Reaching out to OSS gaming projects

[castrojo]

Hi everyone,

With commitments from OBS, Heroic, other gaming tools I think we can start helping out app authors who want to engage in publishing their software on Flathub. I’m running an entirely flatpaked setup for gaming and it’s been great so far, don’t worry there’s still plenty of work for us to do. I am currently using lots of these, Steam, mangohub, etc. but it might be a good idea for us to make a list of cool gaming applications, seeing if it’s on flathub, and then move from there.

(/home/tcl666’s desktop with the goodies)

Existing Apps

There are some apps in flathub that will need help/eyeballs to get them over the line and working how users expect. Perhaps we can do “This week we help $app” or something like that and then we all agree to install it and help out where we can. The more things we fix here the easier the next steps will get. The more warts we document the more we know exactly what needs to happen so the next person can have a better place to start.

New Apps

There are still plenty of gaming OSS apps that are not on flathub. That’s some excellent low hanging fruit since we’ve got a good core of apps coming in and with the Steam Deck being in the wild we could help lots of app developers by working with them to get on the hardware and onto every distro that wants to participate.

If you are a maintainer of one of these and need help, please post. If you are a person who can help your favorite app get there, then post also, we can help coordinate apps with people willing to help.

(Vega’s desktop, also with the goodies)

First steps

I think we can start with just telling people we’re here to help and reaching out to app authors and seeing what they need. Outreaching to existing OSS projects who aren’t on flathub seems like a good place to start since we’re all OSS people and hopefully we can pave the way for the larger organizations.

I would love to see better support for all my Elgato gear, my Scarlett, you name it. By working with existing OSS projects we can make that workflow smoother so that when they do engage we’ll be able to help them better.

What do people think?

[razzeee]

@castrojo

Steam Deck being in the wild we could help lots of app developers

Makes me wonder, if we need something, maybe even a store, that can be controlled by a controller. While the deck has a touch interface, I’m not sure if that will work nicely. The best experience would probably be a store, that’s in steam (I would be surprised if the allow this) that you can start from inside steam and then install stuff from flathub via controller input and start it. If you choose a game, that’s playable by controller it should be friction-less.

Still many caveats especially with games needing to detect the input (symbols) etc, as I’m not sure if non steam games can use valves input system.

[apol]

There has been work on Plasma Discover to work properly with a remote controller. Not that it’s all perfect, contributions are welcome.

[castrojo]

Also one of their stated use cases is when docked it goes into a full KDE desktop mode with a keyboard and mouse, it’s a full PC(!):

[razzeee]

Yeah, but docked won’t be the norm, nor convenient for TV setups.

@apol great to hear, I’m not really in the loop, when it comes to KDE

[JakobDev]

The AppStream Standard contains the possibility to define input methods. Maybe a Discover on the SteamDeck could highlight Apps, which explicit say, they support Gamepad and/or Touch.

[Creak]

I use Yuzu’s flatpak (which works pretty great) and I know that they sometime struggle with the Flaptak process. They might like to know that the Flatpak community is here to support them?

yuzu · yuzu

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.yuzu_emu.yuzu

[Creak]

On the improvements side, it would be nice if we wouldn’t have to install a different version of Proton (the “community build”). I think the more the experience looks like vanilla Steam, the better.

So it would be nice if we wouldn’t have to select a different release of Proton than what all the tutorials tell you to choose:

It would be nice to simply select “Proton 6.3-8” here, instead of the community build

I don’t know how doable this is though…

[Yajo]

Steam on flatpak has a big problem: https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam/issues/378

You need hardware to play, but the configurations can’t escape the sandbox. That one problem needs help from flathub pros.

[Eonfge]

I’ve been doing my part, packaging games like ET: Legacy, GZDoom and similar. For me it’s primarily dogfooding, as I play all these games myself, but it has had an impact.

There is also something quite interesting; All these FLOSS games are cross-platform and Windows is their primary target. As such, they require a lot of active engagement from maintainers like me to embrace linux’ improving landscape. In the past, they just leaned back and let some Debian maintainer make the packages… now I’m bothering them with things like metainfo.xml.

This also highlights the biggest time sink. I sometimes spend more time collaborating with other projects, then packaging a game. If that can be streamlined, that would be great.

As for the biggest application we should get on Flathub’s official list: Discord. The rest will follow.