Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

This year again I attended GUADEC, now for the sixth time in a row. It was a great GUADEC, as usual, thanks to the organizers and the attendees for making it as enjoyable as it was! Friday 🎮 I attended Christian's talk about designing multi-process apps, it sparked the interest of Alexander Mikhaylenko who rapidly started playing with these concepts, as we plan since a long time to run Libretro cores in a subprocess in GNOME Games . Lubosz presented his work on the VR Linux desktop. Even better, he demoed it, and the next day it was possible to test it in the corridor! So I did, and it was pretty amusing. I had the pleasure to meet Andrei Lisita and watch his lightning talk about adding advanced savestates support to GNOME Games. It is the first time an intern working on Games attends GUADEC, but sadly this time it's his mentor (Alexander Mikhaylenko) who couldn't attend. One day maybe, an intern and a mentor for GNOME Games will meet. 😛 Games is a newcomer fri...

With a new version of GNOME always comes a new version of Games, and this new version comes packed with new features, bug fixes and developer experience improvements. Install Games 3.30 Platforms View and Developers View As part of his GSoC project, Saurabh implemented two new views of your games collection: one filtering games by their developers and another one filtering them by their platforms. To know more, read Saurabh's Segregating views and Description view articles on his blog. To implement this he needed to work a lot on the Grilo front, check his explanations in his Adding self registering keys to lua-factory article. He also started to work on a new page displaying many details about a game like the number of players and a description, it was unfortunately not ready on time for this release but will hopefully land in 3.32. Gamepad Navigation You can now navigate the UI with your gamepads! Select your collection view with the shoulder buttons, browse ...

We are getting midterm of the GNOME 3.30 development cycle and many things already happened in the Games world. I will spare the user facing news for later as today I want to tell you about development features we desperatly needed as maintainers: tests and continuous integration. TL;DR: GLib, Meson, Flatpak and GitLab CI make writing and running tests super easy! 😁 This will allow Games to be more stable and to have more features. The More the Buggier Not only does Games and retro-gtk are slowly becoming bigger and more complex, but to handle many platforms Games has to come flatpaked with Libretro cores. Games and retro-gtk are currently only tested manually and as far as I know, this is also true for the vast majority of the Libretro cores we distribute. That's quite a large number of untested lines of code, it is already impossible to test all of them manually and the test matrix is not going smaller. We are not immune to introducing new bugs or to accidentally reintro...

SUSE Hack Week 0x10 finished on previous Friday, during it I wanted to support hardware rendering in retro-gtk . This project had two sides, the first one was to allow the Libretro cores to draw their video with OpenGL, the second one was to render their video using OpenGL to allow filtering it via shaders. It was unrealistic to do both sides of this project in one week and, being at the time a complete beginner when it comes to OpenGL, I didn't plan to succeed any of these projects but just to learn a lot. The week before the Hack Week, I took some time to study GtkGLArea and to implement a skeleton for the RetroGLDisplay widget, which was similar to RetroCairoDisplay but was drawing nothing. The GTK+ part of the project being ready, I was able to focus on the OpenGL part during the Hack Week. Friday The first day I looked for OpenGL tutorials and I managed to implement an "Hello, triangle" tutorial . I played a bit more with it and got the triangle blinking...

This is a guest article by Laurent « Hell Pé » Pointecouteau, the Alfred Pennyworth of GNOME Games who relentlessly works in the shadows to help make Games what it is, when he’s not busy writing in French about video games or slacking on Twitter. I used to be really excited at New Stable Release Blog Posts™ like this one, back in the day when you had to wait six months for getting new GNOME stable releases (and matching Ubuntu PPAs) in order to discover what was new in your favourite apps. But nowadays, these blog posts, while still a delight to read, are just a little less surprising than before, and we’ve got Flatpak to thank for that! So, here’s a quick reminder: Games can be obtained by two ways. The old-school way, with the version provided by your distro; and soon, hopefully, your distro will upgrade to the brand-new 3.26 stable version that we’ve just released. And the Flatpak way, the one we actually recommend if your system is ready for it: it’ll give you the choice betwe...

Games received a non-negligible amount of changes that you will find in 3.26. These changes can be big as much small, and more are to come! Building the Games Collection Games presents your games collection and if everything goes as expected, it does so without the need of any input from you. From an implementation point of view it sounds simple to do, just ask Tracker “Hey, gimme all the games” and it’s done. If only it was that simple! 😃 The system has no idea which files represent games and which doesn’t, but it can associate a MIME type to each file thanks to shared-mime-info . shared-mime-info already had a few video game related MIME types and we added a lot more such as application/x-genesis-rom . That done, we can query Tracker for files having specific MIME types that we know to often represent video game files. Unfortunately, each of these files doesn’t necessarily represent a game and a game isn’t necessarily represented by a single file: some files may be invalid and...

If you want to get some Neo-Geo games for Games , GOG.com has some on sales here . You can run them in Games by simply unzipping the installer and retrieving the two .zip files corresponding to the game and the Neo-Geo firmware. Keep in mind you'll need a MAME Libretro core to run them.

The openSUSE Conference was held during May 26–28, 2017 in Nuremberg, Germany. The event was really interesting and the location — Z-Bau — was perfect for this event. GNOME had a booth there, were you could have tried “the GNOME gaming handheld”: a GPD Win running Games on GNOME / openSUSE Tumbleweed ! This handheld definitely caught some attention. 😃 On a more personnal note I have been pleased to meet several persons I am looking forward to work with. 😃 See in Prague for the openSUSE Conference 2018!

GNOME 3.24 will be out in a few weeks and with it will come Games 3.24. This new version will offer a few new features and many refinements, some of which have been implemented by new contributors theawless and Radhika Dua , kudos to them! Find how to get the latest nightly and (soon) stable Flatpak versions of Games on its web page . A Libretro Core Descriptor Specification In its version 3.22, Games stopped using a hardcoded list of well known Libretro cores and instead looked for the right one to run a game by parsing files describing their corresponding Libretro core's capabilities. These files came from the libretro-super repository and were slightly modified to better suit Games' needs. The concept was great but the format of these files proved to be not very well suited for the job: many information were not useful to Games, some information it needed were lacking, the syntax wasn't specified, complex cases like firmwares were implemented in a messy way, ...

Recently I got myself a GPD Win , to make it simple it's a PC in a Nintendo 3DS XL form factor, with a keyboard and a game controller. It comes with Windows 10 and many not too demanding games work perfectly on it: it's perfect to run indie games from Steam and for retro consoles emulation. But who simply want to play video games, let's make it fun , let's put a penguin in it! On this GNOME wiki page I'll report all my findings on Linux support on this machine, focusing mainly on OpenSUSE for the moment. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a fully working and easily installable GNOME desktop running Games and Steam on this machine? 😃

I didn't blog about Games since quite some time and the app changed a lot since 3.18. 3.20 was quite a small update featurewise: it added support for MAME and Neo Geo Pocket games, added the About dialog, allowed l10n of the application, added a Preferences window listing the available plugins and fixed other small bugs, but this release mainly saw refactoring work with the introduction of the plugins system where plugins allow to list games: the Steam plugin lists Steam games and the SNES plugin lists SNES games. So with 3.20, Games was ready to be improved upon and improvement there was! 3.22 is the first properly usable version of Games The biggest change this cycle is the number of contributors to Games' codebase, first of all with two GSoC interns working on it: Megh Parikh and Ricard Gascons did a great job as I will detail it later. But Games didn't gain contributors only via GSoC: Bastien Nocera has been helping on the project since a year or so and got eve...

The last semester was quite crazy for me as I had to work restlessly for my studies, which let me very little time to work on GNOME Games. That being said that doesn't mean nothing happened in Games land! Here is what to expect in the next versions of Games. What will be new in 3.20 GNOME Games 3.19.90 just came out and brought with him some changes. Besides several small bug fixes, Games have been refactored, polished and hardened to be ready to receive more important features on the next release. Plugins This is the biggest feature that have been added in this cycle. Game formats in Games are handled by providing several types to handle them: a Game to represent the games of that kind, a GameSource to list the games of that kind ( GameSource is a Game factory), other classes could be added if necessary such as a Runner to run the games or a widget to display and control the games in the application's window. Currently a game source gives its games,...