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[Fwd: Re: Possibly a great Idea to reach more players]

 

If a frontend that replaces the users desktop environment if your goal, why not just forget the DE entirely and just start X with the frontend?

xinit /path/to/frontend $* -- :1

Now, X will start on a new $DISPLAY (ctrl-alt-f8) and without the added head way of a WM/DE will allow for better performance.

Ryan Swart wrote:
Ah, I see.. I've actually been looking at the Sugar project, I'd think the activity/group focus and the interface would work pretty well as a game environment.

On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Christian Ahmer <barde667@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:barde667@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

    Thanks Ryan.

    That comes closer to what I thought about.
    Btw. you dismissed something.I plan to use the frontend as a
    replacement for the normal Desktop environment, so that not XFCE
    is started by the loginmanager like gdm. The frontend will be game
    oriented, but it can use whatever program can be installed on Ubuntu.
    You also may build your own frontend so that you can choose which
    applications you want to use often and you can use them directly
    by a click on the related entry / widget on the frontend. So you
    can use your browser, pidgin, whatever program you want to.

    Djl looks nice, maybe I could lend some ideas from it ;-)

    Have a nice day,
    Barde


    2009/5/2 Ryan Swart <serjndestroy@xxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:serjndestroy@xxxxxxxxx>>

        This idea sounds pretty cool, as I understand it, you will
        have a full screen interface like Elisa or Ubuntu Netbook
        Remix, instead of just being a windowed app like Mirthkit or
        DJL (mirthkit also only seems to support games developed for it)
        The only problem I see regards the fact that people don't
        /just/ play games a lot of the time. You like to have controll
        over your music, have an im client or irc open, heck, even
        browse the web a lot of the time.. Having an interface that
        limits you to gaming could be problematic, maybe solved by
        integrating those activities into the app?
But barde, definitely check out DJL <http://en.djl-linux.org/>
        in the meanwhile, the team has similar objectives and making a
        nice interface/adding functionality to the project would be
        awesome :)


        On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Khalid Rashid
        <khalid.rashid@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:khalid.rashid@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

            Hello Barde

            I skimmed through your email, so I'm sorry if i missed
            anything I think your idea sounds pretty similiar to
            mirthkit, which is already in existance and FOSS. Did you
            check it out?

            BR,

                *Khalid Rashid <mailto:khalid.rashid@xxxxxxxxx>*
                My PGP public key ID: BFC11F5F
<http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?search=0xCC9370B757DE41F0A9B35496A8F1137DBFC11F5F>


                /"In the middle of every difficulty
                lies opportunity."/ -Albert Einstein



            On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 17:54, b4rd3 <barde667@xxxxxxxxx
            <mailto:barde667@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

                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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