./play.it project

[Alexandre Detiste <alexandre.detiste@gmail.com>]

[ccing project author]

Hi,

I stumbled on the "./play.it" project ; which aims
to make it easier to install commercial games
on Debian & Ubuntu systems.

http://www.dotslashplay.it/

It looks very much like the previous shell-based Game-Data-Packager,
it even creates .deb for local consumption; most of the community
website is in French, but the per installer instructions
are available in English:

Here is for example some game that is also supported by g-d-p:

  https://debian-facile.org/utilisateurs:vv222:games:gobliiins

1) play-anything.sh : a huge thousands lines bash function library
2) play-gobliiins_gog-2.1.0.64.sh : a per-game 'main()' program

---

This project has some different aims than game-data-packager,
like also packaging dosbox & wine games in /usr/<something>/games;
with help from either linkfarms or unionfs to create
a Copy-On-Write version of the game in $home .

I think G-D-P should continue to promote the free
engines first over running some dos/windows binaries;
but there are more points in common than differences,
so some work could be shared as both tools are
facing the same problems.  (like calling dpkg-deb
to xz - compress data will take ages and users need some feedback:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=778451 )

This project could for example depends on G-D-P and
provide some unofficial package that drops
some dosbox.py & wine.py plugins into
/usr/share/games/game-data-packager/game_data_packager/games/
& accompanying .json game recipes.

This https://debian-facile.org/ website seems to be a very lively &
nice community;
so I just translated g-d-p in French to make it a bit more welcoming;
and will continue with the Debian wiki page.

Alexandre Detiste