Re: List of Debian games & scripts 1/2

[Adrien Plazas <kekun plazas laposte net>]

> Thanks for replying. Most video game consoles and console emulators are designed to use gamepads, so I can understand how launching an emulator from the catalogue, using a gamepad might work.

If by "launching an emulator" you mean launching a separate application, this is not what Games does, instead it uses the Libretro[1] API which allow it to run the games directly.

Though, as I'm sure you are aware. It becomes problematic when launching a native game which doesn't use a gamepad, from a GUI which does. The user either has to switch to using the keyboard/mouse, use something like antimicro, or just not play the game in the first place if using a gamepad.

For now gamepad support is just for integrated games (the ones Games directly run) and not for the GUI, but we do want to support that in the long run.

That's why I am seeking a list of native games that can be launched from a gamepad GUI, and then can be actually played using a gamepad, in order to help the user's experience whilst selecting and playing games when using one.

This is clearly an information we want! This is part of our plans to warn about the preferred/required input methods.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find this information using "apt-cache show" on Debian, in my script. I also don't think I could realistically get this information on my own by testing each game, but perhaps if there were enough people testing and collating the information on whether the game can use a gamepad or not, some progress could be made on this front.

Bastien's solution is probably the best: the information is shipped in a standard way with the game that Games could access and display.

Adrien Plazas

[1] http://www.libretro.com/

Le dim. 24 juil. 2016 à 1:07, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> a écrit :

On Sat, 2016-07-23 at 21:38 +0100, Josh Branning wrote:

On 23/07/16 20:53, Megh Parikh wrote: > > Personally, I would like to know which of all these games can use > > or uses a gamepad. Is this something gnome-games is or may be > > working on? > > I am working on a project to add gamepad support to gnome-games. By > gnome-games I mean the emulator-cum-catalogue application and not > the > package of bundled GNOME games. For this I had also created a > library > (it is currently not up-to-date with the main code in GNOME Games), > libgamepad - https://github.com/meghprkh/libgamepad . This library > is > written in Vala and hence should be compatible with GLib/GObject > -based games/applications. But as of now this is only compatible > with > Vala programs since I have not been able to properly configured GIR > support. Since sometime I have been a little busy and hence unable > to > improve this library but I will do it soon. Thanks for replying. Most video game consoles and console emulators are  designed to use gamepads, so I can understand how launching an emulator  from the catalogue, using a gamepad might work.

Most of those games don't come from GNOME, so there's not really any way for us to tell you which ones support joystick controls, without trying them all ourselves. My thinking is that, however you end up finding out that they support gamepad, arcade stick or joystick controls, or even keyboard, just mouse or a combination of both, this is information that should be available in each one of those games' appdata files, which already contains plenty of metadata about applications. I filed: https://github.com/ximion/appstream/issues/55 about this. Cheers _______________________________________________ games-list mailing list games-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/games-list