Category Archives: EFL

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.

RSXGL working and usable

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Hi everyone!

When the PS3 homebrew scene started, a lot of people were complaining that it wasn’t possible to write 3D games for the PS3 because of its lack of OpenGL library.
Almost a year ago, Alex Betts thought he would tackle this problem and he started working on RSXGL… an implementation of the OpenGL 3.1 specification written from scratch targeting the PS3’s RSX. Anyone in their right mind would say that it’s impossible, that it’s too much work, but Alex spent the last year working on it, alone, until it became usable. You can read some news about it here.
For some reason though, no one used it to build their own apps. Maybe the status of the project was scaring them, it was said to be incomplete, there was no GLSL support, etc…
I am writing today to tell you that RSXGL is perfectly usable! It supports online GLSL compilation, as well as any feature you might want. As proof, I have written a new hardware accelerated engine for the EFL using RSXGL and it worked great! Alex and I spent a lot of time testing and fixing all the issues that were in RSXGL that were made visible by the EFL’s GL engine and I am happy to say that it’s working now. Expedite is able to run most of its tests at 50 to 60 fps on 1080p resolution (instead of the average of 5 to 10 fps it had on 720p before).
You can see performance tests right here (Running some tests from expedite) :
Software rendering: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22642664/expedite_psl1ght.log
RSXGL rendering: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22642664/expedite_rsxgl.log

Please give RSXGL a try. Also, you can get the latest EFL version from my repository, which includes the gl engine for ps3. Now, any EFL application will be automatically hardware accelerated thanks to RSXGL. I hope we can see some new games (or old GL games being ported) soon!

RSXGL : https://github.com/gzorin/RSXGL
EFL : https://github.com/kakaroto/e17

Enjoy!

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!