Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

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...

During last GUADEC, I had a chance to briefly present my project of having a powerful yet simple video game manager and player for GNOME. To make it a reality, a lot of work was needed on the backend side. This article present the release of the first version of this backend, in its release candidate form. Libretro Libretro is a C/C++ API used mainly by retro video game console emulators and game engines. Writing an emulator and writing a GUI application require very different skills, using Libretro allows to isolate the backends (often called modules or cores) implementing the API from the frontends using the API to manipulate them, easying the port of the emulators or engines and offering a multiplicity of cores to choose from to application developers. The main frontend of Libretro is RetroArch and it have been ported across multiple systems. Retro Retro (or retro-gobject) is a GObject based Libretro wrapping library written in Vala. It eases the creation of Libretro...