Re: Purpose: how to provide a better user experience running a game

[Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>]

Hi,

On 07/18/2010 10:29 PM, Devid Antonio Filoni wrote:
> Hi,
> yesterday, working on projectfootball package, I found a fall in user
> experience. A lot of games require, as you already know, 3D
> accelleration, if it is not available they just don't start.  Well,
> suppose I'm a new user, how can I know why that game is not working?
> (an user might think: "Linux s**ks, games don't work!"
> while: "No! Linux is cool, hardware s**ks)
> Sometimes a message is showed in the terminal, but users run
> applications using desktop files, so it is pretty useless.
> This is my purpose: write a software with an UI (GTK+/Qt...) which
> shows a popup if hardware requirements needed to play the game are not
> reached, if they are, the game runs as usual. This new software should
> be added as policy for games which need 3D accelleration support, we
> will have to add a dependency on such games and change desktop file...
> (still don't know, we have to define that)
> What do you think? Should we work on this? Any purpose?

Funny,

Fedora already does this :)

We have this small shell script which checks of 3d accel is available,
and install a symlink to it called <gamename>-wrapper. The .desktop file
for the games refer to <gamename>-wrapper and the shell script will either
pop up a dialog that no 3d accel is available, or launch <gamename>

Here are the scripts in question:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/devel/opengl-games-utils/

Regards,

Hans