Hi everyone,
Last year, in January, I decided to have some fun and write a homebrew application using the
EFL libraries. I decided to work on a homebrew manager.. basically a replacement to the XMB. It went really well, and the development was really fast, and it was all thanks to the awesome
API and capabilities of the EFL libraries. However, I became busy and was unable to continue… also, it was a bit slow and without proper hardware acceleration, it wouldn’t be as good as I hoped for, so I put the project on the side.
After many months, in September, thanks to
gzorin’s work, we finally had a working and
usable GL implementation and the EFL apps automatically gained from it by becoming hardware accelerated. My homebrew manager was much better! but I still needed to finish a few things and I didn’t have time so I put to rest again.
Today, I have decided to release this homebrew application, *as is* for everyone’s enjoyment! This means that it is not fully working, it might still have some bugs here and there, but it is still a homebrew app that people can use and have some fun with. Most importantly it will serve 4 purposes :
Maybe re-awaken this dying PS3 homebrew scene
Be a good “exercise to the community” for finishing it up
Be a good example of what can be done with the EFL
Bring non-developers into writing EFL themes for the app
I introduce to you, Eleganz! The Elegant Homebrew Manager! A little homebrew app that lets you install pkg files and run your games directly from it. Here is the mandatory screencast video :
I have published my app in both
github and on ps3dev’s
gitorious. and you can also download a pre-compiled
.pkg for your PS3 to have fun with it.
Here are some highglights of the application (features, limitations and bugs) :
The whole User Interface is completely customizable with themes
Installs .pkg files locally to its own data directory (won’t be visible in the real XMB, unless someone reverses the database format)
Does not yet run games (it’s for you to do it, use ps3load as reference maybe…)
Current theme is missing proper theme/images for the progressbar windows (default exquisite/E17 theme used)
System freezes for a few milliseconds when it tries to load a game’s background image (might be fixed if we implement a pthread library and threading support in the EFL)
Apparently crashes when it exits (bug)
The homebrew app comes with two themes, a dark and light theme. I like the dark one so I chose that as the default (oh, ignore that grey background ‘default’ one from that screencast video, that was just for testing). I wrote the user interface for the theme (the Edje files) while
opium designed all the graphics. The theme engine in the EFL is extremely powerful, so I hope I will see tons of themes popping up. And I do not mean “change the images” themes, I want real themes, where the whole UI is different, a vertical XMB, a circular one, a 3D theme with perspective/depth for the icons, a dynamic/moving background, etc… You can learn about the .edj/.edc file format
here and don’t forget to check the
EDC reference wiki.
I hope to see the community pick this up and have fun with it!
That’s about it, enjoy it, and send me your patches! I’ll be waiting
KaKaRoTo
p.s: Forgot to say that the rules/naming conventions/etc.. of the EDC files are explained
here. If a .edj file doesn’t have the appropriate parts/groups, then it will be ignored and will not show on the UI.
p.p.s: You can install the EFL on
windows and have access to edje_cc to compile your .edc into .edj.
p.p.p.s: Damn, I keep forgetting stuff.. by the way, the whole Eleganz application works just fine on the PC too, I did all my development on the PC (that screencast was actually on Linux), *then* I tried it on the PS3 and it just worked.. so for theme development, it should be pretty easy to test without the need of a PS3.
