 So hello and welcome. My name is Marcus Koshani, and Today I want to talk about Debian games. I am a developer from Germany and also a member of the Debian games and Java teams And I'm also a contributor to the long-term support team Yeah, what qualifies me for this talk I have some gaming experience since the 1980s I have been using Different computers up to now like the C64 the Amiga 500 all to modern PCs and yeah, I was a long time gamer enjoyed gaming but more recently I have Become a Debian developer and started to packaging games and starting to maintain them And nowadays I don't have much time anymore to to play games despite the rumors In 2012 I created a small website project called linux uarts DE That's basically a simple website with some statistics and some dedicated servers multiplayer dedicated servers Basically it is about You can find almost all dedicated server games on this website which we provide in Debian and and Well, it was my fun project to learn more about Debian games in general and Linux and administration Here in the meantime, I've touched already 400 packages in Debian mostly Java and Debian games and We probably won't have enough time for this talk, but if you have questions about specific games You can always ask me later And I will probably be able to answer them. So What do I want to talk about today? first of all, I want to give you an Overview about all our games in Debian main Debian Contrib and Debian non-free. I Also would like to present you game data package It's basically a tool to cover the fourth category of of games or games content Which is even worse than non-free These are this is a non-distributable content which Debian is not allowed to Legally distribute I Also want to talk about another project. I started in 2013 2014. It's called Debian games blend and How I tried to improve the visibility of games in Debian and then I also would like to talk about creating free content and About some ideas for future projects or how you can contribute to games first of all The gaming industry is really really big the global game marketplace according to a gardener.com a research company is About hundred billion dollars per year There are other numbers and figures That indicates it is only a double-digit figure in the billions But it's still quite high and it also depends on how they How they May I define what what our games and how this marketplace of what kind of games this marketplace consists of they basically say Take into account mobile games web games PC games console games, but also hardware So it's quite difficult to say how big the market really is Successful games attract usually millions of players When we talk about proprietary games, for example blizzard entertainment the very very very well known company That produced titles like starcraft warcraft world of warcraft and Diablo employs more than 4500 people and Yeah, well they own or earn Millions of dollars per month they had two million subscribers for world of warcraft in the year 2010 that was the peak time of the game and in 2008 they decided to Create another next generation MMO Nobody knew what it was back then And they kept it secret what we discovered in 2014 That they wanted to create something Well a huge MMO which basically Should combine multiple aspects of gaming so it should be a shooter game or combat games and you should also could you could also explore society and Trade with other people this very very complex very very complex ideas, but then they decided, okay It doesn't work. We won't produce it. We stopped the production. We stopped the development and Determinated everything in 2014 They employed more than 100 people just alone for this game and full-time and They use some of the contents and to create another game called overwatch Which is now the fourth franchise of blizzard entertainment and It also Attracts more than Several million of players daily What it is also worth to note that Property games receive a lot of extensive news coverage for example, I discovered last week or two weeks ago a BBC article about overwatch and This is usually something you don't see for free and open source software games Yeah, well, what's the difference in contrast to proprietary games? Most Foss games are developed by only a single person and this person is someone who Does it just for fun or for educational purposes? He mostly receives no money at all perhaps some donations and the even less receive money through crowdfunding or sales or a monthly fee Successful games in the first world attracts several thousand players, but not millions and The communities are rather small very small compared to let's say Blizzard World of Warcraft with millions of players So it is fair to say that the first games are a niche and It should not be This should not sound negatively it's just realistic so Nobody outside this room perhaps or in the community knows a lot about games What games we provide and how big they really are and nobody really talks about them and on major news sites We shouldn't really try to compete with these proprietary games It is not a matter of freedom but it's more a matter of money resources and How many people I employ to produce this content and to produce these games and It's very difficult for force game developers To create such a big game that is recognized by millions of players So how many different games are there in Debian? I have not counted them by hand. I've used the Debian games source package and Counted all unique games in all of the tasks files and subtracted the library packages and Also a subtracted toy games, which are not really games So I finally found the number and we have around about five hundred sixty one plus If you know KDE and KDE games, so roughly six hundred What is most important about Debian main is that all the contents is free software But not only the code, but also all artwork complies with the DFSG and If you take a closer look most of the games are written in C and C++ We have very few games who are written in pearl, but one well-known game. That's frozen bubbles The other one is pang zero We have one Haskell game. That's rank head We have three Java games Robocod Robocode is an educational game a programming game. We have free call clone of colonization and Triple a it's a strategy game We have dozens of python games mostly Based on the pi game engine and We have dozens of D games a few years ago. I didn't know that something like D exists at all But they are really cool. So if you have time check out the meta package games slash shooter maps They are really special. I like them because it's an it's all extra abstract shooter games And I think they are very well-written the problem with these it is highly unstable at least in my experience and We have to deal every release cycle with release critical bugs because something changed With the compiler and they don't work anymore. They cannot be compiled from source. So if you know D Would like to save these games Please contact us Well popcorn reports that our most popular games are I have more than 2,000 installations our most popular games are extreme tax racer or zero ad super tax card something like that and Well, you should take popcorn values with a grain of salt Because it is this tool is not installed on every computer by default So it is not clear how many people really use a software And it's also not clear When they will Most let's let's say it the other way most people play a game and then they remove it from the desktop or from their computer again This is in contrast to the tools that you daily need like web browsers male clients your Packager your archiver Whatever and so it is hard to say how many people really play these games PC games definitely dominate in Debian. We have very few web or mobile games They are almost nonexistent. I'm talking about HTML 5 games here and theory we could add hdm 5 games for example kth express Supports such a compile option But then I would also need to fix the M script and package in Debian Which is currently a bit buggy and doesn't work really really good. So Very very few HTML 5 games in Debian If you look for developer tools you can find them in our game slash death packages So if you're interested for example in C++ development You will find a lot of useful libraries in games C++ death So in my opinion the pros of force free open source software games is That we can preserve classic games Because we have the source code and we can reuse Artwork music files And they are free to use It's also a great way to learn a programming and developing in general. It's quite quite a fun as I said before many developers are people who Try to produce a new game or try to create a new game and started by coding a game The difficulty is You you must also be a person who Can create game content who is able to Create a good graphic create a good sound and only a few people can manage both It's something related to the brain. Some people are good at mathematics and others are very creative so a game creator has to be both at the same time and He needs to create a game that is fun So you can be a great developer, but if the game sucks nobody will play it Yeah, well on one one another point Our force games and may are very well integrated into Debian I've listened to the talk of Simon about flat pack. It's the easy way to install games. Okay But in my opinion and force games are a way to Well, Debian main is a way to package really great force games and they Have the same standard as our other packages So if you try to package a complex game like ufo alien invasion You basically have to invest the same time as the maintainer of Okay, it's just exaggerated but it's complex enough like like servers like a patchy server or Or Tomcat servers so you need to have Didn't know how to create a dedicated server package But you also must provide a desktop client package and you must analyze all the codes If it complies with the DFSG and you have to write a copyright file and for example for UFO alien invasion There are 5,000 different graphics and image files in this package. So it is quite of hard to Quite hard to find Or to analyze this package so to invest you have to invest some time in it, but if you do it you get a high-quality package because everybody knows this file is licensed under this license of this license and You can reuse it for another project or for something completely different. They don't have to be a game. It could also be your next video or slide whatever and This is not something a flat pack would give you you don't basically not, you know, basically nothing about the interiors Yeah, well, how Can we find all those games and that was a question I asked myself in 2002? It was rather complicated because I had to use some command-line tools like aptitude You can use aptitude search section games and You get all the games in Debian Okay, but few people know that most people will expect that there is something like software manager application and All the games are visualized in some way big icons I want to sort my games and strategy games in in role-playing games in roguelike games and shooting maps and so on and This is something which was not present in 2002 when I discovered Debian or Well, we had synaptic. I believe back then but it still it was difficult to find all the games so a Debian games blend Should solve the following problem It should list all games in Debian main and it should categorize them in different categories at the moment we have 34 meter packages containing 693 packages and This includes also library packages for game development You can take a look we have a home page at blends Debian or games tasks It's not perfect, but I think it was very easy to create because someone else did the job already My goal or my dream is that we create something better perhaps something listed under games dot Debbie and orc But we need someone with The skills to create such a web page who knows HTML CSS JavaScript and make something more beautiful How does it work? Creating major packages is very simple. There are different techniques, but a Debian games blend Makes it very easy or the blends framework in general makes it very easy. So you can basically Put one line in your Debian rules file include all the Necessary commands you have to depend on blends dev at Debian control You have to write a simple control stub file which contains only the minimum of Lines required to to create a Debian control file and the rest is simple text files are simple text files in your task directory where one line Indicates a dependency or recommendation for one game or a suggestion and then you ran make this and Everything will automatically be created you get all the other binary packages and Well, that's it basically Well some recommendations here If you're new to Debian games or have never heard of the games made of packages before please check out games finest These are the 100 recommended games chosen by myself. I Know I know It's because of popcorn value. I've chosen them because I thought unique gameplay. They had a unique gameplay They looked great or Yeah, well they were simply outstanding in some way. So why did I choose 100 packages when I mentioned this number? Last time at Debian 15 Some people rolled their eyes because yeah 100 that's Isn't it a bit much? I could also choose 10 the top 10 of Debian games or the top 25, but what does that mean? It's very subjective And I have decided that let's choose 100 games which are really good and This would guarantee that people will find it. Yeah, is there Is there a way to have? Default games pre-installed Just even just a few. I keep being asked for solitaire and the you know the equivalent of Windows games And I have to install them manually for each Newcomer so I don't know. Do you want to answer the question? What we had? short before Stretch was frozen. We had in the installer the selection that you could select the blend Games or others, but this was killed Unfortunately, and so you need to install the meta package yourself There's the task out there. This is what he's talking about Yeah, the task is there, but you can't choose it at installer time You have to use it's apt install games slash finest and then you will get Approximately 10 gigabyte of data it sounds a lot it sounds much, but if you compare it to modern games Single game can can have more than 40 gigabyte of data nowadays 10 gigabyte is nothing and this We are talking about 100 100 games here also, I Think the the default install of like the known desktop or the KDE desktop used to include Like my sweeper solitaire that kind of thing I think those have been deliberately taken out because the relevant to desktop teams wanted to kind of prune down how much they were installing Yeah, at the same time. I don't know about KDE, but at least in gnome if you search the overview for like solitaire No shell has integration with gnome software. So if you just type in solitaire Among the search results will be hey, you can install this solitaire package from apt So it is reasonably easy to get these things like on demand So first of all I've deliberately excluded KDE or gnome games because I didn't want that users Pull in complete desktop environments KDE games and gnome games depend on the whole Desktop environment So you would mix two different completely different desktop environments and I didn't want that so they are only suggested and all those meta packages You're right They are really big sometimes or Solitaire games are under games Board I believe You won't be interested in all of them. That's for sure. It's mainly intended to be used You look at the meta package description and you could install them separately, but you could also say, okay Forget it. I just want to take a look and let's install all of the games And then you could easily remove those that are unimportant to you Because the meta packages don't depend on them. They recommend them only So it is very easy to just remove the ones you don't like and you can keep the ones you like That's all about it. I think also If you seek for Solitaire, then you need to know that Solitaire exists and so people end up displaying only Solitaire and The meta package is suggesting things you never heard about before That's the point more questions Okay Yeah, well, it's That was mainly the main reasons for David games blend What else could we do? I Always wanted to create a live image of Debian and Well, I tried to figure out how it works. I studied All the relevant packages But I never Could get it to work never worked for me at least I gave up But this is one thing I want to learn But maybe someone else in this room is interested in creating a live image and I think it would be a very cool idea because Let's take Fedora for example, they call it spin. They have a game spin We could also create such a spin when let's let's rename it and call it Debian games Okay That was basically main I have chosen to include only games from main because I think Debian is all about free software Of course, I could include contrap games and non-free games and well basically every game that ever existed But I wanted to draw a line. I wanted to make sure that we only recommend free games So what are Debian contrap games now? So the policy says every package and contrap must comply with the DFS gene. So all packages and contrap are free software But they are there because they either built or Either built depend on something non-free or they need something non-free to function and In this case it is the the function word which is important It is very common in Debian that we have a lot of free engines, but they require non-free contraint for example Years ago we had Sauerbraten in Debian contrap. That's an first-person shooter and Well, the main contents of the image files are most of them are non-free because they are licensed under non-commercial clause licenses or they may not be modified Very interesting is that for example Richard Stolman thinks that the art in the game is not software It is not ethically imperative to make the art free though free art is an additional contribution This are his words about non-free games so in Debian it is imperative that free games also have free content and Otherwise they can't enter the Debian main archive and but he has a point. I mean Are PNG files really software? Some people in Debian argue that way they say You must provide the source for PNG files. So PNG file or JPEG file is only It's not the preferable form of modification maybe the developer has something better an SVG file or well an uncompressed sound file but it's very hard to tell if this is really true and Some people like me. I Found a PNG file on the internet. It was licensed under a creative commons license Share like I've used it. I modified it and I used it for another game. I Never had the SVG file. So does it this isn't is this a reason to call a game non-free? Hmm well the problem is or The problem exists because in 2004 We wanted to include scum. We am into Debian scum. We am is very well known application where you can play old adventure games and Back in 2003 2004 The FTP masters decided That an engine without free content cannot enter the main archive So the lead developer of scum. We are at this time asked to a company if they would license real license one of their games and so beneath beneath a steel sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen entered the archive. They are BSD licensed basically and That was the reason scum. We am could be moved into the main archive Because remember Only main comprises Debian Basically country and non-free are not part of Debian. We only provide the resources Well on the other hand we have a lot of emulators and Debian free emulators very good ones and the question is Do we have free content for them? I don't know but they are in Maine all of them and I believe or I fear we treat Some packages differently than others And I wonder if we really serve the free software worlds very good if we say a completely free engine is Not part of Debian of all this author although it is free software and well some people disagree with my opinion and so we have Reach the consensus in our team at least and With the FTP masters we believe that engines can go in Maine even without free data Also being in Maine as long as usable data exists So that means you don't have to package Free content it is enough if you know it exists somewhere on the internet So for me Contribute is a staging area These are all games free software, but they are not perfect because they don't provide free content and you can either Say okay forget about the free content. We just take the non-free content like mr. Storm on set It's not ethically imperative Or you can say Let's create free content Let's talk about sour Bratton as our Bratton is a beautiful German word as a dish and Well here you can see some potato dumblings and red cabbage and that's what actually sour Bratton is It's also the name of a first-person shooter developed by a Developer with the nickname a double that's Dutch and literally translates to earth apple or More commonly known word in English is potato So it makes all sense if you know this information Okay, I believe it was two years ago that I decided I wanted to change something about sour Bratton So Barton the engine was free ZLIP licensed, but the content was Partly free, but mostly unfree non free It was one buck reporter who pointed me to Free content which was assembled by Alon Sakai who works or worked for the Mozilla Foundation and who Created a really cool project and he Compiled or used the sour Bratton engine Compiled it to each JavaScript with the M scripten with the scripten and You could run the game in the Mozilla web browser There's even a link Maybe you can show it to you later You can play sour Bratton in your Mozilla browser. It's yeah, JavaScript and Well, he wanted to Create a free game, of course. So we asked some of the developers if they Would realize since some of their models and graphics and as I said some of them were already free and I discovered this package Slightly modified it so that it worked with The cube to engine in Debian and we got cube to data Only recently someone contacted me and filed the first bug reports I mean upstream bug reports because now I'm a upstream developer basically It's I'm the upstream developer of cubes to data and he well, he discovered some bugs and we enabled some new game Game game modifications. He introduced some new files. Well, and now you've basically started a new project a Free project and it's it's just a demo game. It's not complete But it's playable you can use it and you can use it freely to showcase Debian or Jen in a free first-person shooters general There are several websites dedicated to free artwork One of them is open game art org and the other one is for example free sound org example number two Elgeneral Elgeneral was also in contrap But there was no content at all no game content at all So it was basically useless for a gamer Elgeneral is a clone of a Panzer general which is a game from the 90s developed by an American Company Which was very popular game. It's a classically classical a strategy game with hexagon fields and you could basically play well, Germany and World War two and conquer the whole world the main objective was if you were really good in this game you could Conquer washing Yeah, great. That's the reason why it is still on the index on Germany You're not it's no joke So well Okay Well, I am asked Steve McHugh who created our world war one a modification if he would re-license his art files artwork and He he did I could reach him his email address was still intact and still yeah, well it basically converted all this graphics into a format which was compatible with the general engine And here we are we have we have some content. I didn't develop it I just ask another person if he would like to Realize since his work and most people are very generous when it comes to this kind of question Well, so we had another content package So how do we solve these non-disputable problem? We could as I said create our content or we create Or we use a tool to download all these bad content non-disputable and This tool is called game data package. Yeah, the main drivers are Simon and Alexandre It is basically a tool written in Python 3 that scans the upstream data and and Creates creates hashes of each file. So they are all identifiable and Then downloads all the all the information all the source files and creates a Debian package But you as the user must Accept the license. So basically it's outside of Debian So the tool is free software, but you must ensure that the license is okay for you. It's It has a very simple command line interface Basically nothing can go wrong. You you just type game data package and the name of of the game content You want to download and currently we support 213 games and game variants Non-free well, this is very easy and non-free are all packages which are Encomper encumbered by patents other legal issues that make their distribution problematic meter package for for game data package So the idea behind game data packages Well that you must that you can only that you create packages for your use for your users alone and I don't intend to create a meter package, but everyone else is free to to create such a meter package I'm personally not interested in it, but of course. Yeah, you can file wishlist box reports against game data packager and request this feature or you can add games yourself. It is not very difficult game data packager uses YAML files and Contribution is really simple. Just check out the existing files and you can contribute new new games and of course you can also package something Where no Where no engine exists and then at the moment No problem. I I'm not sure if I have correctly answered the question But I maybe come back to this later Yeah, the most popular non-free packages steam. Oh Because yeah, as it is more than 5,000 installations that is more than two times What the most popular free software a game has some deviant? Yeah, why is it that all people talk about steam? Steam is a very big distribution platforms that has more than 125 million regested accounts and There are more than 2,000 native linux games available proprietary Linux games available, but also some games are completely free And they provide a means for free software developers to To get some money so you can buy their game on on the steam platform and They receive the money for it Yeah, well steam is It's not my kind of thing because I'm more interested in fixing Packages from main because I can't really fix anything in steam steam is completely It's a binary blob at the client and I can't do anything about it But I acknowledge that it is very important that people can play Their favorite game there. There's always a time you want to play a specific game Like it was World of Warcraft for me seven years ago, but I played it with wine I was probably the only one who played it with wine in my guild But yeah, there's there are times you want to play a specific game, okay it's fair enough and In this regard steam is very helpful and it's better a steam is The people place steam games on Debian or on linux than on another Operating system in my opinion Okay Some key points about the Debian games team. I joined the team in 2012 My first experience was very unpleasant because nobody wanted to sponsor my packages or review them and Without help from outside without developers like arya and globits and the Winston Chang I Would probably not stand here this really sucked But nowadays the situation is reversed I could sponsor packages, but There are no people who want to want to contribute something. That's why I'm here Yeah, some stats You can see that in 2006 to 2009 we had a lot of contributions on our mailing lists for the discussions And they were equally distributed so we had some contributors and we are well It looks quite good then between 2010 and 2011 you see one blue Guy mr. Paul wise who contributes regularly on Debian devil games, but The contributions declined over time and we are here now We need to change that please Okay, um, well, this is another graph from the package games to ball this is our buck mailing list and I started to reply to some buck reports in 2012 and here the Purple graph that's about this this is game data packages Basically, Alexander who fights wish list bugs against game data package But well, yeah, it increased a little bit. We are better now in fixing bucks and we respond to buck reports And this is my chart which I Have painted on my wall It's about bug fixes and Well, again, it shows that we have approved a little over time so Yeah, I've created another chart in this team statistics which displays The relation between how many maintainers are working for one package and mostly is one Do you know this graph maintenance pair? Package I've put the link to into I'll see room boo. Maybe we can show it later But okay, this is quite interesting and it should yeah, maybe finish your talk and then I'll show you okay No, I've never heard of it before Last but not least Ideas for future projects. First of all, it's not very difficult to contribute something to Debian games First of all just play the games Block about your experiences that is very helpful reward report bucks and fix them and What you also can do is have to improve desktop and app data files and icons It's a very simple tasks, but we need better icons You can we have some games with actually icons, but this this is the first thing people will recognize And they decide hmm, that's an ugly icon must be an ugly game So you can easily change that by providing a better icon very simple Have to maintain existing packages if you are already a Debian maintainer We would like to welcome you We could also create that we can games live project. I have told I talked about that before You could move blends dot Debian org to games dot Debian org and improve the web page and We could also create a game content database. I had a mind something similar to code search Dot net but for artwork We already provide good copyright files in many cases, so it would be very easy to say, okay I need an image about I don't know some some house or some texture and it should be a created license under a created common license This would be the perfect database It doesn't exist yet last but not least We could also create a promotional gaming video Like it is very common In the gaming world where we just showcase in one minute what games we have and What what cool games we have and yeah Why you should play them that would be really cool So that's it for my side and thank you for listening Whoever is interested later on when when we leave the show here There is currently a project based on the famous open Pandora a successor called the pyra and Fortunately, I was able to bring a prototype here. It's a gaming console Based on Debian stretch So it's quite a nice thing that there exists such a thing And you can look at it. I have it here. It runs currently frozen bubbles And yeah, I put it on my desk and everybody who likes can see it and touch it and play with it I'm not related to the project itself Yeah, yeah, we we can show to the camera And is it on the camera now? Very cool too high too low, okay It's not open hardware unfortunately Because the license is not completely free. So as fine as I know you get all their schematics and PCB and so on But it's not let's say open hardware license or something At least for software developers. That's quite okay because you know all their Pin connections and so on everybody Colonel hacker or device driver hacker needs to know But it's a non-commercial something So not really open hardware. No I'm made might perhaps show the graph quite quickly here What's what this graph shows is the version control system contribution of maintainers and about 200 packages are only touched by a single person in the game game games team about 130 packages are Touched by two persons and so on so you have this kind of hyperbolic graph and It's similar in the Indian mid team a little bit better But it should be like in the pearl team where you have kind of that graph So you have a minimum of packages only by maintain by one. It should be the goal. That would be optimal. Yeah, I agree Meet a discussion pardon Does it show the people really maintaining the package or the ones that are mentioned in the control file? No, no, this is our real commits. It are commits and I strike out Commits below five so it's a random commit but The the real question you should ask is it does it has a time scale because in Debian meet we have a better Distribution of two maintainers, but the fact in fact there. It's our package Built by somebody else and talking take over by me. So it's also a single maintenance package. So but Yeah, in the pearl team you see where it should should go and We should have a for ice principle for packages and this is definitely no for ice principle Okay, yeah, thank you all for your attention and that's it for the Debian games talk. See you around