Get your fresh games here!

2009.06.05 in code, gnome, and summer of code

During one of my first conversations with my GSoC mentor, Thomas H.P. Andersen, he suggested that we set up a Launchpad PPA. A PPA would be a great way for people (people using Ubuntu, at least) to get ahold of the very latest work being done with Gnome Games, provide a lot more eyes, and encourage much more feedback from the community during the summer development process.

So, this week, I went ahead and created the gnome-games-experimental PPA. It currently contains all of the dependencies for my branch of Gnome Games (including WebKit, seed, gobject-introspection, and Clutter), as well as a build of Gnome Games itself. This build includes three branches:

gsoc-seed-games — my ports of Same Gnome and Mines to Clutter+Seed, and a new game, Lights Off

gnibbles-clutterGuillaume Beland's port of Gnibbles to the Clutter canvas

sudoku-tubeZhang Sen's implementation of joint Sudoku games over Telepathy tubes

Keep in mind that we've only been coding for a week and a half, so if you go ahead and try out the PPA today, expect to see very little working, and within what works, lots of horribleness (I personally know of numerous gigantic animation bugs in Lights Off that you'll get to experience!). However, if you do decide to jump onto the cutting edge, you can feel awesome about yourself for helping us out, and you'll also get to play with the finished products long before anyone else.

I plan to update the packages in this PPA once a week at the minimum; you're welcome to use it (please, use it!) and let me know how it goes... I'm new to packaging things (relatively; I packaged bits for Seed before, but that never went well), and I'm probably doing it slightly (or totally) incorrectly. Let me know, and I promise I'll fix it!

It seems to install properly against a fresh Jaunty install (just add the repository, upgrade gnome-games, and watch as the dependency list explodes in your face; most of those won't end up actually being dependencies of Gnome Games, it's gir-repository's fault...); Karmic builds will be ready soon. I make no promises about stability or about these packages not screwing up your machine (especially things that use WebKit)... but if you have trouble, again, please let me know!

Comments (legacy)

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Olivier Le Thanh

Hello,

I just installed it under Jaunty and for the LightOff game I only have a screen with a counter but nothing else, is it normal?

Good Luck with your SOC.
Olivier

Hans

Just tested it out, can't say it was particularly stable, but I never use GNOME Games anyways, so that's no big deal. Will check them out after each available update.

One weird thing I noticed was that gnibbles didn't work with gnome-globalmenu, since I rarely use GNOME Games I have no idea if this has always been this way, doesn't it use standard gtk widgets for menus?

hortont

Hans: Definitely not stable, but hopefully that will change! A cursory glance at the source of gnibbles suggests that it uses standard GtkMenu bits; if I remember tomorrow I'll install gnome2-globalmenu on my machine and test it out and let Guillaume know what's up.

hortont

Vadim: at the moment, no, they're actually the same exact package :-P

jef: I haven't! I'll have to take a look, but I really don't want to spend too much time on packaging (my job is to write games!), and Launchpad is quite convenient...

Vadim

I'm subscribed to the webkit ppa from liferea. Will these conflict?

jef Spaleta

Have you looked at using Suse's build service for multiple distribution package building?

http://en.opensuse.org/SUSE_Build_Tutorial
http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/cross_distribution_package_how_to
http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/Deb_builds