[Feature Request] Improved thumbnail images

[kenbot]

Thumbnail images are one of the most satisfying and fun things in DoomLauncher. But they are missing from too many WADs and could be heaps cooler. Here's some ideas.

Find more images

• Heretic, Hexen and Doom 64 IWADs/PWADs need special custom attention
• If there's no title image but there's a screenshot, use the screenshot It already does this! I didn't notice because it isn't finding my GZDoom screenshots, but it works with DSDA Doom
• If we can improve the PWad -> IWad matching (almost every WAD is supposed to be exclusively used with 1 IWad), we could use the IWad thumbnail (or some derivative) instead. This will mean there's no wall of grey, which looks bad, but a colourful wall of relevant information I installed DoomLauncher on a new computer and now it does this already! Maybe I was stuck on an old version before?
• WADs with TITLEMAP look amazing in-game, but we have no image. Is it crazy to imagine that we could write some minimum of shitty code to sew the TITLEMAP lump vectors/textures into a rendered image without going down an infinite rabbit hole? (I doubt any source ports have a headless mode we could use)
• If we have that magic solution and still no TITLE IMAGE or TITLEMAP, we could render an image of the start of MAP01 or E1M1

Cooler images

• Hover effects! Animate the image on hover to get a bit bigger, and animate flicking through the screenshots with fade transition
• Steam has this cool glossy effect like the games are expensive trading cards, something like that
• When the thumbnails are the wrong proportions, instead of ugly black letterboxing/pillar boxing, fill up the whole space with a blurred stretched version of the image and put the real one on top

[kenbot]

Here's what the background blur looks like. It's.... ok I guess? The good ones are good. Some of them are a bit meh. Concept needs a bit more work imho

[kenbot]

I tried some extra things, altering the blur radius (above screenshots are 8 pixels), and greying out the background. None of them were massive improvements.

What was a massive improvement though - switching to 4:3 ratio instead of 16:9. The overwhelming majority of WAD thumbnails are naturally 4:3. And honestly, most of the ones intended for 16:9 don't contain any interesting detail in the wide bits that would get clipped. Switching to 4:3 looks heaps better, and it also lets you fit more WADs on screen at once