 So this is the Debian games team boff, this is the intro about the boff and so I thought we'd cover some of the things that the games team is doing and introduce some of the members of the team and yeah. So I'm Paul, I package Warzone and Chromium BSU and some other stuff. This is Rhonda, mostly packaging Wesnoth and some other stuff I think. And Ansgar doing lots of sponsoring and other things. Do you want to say something about what else you do in the games team? Are you a person? I've not been doing that much but I look at least after Simu Trans currently. And sometimes sponsor other games. So as you can see from the gobby document we've accumulated quite a few source packages in the team and as a result we also get quite a lot of RC bugs and sometimes we aren't so good at staying on top of those. In the past we've had regular IC meetings but we haven't had anyone organising them more recently so we need to resume that and I think it was a very good activity while it was going. We've also had work parties on IC and the first one we did was the screenshots party. We didn't get very many people but I think it went well. We got over 100 screenshots for different games. And the other stuff we do, there are some people working on live CDs and Devin Purebland and Rhonda has been looking at doing games, video casts and maybe you can say something about that. I had this idea to do a regular video cast about presenting free software games. This idea came up several years ago, three years. I think in Spain I brought up the idea first but I wasn't able to find the tools that worked properly for me and no one else. There was a lot of interest in it but no one else invested some effort into it and I got distracted by several things and I recently started to look at record my desktop again and I think I came to the point that it's possible to do something. I might be doing one or two over the next few weeks and mailing them to the mailing list for preview. I'm still looking for a fancy name for the YouTube channel or wherever we would like to put it up to. And that's mostly it. I think it should be something like five to ten minutes. Ten minutes might be even too long but five minutes should be doable depending on the complexity of the game of course but it should show the most common situations within the game so that people get interested and try it out. It should definitely have the URL of the game, where to get it from and things like that. Cool. Can you write a wiki page about your workflow and stuff like that when you start doing it? Yes. When I managed to get the first or second episode done I will definitely put it down in the wiki page so others can follow it and put it there. And also produce some guidelines what should be in, whether a comment, if it's a single player game, multiplayer, watch our rights, covers for maybe even if it's considered to be pedagogic or for children useful or something like that, I'm not so sure if we all have the expertise to rate it like that but some hints might be useful. Okay. One other thing we get into is discussing with upstream about what their source form is. A lot of the time the data that they release is pre-compiled, pre-rendered images and sometimes they have the source in a secret repository somewhere and it's useful to discuss with upstream to find out where that is. So here we have some links involved about the stuff that I've just talked about. So the first one is the team, how to get involved, some of our QA pages, about our meetings and parties and blends, live CD and I've written here some stuff about source. So I'll just show you those. So this is the team web page, some links about how to get involved and stuff like that. And this is our getting involved section, lots of links to different aspects of the games team and this is our sponsors queue. As you can see there's quite a few new packages that need to be uploaded that non-DD members of the team have worked on. So if you're a Debian developer we could certainly use your help with sponsoring those if you want to join. This is our pet instance, it's basically a to-do list of things that we need to do. As you can see it's very, very, very long. A similar Debian maintainer dashboard, another to-do list, lots of RC bugs. This is some info about our meetings. We documented our procedures extensively to make it easier for new people to help organise the meetings. If anyone wants to get involved with that we need to restart those. So this idea I had about Debian games parties, they are well publicised periods of time where we do lots of work on a particular area of gaming in Debian. The first one was on screenshots and we had about five people at the first one and that was in February 2012. I wrote a blog post about it and as you can see we made quite a few screenshots and we had about five people and we also filed some bugs and got some old games removed. Next thing, a couple of things are the Debian Pureblends and the LiveCD. Ben Armstrong has been working on the LiveCD stuff and Andreas Tilley has been doing some Debian Pureblends stuff for games but the team hasn't really worked on it very much. So we need people to contribute to that as well. And this is a page about how to be a good upstream for games. This is a cross distro page and we wrote part of it about source to encourage people to release their source code to their data. So that's it for the introductory part. Let's have some discussion. Any thoughts? Thomas? Any thoughts? Fogart? Anything? So I've looked at some games and I wonder if there are common themes like some games will download a bunch of files as you connect to them. Is that appropriate for main? Or just a sheer huge quantity of data files and stuff? How does the game seem generally handled that? Or is there some sort of problems they see with some games out there? In general I think most games in Debian at least the data is in the source package. Some games like MindTest you can connect to a server and the server has a world in it and it's got different things so it's kind of like a web browser more than a game. So there are different games doing different things and then there's stuff like Ryzone which is 13 gigabytes worth of data or something like that which is kind of a world. I'm not sure how that works. I think you were talking about it before? Yeah, there's an Ubuntu PPA for Ryzone and I've been just rebuilding it on Debian and it basically rsyncs the data files on every time you run the program and it's actually only about 8 gigabytes worth of data files. Only? Only. But otherwise technically it seems pretty legit as a package. On the large data file thing there are some games that expect to have that data already installed and also have very large amounts of data like VegaStrike. Something that's been in progress for a number of years or at least thought about is data.debian.org. I wonder if Ansgar as part of the FTP team could say something about whether that's in progress or planned or... There's nothing new about data.debian.org in the last time. Okay. What might it take to get that moving hardware or... I'm working on my help with it which is this multi-archive stuff for DAG but well I'm not sure about the other things like would it be an extra Muro network and who should... Yeah, I imagine it would be a separate to the regular Debian mirrors. There was also the idea hanging around somewhere whether we should try to find a server where we could put up the network servers for the various games. I'm not so certain if this is really needed in some... With some games it might be a useful thing because upstream moves on and we have to support stable and should give our stable users the chance to continue to play the stable versions. To some extent we can of course use backports for making the newer versions available for stable users so they can continue to play with other players that move down already but to some degree we still should be able to support our stable users and I think the server might be very useful for that. It's so hard to find a sponsor for a server, especially the hardware, locating, putting it to in some rack somewhere is usually not the issue but to get the proper hardware for it might be troublesome. Perhaps we could talk to DSA and see if they could give us a VM somewhere. The topic that you touched on there is backports. I don't think we do very much of this at the moment but we probably should especially for games that have version-specific network protocols for multiplayer and stuff. So is that something you do for Westnorth? Yes, there's the 1.10 version of Westnorth already available in backports. You do it for Warzone? I haven't been doing any backports yet, but you did it for the last release. You did it for the last release, right? Yes, I think I did. I haven't been doing it recently though. But Westnorth is one of the examples where the new upstream release came out this year, so definitely far too late for squeeze and I'm offering it in backports and for every other games that have network games available and potentially incompatible issues with that. Please feel encouraged to make them available for backports. Any questions? Any other thoughts? Jonathan, maybe you have some ideas? A few thinking in a project like Linux Gamers but based in Debian and including other games that are not included in Linux Gamers. So can you write the URL in Gobi? What's Linux Gamers? Can you say some more about that? I'm not familiar with what you were talking about. Well, I refer to the intention to make a live CD like the Linux Gamers live CD, but someone based in Debian and including other games that are not in the Linux Gamers live CD. So Ben Armstrong was working on a live CD. If you want to have a look at the source code and create the live CD, you can take a look at this page here and if you have any suggestions, you can send us patches for that. I'm not sure how much work is done on it or what it includes or anything. But it's probably a good idea to check it out and maybe you can have a LAN party or something like that. We need to probably have some sort of daily image generation so you can just grab the latest one and run it. Thank you. So anything else that people want to bring up? Thanks, Gar. Do you have any other thoughts? Well, let's see if there are any questions on ISE. I'm not in the talk room too. Talk room one, I mean, has there been any comments on ISE, Rhonda? Yes, there was recently again brought up the topic about the free-ness, how free can a music file, a org file, mp3 file really be? Is it the preferred source form for a package? Same goes with images. It's a topic that pops up every now and then. It's an old discussion, probably 10 years or even older. No one really properly cared about it but my standing with respect to it is as long as the artist themselves consider this the preferred source of modification it should be considered that way too. So the way I think about it is that Debian users and upstream need to be equal in the ways that they can modify the source. So if upstream's got a multi-layer image somewhere, it's probably easy. You can modify that in more ways than you can modify the rendered PNG or if you've got a audacity project, you can modify that in more useful ways than an org file. So it's about the equality between Debian users and upstream and Debian passing on the freedoms that upstream has given us. So if upstream has thrown away their source, then what we have is the only thing that could be modified because it's the only thing that can exist and I guess that's suboptimal but that's just the way it is and we have to accept that as the source. I hope that answered the question on ISE. I'm hoping to write a blog post about this sort of stuff soonish when I get back from DevConf. So any more things? Otherwise we should probably close if there's nothing else. Okay, I guess that's it. Thanks for coming and if you've got any questions for afterwards, feel free to come and see any of the games available and thanks for coming to DevConf.