stick's corner

For creating my GameStore talk at LinuxWochen Wien I decided to use new and hip tool called Prezi. I’m not going to write about its features, you have to try and see for yourself. What I can say is that I really like the tool, but it has one big disadvantage – it’s written in Flash.

During the event we had a wireless connection available, but it was rather unreliable, so it was no option for me to present the talk online. I started to investigate the offline options. Either you can download the full blown Prezi Desktop, which is available if you subscribe the service, or you just download the Prezi “Player”. But wait, the page claims it is compatible only with Windows and Mac OS X. Let’s see. I downloaded the ZIP archive and indeed – it contains data folder with your presentation, Windows application (prezi.exe) and Mac OS X application (prezi.app).

Let’s get hacking! Mac OS X application is in fact just a directory structure. I copied the file prezi.app/Contents/Resources/movie.swf to the same location as my data directory and tried to run flashplayer movie.swf. Wow! The presentation started to load, but unfortunately it stopped after few seconds and I ended with this:

I tried straceing the process, but found nothing unusual (like failed open calls). Then I downloaded the debug version of Flash Player, run the command again and got this exception:

An ActionScript error has occurred:
Error #2044: Unhandled SecurityErrorEvent:. text=Error #2140: Security sandbox violation:
file:///.../movie.swf/[[DYNAMIC]]/1 cannot load file:///.../data/fonts/LiberationSerif-Regular.swf.
Local-with-filesystem and local-with-networking SWF files cannot load each other.

Aha! Locally stored SWF files cannot load other SWF files, neither local ones, nor remote ones. That’s the problem. Ok, let’s change the standalone player settings. But how?! I tried various command line switch with no success. After couple minutes of searching I found that standalone Flash Player settings could be changed via Flash plugin that loads Settings manager from the Internet? WTF?!

I will make it easier for you: let’s google for “flash global security settings content creators”. The first result at the time of writing this article was this one. Go to this URL, wait until the Settings manager is loaded and then click on the “Edit locations …” button.

After that select “Add directory” and choose local directory where you store your presentations. From now on you enabled standalone Flash player to run your Prezis. Congratulations!

Even though I like Prezi, I would be ecstatic if they dropped Flash and used SVG instead as its presentation and interchange format, probably using the uber-cool SVG-edit as the core. It would also enable iPad users to use the tool. And yes, I know about JessyInk, but that’s not exactly what I have on mind …

Today I applied the new Robert Lihm‘s theme called Bento to GameStore web, so it doesn’t look like a quick hack anymore. This theme, which will be used across all openSUSE.org websites in the future, will also help to integrate GameStore into rest of the openSUSE infrastructure. You can visit the site by clicking on the mandatory screenshot below.

This week we had Hack Week event when everyone was welcome to use Innovation time on FOSS projects or even start the new one! I spent most of the time on hacking the Game Store, which I introduced in my previous blogpost. The package is now ready for you in the Build Service.

Simply use the following One Click Install files (openSUSE 11.0, openSUSE 11.1 and openSUSE Factory) or add the games repository and install the gamestore package manually. Game Store uses this repository to download the games, so you should stay subscribed to it after the installation too.

As a bonus I created a very simple One Click Install files catalog which imitates the Game Store look. It is available at gamestore.gk2.sk.

The screenshots for both versions (left Qt, right web) are here so you get the idea how it looks, but the best thing is to try it on your own!

Big thanks go to randy-sk who helped me with harvesting of icons and screenshots of the games. I am already looking for your feedback!

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.