 So, welcome to Debian Games BoF by Eugene Golov. Hi, thank you very much. This is Debian Games BoF. I'm quite loud on the speakers, am I? Perfect. Well, I was quite... Yeah, astonished that it was settled in this big room, because, well, it should just be a small BoF. But, well, you are here, I am here. I hope you will enjoy and improve the games in Debian even more. So, who are we, the Debian Games Team? Because I see pubs, I see Persia, I see Christoph, Lindy, Ansgar, who else is in the Games Team here? Nobody. Okay. We are actually 169 members, according to Alliot. There are 169 people in the PKG-Games group. We maintain 270 safe packages in Maine, 22 in Contrip, and 12 in Non-Free, because, well, games are often Non-Free, or at least the data of the games is Non-Free. This seems pretty impressive. But there's also a downside of this big team with many packages, because I counted 74 inactive members. I guess if when Andreas will use his better tools than mine, he'll come up with even bigger numbers of inactive members in our group. I counted inactive just as no commits and no mails since January 2010. We also have, well, a bit over 500 bucks for them are Grave and 10 Serious. That is, well, okay for 270 packages, but we could do better. And we always wonder what can we do to be better, because, well, as a Debian developer, maintainer, whatever, you have a different view on the packages you maintain yourself than a regular user would have. So I hope to get some insight from the user sites during this ball form, maybe afterwards. I already got some from some people who are not here, said, but, okay, I'll introduce the staff. The game team was quite low in activity the last year, and about four months, perhaps, is it right? Four months ago in March, I think we started with reviving the game team. We did, we now do meetings every month. The next is on the 7th of August. I won't be able to join because I will be at Wacken, but I hope the other guys will rock the show and do some productive stuff. We are about to write a policy how games should behave, packaged, whatever. And we try to interact with other distributions, but, well, it works with Ubuntu because they are just downstream for us. They almost not maintain games in themselves, I think. Is that right, Persia? That's the story we usually tell in some contexts. The other one we sometimes tell is that we prefer to have an integrated team because it's easier than dealing with patch management through the PTS and whatnot. And I think we have one contact at Fedora's. It's Hans de Geode. He's a very nice guy, but, well, it's just one person, so it doesn't help perfectly. So we need help, obviously. So everyone put on your laptop, join Gobi, and let's help the games team. What I want to do with the games team in the soon future, I think, is to clean up. I told you there are about 70 members of the team who are not real members anymore. I'm planning to send out some emails, and when I don't get any response in a reasonable time, just delete them from the group. They can rejoin every time, of course. I also plan to play around with team metrics that Andreas and Sukhi... Thus, I was just introduced to it the day before yesterday, I think, so it's new to me. I hope to get something out of it. Also, Andreas mentioned it, and it also was in my mind, we need a homepage or something like that to represent this community of gamers in Debian to show maybe it would be just a link collection for starters, but hello, Ronda. The most important games team member, Ronda. You won't be kicked out of the team, never. Practically, I'm currently just compiling Vesnot again. There's a new upstream release, so... Yeah, but I heard there are quite a lot of players for Vesnot, so you are important. Andreas also mentioned that it's quite easy to create so-called blends tasks page with basically a shinier and nicer index of packages and group the packages into better groups than Upt or Deptex can do. We also had the idea to extend Deptex a lot, but I think we didn't reach any good conclusion yet on this. We also have a tool called Game Data Packager for sort of non-free games like Quake where the engine is free and you have to get the data for the game yourself. The Game Data Packager will create a depth package from the CD or whatever you have the data on so you can just install it on your machines. I think we could extend it very much, not only Quake, not only data, but also other games that are available on Linux, but not free and cannot join the archive. Also, Humble Bundle was released, I think, four days ago, and I think it would be quite nice to go to the guy who makes Humble Bundle and says to him, hey, let's make depth, put it on your BitTorrent, and let the players just download the depth instead of what touches it and extract it somewhere and run it somehow. Rhonda, you do backpots, so you're not only doing where's not. And I think we should do more backpots in the team, especially because games are often under some... Or multiplayer games are often, in the case that they change some protocol and you need a new upstream, you can't go with the older one. There's often the case, especially with multiplayer games that in the server, the upstream project moves on and just supports the latest version of the servers, so it would be good that we have the latest version available for the stable release for the users. That's where backpots come in. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. I have the same problem with SpockRTH. Like pubs uploaded was on 2100 to backpots already. I think Nexoys might be another target at some point needs a backport. Maybe... I don't have the full overview because I play on unstable, so I just serve the users when they do backpots, which I don't do yet for games. And of course, as they are not all game team members here, what do our users wish? We would really like to listen to you, so speak up now, maybe later. Well, at that point, you can see in the corner that slide five from six, and the last one is just... Well, we are the team, join the conversation now, and what do you expect from games? Hello. It's working, yes. Yes, you mentioned it on your page. Let me do some comparison of the games teams, perhaps with the multimedia team, and we also have the Giz team, and perhaps DebiHem or whatever. All these teams are working on a certain topic, and I... You know, I favourise the Blends thing and just put my ideas on these teams because of the following reason. You all are doing some excellent technical work on single packages, and you are communicating on a level of SVN or Git or whatever and packaging, but there is... I think there is a missing link to the user who tries to get the answer. What can I expect from DebiHem? And once you install DebiHem, you can use, for instance, GoPlay, which is nice. But no one knows there is GoPlay. Yes. That's one problem of it. I've learned it in a quite early stage, but if you want to attract a non-Debian user, you need it on the web page or somewhere. But this is basically the answer I want to give all these Blends stuff is basically a technical answer to the problem, how we can structure as a project. I like to be Blends even more to be some kind of interface, to the user, even having perhaps a game's user mailing list or something where people can ask. I don't know if it works for games, but... We have a mailing list and they can, of course. Okay, so that's just me. That's fine. But other teams where we are just lacking such a list where users can ask. And so Blends should be something, a contact point and a point for information and giving the team some structure. Perhaps in my case we have some distinct people that are working for biology or for imaging. Also, perhaps in your team are people who are really keen on 3D games and ignore the other ones or strategy games. So you could give the team some structure in case of categories or whatever. Yes. Also, Mika from Grummel mentioned earlier to me, he can't be here because he's in the ability, boff or whatever, it's in the next room, that it would be really cool to have some kind of recommendation system. So this one would have to be installed on the machine and then it's like, here you have open arena installed, which is a first-person shooter. How about trying Nexus or whatever? This also could be exported in some way into the web with more user input than. So yeah, that's also partly also my point. I think from a user perspective it's currently not, there's not much enticement to install Debian if you're not using Debian already, if you're after games basically. What's really missing is something like a central point which is probably also linked on the, maybe also linked on the main Debian website. Where people have a chance to see how many, to get a first impression of how many options there are probably in games in Debian, what they look like, you really need pictures or videos or something there. And yeah, I think the PlayDep people are doing a nice job in this. They have some software which automatically indexes repository and up-to-repository and makes screenshots. I'm not sure whether it makes screenshots, probably they do it manually or something. At least they have a nice way for presenting the packages they have in the archive. Of course, many of those are not free and could probably not be in Debian, but those which are in Debian could be presented in a similar way that would be pretty nice for people and give a better impression for how nice it is to use Debian games. That one there? Actually, the packages Debian org websites offers the possibility to just add, slash, squeeze, slash games and get a list of all the games within the pool. Usually the package management software also offers to search for games because they are put in their own section. We have screenshots, Debian.net. The screenshots from there are at least incorporated in both the packages website but also inside the software center. This is a GNOME-based software installation software package tool. I think not that many people use it but I guess end users actually might use software center because it's very easy to install software from there. But we had some discussions a while ago about doing a website which presents more information which is more tailored towards games than what the packages site can offer. I think GoDebian, PlayDep or something like that, they have a more or less interesting approach to this and we could learn from them how to present games and could potentially come up with something similar. It just needs someone to do the work. I also suggested to potentially do screencasts. I just haven't found yet the tool with which I'm able to do it easily. A screencast of like five minutes, maximum ten minutes of presenting your favorite game and do that regularly through some YouTube or some other channels publishing it and get people to subscribe to that channel to get a constant flow of this week, game of the week, something like that. There is a package of the week, I think, on the page somewhere on the net. Yes, but I don't... I'm not sure if it's still active. I don't know either, so... That might be the problem. But a screencast tool that works fairly well and is able to help us get some short presentation of games onto the web would be cool. There are so many places where you can get single parts of information which could combine into a central experience. But this is currently missing, right? So probably some work needs to be done there. Then I think a website would be pretty nice for people who are not into devianet or actually people who are already using devianet too. So something to complement the application installer, which is probably not actually known to everybody yet. So actually, especially I think new users probably do not know application installer if they installed devianet. So are there any web developers who can do it for us? Andreas, you are not one. Definitely not. I just went to playdev.net to compare what we could have with these task pages and I see they have a better web developer than me, definitely. I would love if some... I would have a better designer than you. A better designer than, okay, I would love if somebody would tweak the task pages that way. We have some template, it can be tweaked. It's easy. I see what's in installs now. We can't provide this probably. Are you going to dust? I don't know. If we can, in devianet, just click a button to install a package. As it works in Ubuntu, we could backport something. If it works even better. It just has to pop up a software center or synaptic or whatever is installed. Perhaps it's a good idea. What I'm missing on this page is definitely localization. So on the web page, on the task page, we have at least if... It's something translated and I think translation is very important for games because you want to address children, you want to address people who are not necessarily speaking English. And this... You can get it for free with the task page, I think. I wonder if... Just on the translation thing, most games are generally not translatable because they... I mean, it's a description on the web page. To learn what the game is about, to find a selection what you can expect from this package. What's the game itself? You can't do anything about this. Yeah, okay. You can always, but... I wonder if PlayDev has some kind of star system so you can tell, yeah, this game is really great. I give five stars to it or something because it's also something that... This is also we wanted to implement, but it really needs a web developer. Yes, sure. Which is not me. So that stuff is kind of like what Enrico was talking about with the AppStream project. Yes. So, yeah, maybe we could have a game stream branding... Maybe we wait a month and Enrico gets all these things done and we can just enjoy the stuff for free. We don't have the star system on the task page, but we have the popcorn information, so many people are playing this or have installed and used this. Well, this is the data what we have. Yeah, but I don't believe in popcorn, for example, because I don't have it on any of my machines. Yeah, but it's not only you, and we have some statistics, and if there's a game installed one or two times and the other game is installed 100 times or even more, it says something. It's a bit of information. Another interesting project is Tassia's work that she's doing on App Recommender, which is her master's thesis for recommending different programs to the ones that you have installed or similar programs. So you could say, I've got Warsaw installed, I want to play some similar games, what's out there, and then it would go recommend you 10 different games to play. I didn't know about this. That was a talk about it earlier in the week. Oh, video. Why do you tell it to me now? It seems I missed all the interesting talks this week. At least you're on the GameSpot. Well, it would be sad if I weren't here now. So what do I have here? Blanc's was put in by you, Andreas, really just 16 to 20, and no one wants to say anything about games. You don't play. That's a good idea. Can you host a machine somewhere on the internet so we can install a game server on it to have parties? Certainly not, but I think we can find some if needed. Well, I think if we as a Debian project want to host some Debian server with games server, well, if there is some interest, we can do that. But I don't have the hardware. We are still searching for someone with the contact because it would have to be a quite big machine with much of CPU and RAM, and it would use quite a lot of traffic. So it's not doable with a random server you can rent for 50, 60 euros in Germany or something like that. Ask DSA. Who? DSA. And don't tell them how many exploits are in games or possible other vulnerabilities no one cares about. So, Didi, what would you play now if you would start to play? Let's not. No one wants to play poker with me, it's sad. I'm so good player. I always lose so you can just win. Whatever that is, never, never knows this. I told you there are 270 games by our team, so no. One a day for a year and you can play and then you know Liquid Wars. Liquid Wars is the best game for network play. Okay. So actually this shows quite clearly that we need this screencast desperately. We need screencasts and we need recommendations and some kind of... We are all within our own team. Yeah, sure. We are on the team but we don't know every game. I mean, I look at my packages and at those who have FC bugs or something so there's really need to work on it. Christoph, are there any games for Emacs? Yes, but I'm not sure if we have anything extra in our games team. Okay, I saw Tetris for... Yeah, Tetris yesterday. There's Tetris for Emacs as well. That was funny. What did you type in? All known, yeah, backboards. Wonder you have two packages in the new queue? Please accept them. Thanks. The two... The third and the fourth packages. I don't care for the first two. That's not mine. Depth tax improvements. Well, that's something we have to do but I don't think we can discuss this here. Is anybody here who wants to tell us what's bad for games in Depth tax currently and what could be improved in kind of different dictionaries, vocabulary, sorry, or something else? Perhaps it was your point. The first one is playing nice. As far as Depth tax is so far on the list, I think we've talked about input methods, like touchscreen, joystick, blah, blah, blah, and also multiplayer versus single player versus mandatory two player versus X number of players, whatever. I'm not sure what else. Anyone got any ideas? What I had in mind because Mika... It's the third time I mentioned this name today. I mentioned it. We need some kind of tag or something. Is this a short game? So I can just play it in the train for half an hour or between work task one and work task two? Or is it some addictive game? I have to play the whole day. Likewise, not maybe. I think this is something we could try to implement but I don't know where to put the barrier between short and long-term game. Play it up. We handled this one. Damn cursor. Sponsoring workflow improvements, PET versus Viki. I think Viki will just die in the next. Ansgar? When is PET 3 ready for the games team? It's nice to have all the people here. It's running now for the Perl team whether there are some glitches supporting multiple teams yet, but I'm working on it so it should be pretty soon. Great. I think I just locked the Viki page so nobody can edit it. I think we have to use PET, which is actually really great. I'm not quite sure what game user feedback should mean. Do we mean input on the mailing list? Let's package this game or let's package that game? I think if we get up a site like the PlayDep, a similar site, we should allow user feedback directly inside this page so users can, for one, rate the games and for other, add their commands to it. I think that might be going along that line. Whoever added that to the list. So maybe through that, that we have an idea of which games really are popular, not just to ourselves, but especially to our users. Another thing I have with one of my upstreams, they have a forum on the web. They use regularly for everything, coordinating translations as a sort of bug tracker. There's also quite a lot of Debian or Ubuntu-related questions in there and no one besides me can answer them. I wonder if it would be possible to solve this somehow with a link. Maybe it would help with the command function that Ronda introduced. Why am I called if Genie2? Anyways. Andreas, for the blend stuff, you just wrote a copy. Is it a bunch of scripts or what? Actually, when you ask if you should install a game, I started just doing it and I will show you afterwards. Is this okay? Okay, sure. Because I didn't like the interface, but the data is great in it. If there's no more feedback from you, I could call it a talk or no above and, well, get a beer. And I hope you all will join the channel, join the mailing list and tell us what you miss from the games and we missed here in the talk now. Thanks for being here.