Tag Archives: efl

Eleganz release for Cobra ODE

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Hi everyone,

It’s been a long time since I last blogged. Today I have some exciting news for you, as I have ported Eleganz, my homebrew manager, to the Cobra ODE.

A little while ago, I tweeted that if Cobra ever released their device and did provide an open source library for integration of other managers, I would port Eleganz to it, and today I am fulfilling that promise. I would like to thank the guys over at ps3crunch.net and ps3hax.net for testing this for me, particularly Abkarino, hyappon, freddy, magneto and Xodus69.

When I released Eleganz in November 2011, I left out one small thing on the TODO list, I wanted to see someone pick it up and add the code to exitspawn to actually make Eleganz execute the homebrew apps, but no one did that in almost a year now. I am a bit disappointed that the ps3 scene (homebrew devs, not users) didn’t pick it up, but it looked like no one was interested in maintaining Eleganz in my place. Today, I am happy to see that Eleganz is not throw-away code, as it can be useful to ODE users.

I can understand why Eleganz didn’t have much appeal in the world of CFW (it was originally intended to run on OFW if my HEN ever worked), but with the ODEs running on OFW, it’s perfect for the job. It’s simple, it’s beautiful and customizable!

Not only can Eleganz list the games from the Cobra ODE and allow you to select your iso, but it will also allow you to list and run homebrew apps that you can embed in the ISO file. This way you can get access to all your homebrew in a single place, without the need to restart the PS3 or boot the homebrew’s iso from the ODE. You can just extract the eleganz iso, and add homebrew apps (that are re-signed for running from a BD drive) to the iso’s PS3_GAME/USRDIR/HOMEBREW directory and recreate the iso with the cobra tool, and that’s it.

Note that this is not an indication of me getting back into the hacking scene. I have given up on the HEN long ago as I realized that there was no way (that I could find) to run homebrew on OFW, unless they are running from a disc. I may keep improving Eleganz in the near future, but I do not plan to do anything more than that for the ps3 scene at this point.

I would also like to tell everyone that there’s no need to worry, Eleganz will not become cobra-specific, as any feature I’d implement will benefit CFW as well as ODE users. I will be releasing an updated version for CFW users soon.

I’d also like to thank magneto and the Cobra team for offering to send me a Cobra ODE as a gift for porting Eleganz to it. Once I receive it, I plan on adding disc dumping capabilities to Eleganz and improve the user experience a little without relying on others to test it for me.

You can find the latest source code on github as always and compile it yourself or you can download the pre-compiled iso file from this link : http://www.multiupload.nl/GXBBI19VOL

I hope it gets used now and you all can enjoy it and I hope I can see some cool themes created for it now!

KaKaRoTo

Eleganz: The Elegant Homebrew Manager

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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 :


YouTube Link toEleganz screencast

 

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.

Exquisite tool becomes a library!

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The exquisite tool that comes with Enlightenment is a nice, pure edje application that is used for showing boot process splash screens. I thought it was a nice splash screen and more generally, a nice progress bar and wanted to use it in my own apps.

I have modified the exquisite tool to become a library so it can be used by others in their applications, while keeping the exquisite and exquisite-writer tools intact (they will now depend on libexquisite.so though).

Since it’s a very simple feature (only a couple hundred lines of code), the API is simple as well. Here’s an example of use :

  Evas_Object *obj = exquisite_object_add (evas, theme);
  evas_object_show (obj);

  exquisite_object_title_set (obj, "Title of the screen");
  exquisite_object_message_set (obj, "My Message");

  int test_id = exquisite_object_text_add (obj, "First test");
  int second_test = exquisite_object_text_add (obj, "Second text!");
  exquisite_object_status_set (obj, test_id, "FAIL", EXQUISITE_STATUS_TYPE_FAILURE);
  exquisite_object_status_set (obj, second_test, "OK", EXQUISITE_STATUS_TYPE_SUCCESS);

  exquisite_object_pulsate (obj);
  exquisite_object_progress_set (obj, 0.95);

That’s it, and you get a nice screen with title, message, text area for status messages (if you want it), and a progress bar. This also means you can use the default theme from exquisite or write your own using the same theme specification which can later on be used by others.

Please review the API provided, and this is the right time to suggest any changes to the API or to improve on the library, so let us know what you think!

Eskiss for PS3 with PS Move support

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Hi all,

I’m releasing Eskiss with Move support and I think the instructions on how  to use it require a bit more than what twitter allows (from my usual small updates).

You can download here the Eskiss package for PS3 3.55, and here the package for PS3 3.41.

The instructions are simple, you can still play with a normal mouse if you want, or use the controller to emulate the mouse, just like before. But, if you have a PS Eye camera plugged in, then it will also be ready to handle the Move.

If it detects a move controller, the ball on the controller will be white, at that point, you must press the Action button while pointing the controller to the camera (there’s no image feedback on the screen, so just point and press the action button). This will calibrate the controller and the ball will change color. At this point, moving the controller will also move the cursor on screen.

You can press the Action button at any time to recalibrate the controller (useful if the tracking stops working correctly, or camera falls off), and you can press the Start button at anytime to center the cursor on screen. Pressing the T button trigger will emulate a click.

You have the choice between two tracking modes, the first one (the one selected by default) is the 3D coordinate system, which means the cursor appears on screen with 1 to 1 precision (kind of) with where the controller is located in the room, so you have to move the whole controller to move the cursor (and even maybe stretch your arms to get to the corners), the second tracking mode is using the internal gyroscope of the controller, in other words, you can move the cursor just by pointing or rotating the controller without moving the whole controller in 3D space.

You can switch from one tracking mode to another at any time by pressing the Select button. Try them both and see which one you like best.

P.s:  When you press the Action button to calibrate, the ball will change colors a few times, you must not move the controller while it’s doing that, do not move until it becomes a solid, stable color. If the ball becomes white again, it means you moved and the calibration failed… in that case, try again.

P.p.s: In this release, I have also fixed the crash that you might have had in the previous version, so the game should be a lot more stable. While it still might crash, it is now very rare and shouldn’t break the gameplay like it did before.

And here’s a video demo of the game running with the Move controller, courtesy of fungos :

Enjoy,

KaKaRoTo