Comments on: Problems when packaging games

By: El payaso Pogo

El payaso Pogo — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:39:23 +0000

Licencias Creative Commons 3.0…

Desde hace poco tiempo he estado utilizando las licencias otrogadas gratuitamente por Creative Commons para la jurisdicción de México, y les he dado uso para los trabajos desarrollados por mi empresa.Muchos debates se han generado entorno a estas lic…

By: uls@jabber.org

uls@jabber.org — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:52:32 +0000

Hi Miry, just curious, what games have you packaged lately ?

By: Miry

Miry — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:48:43 +0000

Thanks for the comments. I guess it would be nice to develop a checklist for game developers, so that they could quickly have a look at whether they have unsolved issues with the games they’re developing. There are more problems with games, some of them specific to packaging, for example right now, when minor changes are made to some data in the game, the whole bunch of data files must be updatedm which doesn’t really make sense as an smaller differential system could do. Anyway, that’s not an easy thing to solve right now.
As for BenKo’s comment, I do not know of any game-specific HOWTO packaging manual. I guess Debian New Maintainers’ Guide is still the way to go. Anyway, you can ask for help to the Debian Games Team ( http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/ ) whenever you want, you’ll be welcome. I’ll try to have a look at that game

By: BenKo

BenKo — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 21:39:42 +0000

Is there any checklist or HOW-TO about preparing games for linux packaging? Some friends and me created a game at the last Campus Party, and we want to polish it and release this final version under the GPL (both code and data). It’d be great if we manage to get it into Debian

By: Joe Wreschnig

Joe Wreschnig — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:57:23 +0000

Having recently started work as a game programmer, I can say that most of these are not specific to free software (our data build chains are a big hack, and there’s no supported way to automatically regenerate all the “compiled” data from source, and even then “source” is not always real editable source, e.g. just PNG files instead of XCF files; real internationalization is super-painful thanks to features like text on 3D models or the desire for polished font effects).

Especially on GNU/Linux, the issue is that such things like installers or configuration files are often an afterthought for games. After all, that’s not exactly the fun part to write.

When making Angry Drunken Dwarves I tried to pay attention to these details (for example, the data builds happen on make install, and source for all data files is included). Even then, since the music was composed (almost out of necessity) in a proprietary application, those source files are useless for GNU/Linux users. It also seems that most people don’t care; if they don’t like your graphics, it’s rare that they’ll open up the XCF rather than munge around with the PNG or just redo it from scratch.

By: Josh Triplett

Josh Triplett — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 18:44:11 +0000

Related to your point about data build chains, sometimes the game author has programs to create and edit the game data (such as level layout tools), but refuses to distribute these programs.

By: Josh Triplett

Josh Triplett — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 18:42:21 +0000

Some games check for a mandatory environment variable to point at their data
directory; this forces the Debian packaging to either patch in a hardcoded
directory or use a simple wrapper /usr/games/thegame to set the environment
variable before running /usr/lib/games/thegame/thegame.

Some games require files in ~/.thegame in order to run, but don’t create these
files if not present; this again requires a wrapper to copy the necessary
files if not present.

By: Stoffe

Stoffe — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 14:54:43 +0000

Seems like this list could be turned into its opposite: a HOWTO or checklist for game makers that would like their games to be distributed as free software, something that perhaps could be read even before the game is written…