GUADEC 2014 video games BoF summary

[Adrien Plazas <kekun plazas laposte net>]

Hi everyone,

On GUADEC 2014 I presented the GNOME Video Games (woring title ;) ) projet and I leaded a BoF about it. Here is a presentation of this project, a summary of what have been said during the BoF and a kind of roadmap for the project.

Don't hesitate to participate by sharing ideas or giving a hand!

The project's past and present

The project have been started by Laurent Pointecouteau (https://wiki.gnome.org/LaurentPointecouteau) during 2012 and I quickly joined the project. I worked on this project on my spare time since then, mostly on researches. Unfortunately after some months, Laurent have been less and less present on this project. If you ever read this mail, come back Laurent, the fun part is barely starting!

Most of our researches have been compiled on that wiki entry: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Playground/Games

During spring 2013, a game launcher prototype have been produced (https://github.com/Kekun/video-games). It's written in Vala and Python and not much have changed since. During fall 2013, a game console emulator integration prototype have been produced (https://github.com/Kekun/retro-gobject), leveraging the power of libretro. It's written in Vala and C and not much have changed since also. Both prototypes have been demoed extremely briefly during GUADEC 2014.

GUADEC 2014 BoF summary

Goals

• Being an interface for games which don't have one (game engine packages, ROMs…)
• Focusing on metadata (author, realease date, players number, used input devices…)
• Integrate the games as much as possible into the interface (may not be possible for native and Windows games)
• Advanced seach based on the metadata
• Search for any type of game in GNOME Shell
• …

Non-goals

• Being a game provider (or a game store)

Title proposals:

The title must reflect what we want the software to be. The title is still to discuss. Some possible title are already taken by actual GNOME projects (GNOME Games and GNOME Video Arcade) and some are too close to other similar softwares (Game Center on iOS).

Here are the different proposals:

• GNOME Arcades
• GNOME Entertainement System
• GNOME Game Box
• GNOME Game Center
• GNOME Game Collection
• GNOME Game Library
• GNOME Game Shelf
• GNOME Gamer
• GNOME One-up
• GNOME Play
• GNOME Player
• GNOME Press Start
• GNOME Video Games
• GNOME Videya (can anyone explain me what it means?)

A vote may help to decide what name we should choose. The softaware may also have a nickname reflecting the canges of a specific release, like Super *software's name* for SNES's support or Mega *software's name* for Mega Drive's support.

Gamepads

Gamepad support for the most common gamepads should be added to the Control Center (Xbox 360 Controller, DualShock 3, Wiimote). As I own the three of them so I'll be able to help testing implementing such a feature.

Shell integration:

It still have to be decided how the application may integrate into the shell. Games presented as desktop entries may be problematic.

Achievements:

It is definitely a potential long term goal, but integrating with achievments may be nice.

Some achievements related websites:

• http://steamcommunity.com/
• http://www.xboxachievements.com/
• http://www.playstationtrophies.org/
• http://retroachievements.org/

First release

It would be nice to have a minimal first release for 3.16

It haves to include:

• Support for desktop games, Steam games included (with metadata)
• No support for gamepad, achievements or anything fancy yet

It may include:

• Support for DOS games, as they are easy to find legaly

Next versions:

• Support some video game consoles
• Support a tiny number of gamepads

Components to develop

The application:

• It should be re-written in Vala
• It should use GtkBuilder when possible
• It should use Grilo to look for game metadata
• It may use Tracker to look for games
• It may use GOM to save user specific data
• It should look for games in ~/Games (except for special cases like desktop entries)

The libretro binding:

• A sort of ABI compatible GObject-based libretro implementation which actually alows to load libretro cores
• It haves to be polished (needed for DOS support)
• Shall we port it to C totally imstead of the actual Vala and C?

The Grilo plugins