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I was adding some new packages to our games repository in openSUSE Build Service, when I realized that we have over 150 games at this one centralized place! Wouldn’t it be great if there was an application which would allow users to browse through games, filter them by genres or names, view the screenshots and read the information about the games? Players usings Windows can already use “Games for Windows” or “Steam” from Valve, but they also have to pay for the majority of the games. All games in our repository are free and just one click away! I started to hack an application with pretty concrete idea in my mind. You can look at the result of my efforts below (left Games for Windows, right Game Store):
As you can see, Game Store is at the moment quite immature Qt application (actually it is my first Qt app, so my Qt skills suck pretty much right now 
), but it is already able to load locally stored XML together with game icons, screenshots and descriptions. User can install new games (using our great One Click Install feature) and launch the installed ones. Later I want to add the ability to synchronize your games settings (configuration + saved games) with Game Store server, so you can have these on any computer and the server could create a hi-score charts for every supported game. There is a long way ahead to go, but I wanted to approach you very early, so you could be involved too. Even if you don’t speak C++ or Qt, you can help us with filling the missing descriptions, gathering game icons and screenshots. Just read the GameStore wiki page to get the idea what needs to be done or clone the git repo and start hacking right away!
Thank you and I hope that GameStore will be a great addition to other openSUSE applications and tools we already have!
Update: See the next blogpost for more information.
Great idea!! In the future i’d also add games from packman
(many are on both repos right? ) and in the even later future it would be great for people to leave score for those games (maybe with 5 words describing why and why not 
). GREAT IDEA!! Keep it up!!
Basically a nice idea. However you should try to get your data from somewhere else instead of loosing time on maintaining your own xml “database”.
For instance http://software.opensuse-community.org/ has a similar goal and has ratings, however also targets regular software. The portal though is in it’s early stages and besides the needed usability refresh it also needs more stuff like screenshots.
Despite that you can probably grap your games data using libzypp and perhaps communcate with the portal mentioned above to retrieve additional screenshots, ratings, etc.
@FunkyM
I agree that lot of the data could be found elsewhere, but
a) software portal is in early stages of development and has almost no relevant data (icons/screenshots)
b) descriptions in packages in games repository are in a very bad shape
c) Game Store needs the name of the game binary and the list of the packages that belong to game (these two are not and will be not provided by sw portal)
d) once the Game Store data are finished, I’m planning to update the descriptions in BuildService to match them, also the sw portal could benefit from it (I would like to see that happen)
Pavol,
150 games already? Carlos being busy I would say.
I really like the idea of the game store. It being an independent app (which at a later stage can hopefully be pushed into Factory) is a good approach. OTOH, we probably also will need a GTK version of it. Is the core separated from the GUI? If not, I think it would be a good moment to do this now.
And I fully agree that we need to get the description deep inside the meta data of the package (description, maybe some special meta tags for ‘main runable’, screenshot, icon and the like?
@Dominique Leuenberger
Core uses Qt classes, so I don’t see GTK port realistic. Qt haters could still use web interface (once it is finished 
)
We fortunately have more maintainers than just Carlos
Great idea!
If I have some free time in the next few weeks I’d love to help you.
Please keep to the pure Qt, since it’s much safer and nicer than using GTK and STL.
Heh, why not use libyui? You could have 3 UIs for the price of one code (Ok, you would have to do with the set of widgets YaST normally offers, that is, not much fancy stuff, but still … )
@Bubli
, so it leaves us only with 2 UIs
)
Actually I though about libyui, but:
a) ncurses version is not very good with showing games screenshots
b) Qt is not only about widgets, but also about classes like QProcess, QNetworkAccessManager, QVector and so on (and yes, you guessed correctly I hate STL
c) I’d like GameStore to become cross-distro application (it could become also Windows or MacOSX application when using Qt :-O)
d) if somebody is willing to install tens of megabytes of games and their data, I suppose he/she doesn’t mind few MBs of extra Qt libraries
Good old loki_demos was something similar:
http://www.lokigames.com/products/_img/demolauncher.jpg
rotten source is here:
http://svn.icculus.org/loki_demos/