ubuntu-gaming team mailing list archive

[b4rd3 <barde667@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there, Ubuntu Gaming Team.

Let me shortly introduce myself. I am a 27 years old programmer and web
designer with a certain dedication to making music, playing games,
creating media and so on... of course on linux operating systems.

I primarily used Gentoo Linux for many many years now, but some time ago
I switched to Ubuntu, 'cause it just means less trouble. At all fronts
you don't have to fight your system, many things will just work (even
out of the box). That's an important point these days. Linux evolved and
many many problems we once had were solved by time. But there's one
thing remaining:
We've got too many distributions, so especially developers of games
don't have all the resources to test their games on every platform or
distribution. We need a certain "base" - I just call it Ubuntu in these
days.
Also, there are too many games that are not really known to the public.
They are in the repositories, but just few people ever installed them.
The good ones should be better promoted.

And now let me explain my idea as quickly as possible...
Well, I have the idea to write a gaming frontend ( I already have a
proof of concept - it works). This frontend should replace a normal
Desktop Environment when Ubuntu is in "Gaming Mode". E.g. if you're
running XFCE4 or similar, then you would start the frontend ( or make
the frontend to your standard X11 Environment if you like , just tell
GDM to start it rather than XFCE/ Gnome/ etc..).
The frontend that appears then will check the users password ( he has to
enter it once, so the system can do all things to come automatically
later on) and check if 3d acceleration is activated as well as an
internet connection is enabled. These are things that often should run
just out of the box on a modern ubuntu system. Well, the frontend will
then offer a list of game categories that you can select and then you
come to a list containing games to this category. You will see, which
games are installed at the moment and which ones are not. If the game is
not installed, the player can just click on an install button and the
system will apt-get it instantly from the ubuntu repositories (that's
where the password comes into play). The user even can purge games, if
he doesn't want to have it on his system anymore. You'll also see if the
games can be played with more than one player and so on.

To minimalize the development times of the frontend , my idea is to use
a ruby based framework called MERB and write the whole frontend as a
local running web application,rather than program the whole interface in
a language like C / C++ or whatever. So we basically could use a lot of
media and the interface can look whatever you like to. Settings will be
stored in a portable sqlite3 database and the application itself will be
running as a local user process with the help of the mongrels server,
that itself is written in ruby/c++.
With the help of the database, we could extend the system at any time
without much bliss. The User can update the system database with the
newly available games and so it can offer more games later on.

We could extend the application so that it stores some data of the User
like his nickname and
Further development could lead to the creation of a gaming league that
bases on oss games. We could use the system to promote new oss games
from developers who otherwise wouldn't get much attention, for example.

So it's clear that this is a lot of work, but with the help of some of
you guys, we could get something together in the not too far away
future. Xorg X11 development makes good progress in these days and 3d
games and engines will support linux, if just a broader community would
shine on.
Maybe we could even use wine... writing scripts to automatically install
windows games from cd /dvd that otherwise would be a pain to install for
most users. There are plenty of ideas, we just have to stand up and the
penguin out.

many greetings from austria to everyone who reads this.

btw. i say "thank you" to every bit of comment or criticism

regards,
barde
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