v1.1 with the move to the SDL2 GameController API.
* Some artifacts can be present with the gaussian blur shader, and screen tearing can be seen when using the slide transitions with certain graphics drivers and resolutions. Both of these issues mostly affect the upper part of the screen. The second issue is apparently more prevalent when running ES-DE at a lower resolution on 4K displays by using the --resolution command line option (which is only available on Unix). These problems will hopefully be resolved in ES-DE v1.2 when moving to the GLM library.
* The launching of games can freeze ES-DE on some Windows installations. It probably only occurs on Windows 8.1 but that's not confirmed. The setting 'Run in background (while game is launched)' can be enabled to get around this problem, but this causes some other issues so it should only be used as a last resort. It's unclear if this problem can or will be resolved. If it's confirmed to only affect older Windows versions, then it's probably not worthwhile fixing it.
* On Windows when using high DPI displays, if not running ES-DE on the primary monitor and the display where it runs does not have the same scaling percentage as the primary monitor, then the ES-DE resolution will not be properly set. The application will still work and if running in fullscreen mode it may not even be noticeable. This issue is caused by a bug in SDL where the primary display scaling is always used for calculating the display bounds and as such it needs to be fixed in that library. If using the same scaling percentage across all monitors, or if not using high DPI monitors at all, then this issue will not occur.
* Scraping using ScreenScraper could lead to the scraper halting if exceeding the allowed requests per minute. This will cause a popup window to be displayed in ES-DE with the option available to retry the scraping for the current game (you should first wait a minute or so though or the error will immediately reoccur). This is not really a fault in the application per-se but rather a restriction of ScreenScraper. A request per minute limiter is planned for ES-DE v1.4, which should help with avoiding this problem.
