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 -- This message was sent from Launchpad by the user b4rd3 (https://launchpad.net/~barde667) using the "Contact this team" link on the Ubuntu Gaming Team team page. For more information see https://help.launchpad.net/YourAccount/ContactingPeople _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-gaming Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-gaming More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
