Technical reviews of games

[Guus Sliepen]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2016 at 09:12:01AM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:

> >Uhm, do you want to have just the packaging work reviewed, or the game
> >itself as well? And do you want to swap with a package from another
> >distro or just Red Hat?
> 
> Just the packaging work, and just Fedora. Sorry this should have gone to games at lists.fedoraproject.org
> not games at lists.freedesktop.org.

No problem. But in any case, how about doing *technical* reviews of games
themselves? So not about how nice the game is, but rather things like:

- Does it integrate well with the system? (FHS compliance, .desktop
  files, no private copies of common libraries)

- Does it have proper support for input devices? (Joystick/pad support?
  Ability to rebind things? Can you fully control the game with a single
  type of input (keyboard/mouse/joystuff)?)
 
- Can you switch between windowed and fullscreen? Does it have a
  sensible way to choose resolutions? VSync? HiDPI support?

- Does it compile cleanly? No lintian/static-analyzer/cppcheck/valgrind-
  /sanitizer warnings?

- Et cetera.

Last year I was helping someone set up a HTPC running OpenSUSE with 4
Logitech joypads. The idea was that it could be used to play local
multiplayer games. We tried many FOSS games, but the only one that ran
decently, could be controlled solely using the gamepads, and supported
split-screen multiplayer was SuperTuxKart.

That got me thinking, perhaps we could do some certification for FOSS
games; doing a technical review, assigning a score, maybe some
designators like "local multiplayer support", "joypad support", etc. Set
up a website where we list the reviewed games. Send feedback to the
authors with suggestions how to fix any issues that are found.

What do you think?

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
      Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org>
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