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...

Let's come back to retro-gtk. In the previous articles I explained how bad retro-gtk was, what I did to start improving it and more importantly what I did to prepare the terrain for further development. This article will detail the aforementioned planed improvements! Unless stated otherwise, I don't plan these changes to be part of retro-gtk 0.14 and I have no idea when they will be implemented. If I say anything you know to be wrong or if you know something which could help the library's development, please share it in the comments! Stabilization of the API As stated in the previous article, I want retro-gtk's API to stop breaking as much as it did in the past. Starting with 0.14, we will avoid API and ABI breaks as much as possible, and if we do any we will document them properly. The API should be stable but given that some big changes are coming I don't feel comfortable promising proper stability just yet. Gitlab I requested to move retro-gtk to GNOM...

This is the second article in a small series about retro-gtk, I recommend you to read the first one, retro-gtk: Postmortem , before this one. In the previous article I listed some problems I encountered while developing and using retro-gtk; in this one I will present some solutions I implemented to fix them! ☺ All that is presented in this article is part of the newly-released retro-gtk 0.13.1, which is the first version of the 0.14 development cycle. Changing the Scope The Libretro API is tricky: lots of little details need to be handled properly and it isn't always very clear how to do so. By mimicking this API, retro-gtk inherited its complexity, making it way more complex than it should be as there aren't many different ways for a Libretro frontend to handle the cores correctly. retro-gtk was forwarding the complexity of the Libretro API to its users rather than abstracting it. About a year ago I decided to slowly change the scope of the library. In the previous art...

This article is the first of a small series about retro-gtk, a library I develop in tandem with Games and which allows it to use Libretro cores. This first article focuses on the initial goals of the library, its design and the problems that arose during its development, while the next ones will focus on what I am working on to fix these problems. Libretro? retro-gtk? Are These Edible? The Libretro project defines an API to be implemented by so-called Libretro cores — typically video game console emulators — to expose them as shared libraries with a common ABI. These cores can then be used by so-called Libretro frontends via this API. Here is the main C header if you want to know what it actually looks like. You can see Libretro as a videogame console emulator plugin definition without a plugin system to make it usable. Initially, retro-gtk was designed and implemented as a library easing the use of Libretro cores from higher level languages like Vala. It allowed to dynamic...

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...

Do you like video games but don't like how inconsistent and annoying it can be to enjoy them on a personal computer? Then read on, I have something for you! And if you're not such a gamer, you'll probably learn fun things in the article nonetheless. In this article I'll present you the new GNOME application called Games , whose first preview version (labelled 3.18.0) just came out. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Games Your games library Video games on personal computers exist in lots of shapes and formats, each of these being accessible in very different ways: games installed from Software are found alongside the applications, Steam games are listed in the Steam client, video game consoles and retro computers games are handled as ROM files, disk images or archives, each one playable with a different application depending on the original platform, some game engines have their games distributed as packages that have to be run with the cor...

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...