Technical reviews of games

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 03-02-16 15:47, Guus Sliepen wrote:
> 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?

This sounds interesting, but I seriously wonder where we're going to
find the time to do this. Also I do not think this is very useful unless
we've people who are willing to commit time to fixing issues found from
a review like this.

Regards,

Hans