The key is not to build the comprehensive list of games. You can always take the Linux games and work through them. But the idea is to highlight that there is a real Fedora user who plays this game. And it is possible to talk about it. Whether you want a technical help or just to discuss the gameplay, you can come to the Games SIG and feel at home.
This provides the exposure to Fedora Games SIG, which may eventually bring more initiatives and more development.
I’ve been thinking about this topic. I look at this as being two topics. There is Reviving the Games SIG and Promoting Fedora for Gaming.
If you look at the mission of the Games SIG on the Wiki: “Goal: to make Fedora the best Free software and open source gaming platform there is for both developers and users.” I always viewed the SIG as focusing on packaging open source games and promoting those games.
Posting about closed source games you play on Fedora is great for promoting Fedora as a gaming system but is not currently a goal of the Games SIG. A forum like this for such discussions is great. I posted my experience with Disc Room for exactly that reason. We could change the goal of the SIG but I don’t really feel like that is important especially if we are using this forum instead of the SIG mailing list.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and am a part of the RH Gaming Community of Practice
Hey folks, with regards to:
and the mission statement from the Wiki:
“Goal: to make Fedora the best Free software and open source gaming platform there is for both developers and users.”
I think that to resolve the 1st problem we need to focus on the developers part of the mission. Based on the discussion thus far I haven’t seen much discussion around the awesome game development tooling that is available on linux like gimp, inkscape, krita, synfig, blender, godot etc.
My vision for the Games SIG and a “Gaming” spin is not just the FLOSS games focus, but the FLOSS game development focus. To make inroads with game developers we need to provide them with a platform that has a working production pipeline out of the box where they could, say, boot up a live distro and work through a provided example that resulted in them with a working game on Fedora.
Doing this will result in Fedora becoming a great place to make games, not just play them, and will also result in putting a dent in which platform is the default goto. Wouldn’t it be great to see the credits in a game scroll by and see the Fedora logo? Not saying that this should be required, but if we can provide a great experience for developers they might feel strongly enough to do that.
Of course the question, as always is, who is willing to do the work required 
While I’m not sure the amount of time I’ll be able to find, I’ll be the first to throw my hat in the ring as being willing to take on the game development focus. Specifically I can build and package the tooling, or work with those who already do, to ensure the versions work together (as much as they should anyway), and maybe build out content around their use.
Thoughts?
I think this is great! We really just haven’t come in contact with any true game developers yet, but that still doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be part of our focus!
What do you mean no “true game developers”? I’m a game developer. Bt Builder is my reimplementation of the Bard’s Tale Construction Set. Troll Bridge is my Zelda-like game. Yaroid is an Asteroids game for the Net Yaroze. Pinball Disc Room is available on itch.io. Mutant Road, Viobyte, and Color Monsters are games I’ve created for the Tiny Arcade/Pocket Arcade. Granted most of these are unfinished. I’ve also updated Seahorse Adventures, Shippy 1984, and others.
I’m not sure that whether or not we have come into contact with any game developers is the litmus test as to whether this should be a part of the focus or not. There are undoubtedly many game developers who could be using Fedora as platform to produce games given the tools available. It’s only whether anyone is both interested, and has the time, to help make that use case easier and more prominent.
Alright. @copperi and I have started on the documentation, and our first decision to make is where all of our discussions will take place. My vote is discourse as a primary, with mailing lists as a secondary. I feel mailing lists are starting to feel more and more antiquated, while I believe Discourse is more accessible by users and contributors both new and old. However, I know I have less experience on both platforms than many here, so I would like to get the opinions of any other potential contributors, whether it be to the Docs, Packaging, Development, etc.
For @suve and anyone else for whom email is more comfortable, I know it’s not the same (because it ultimately is web-first), but Discourse works by email better than most other forum software. See Guide to interacting with this site by email for some tips.
Personally, not speaking as FPL but as a Fedora gamer and a dabbler in game programming, I think Discourse is the right choice.
Future games documentation’s official address is
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/gaming/
So here are my thoughts on the state of gaming on fedora as Linux gamer:
a) Lutris - My favorite gaming related open source software. On the surface its just a standard launcher for all kinds of games (steam/native/wine/emulated etc) but its so much more. It supports install scripts and everything so you can install native and non-native games from GOG using the correct wine settings without the user having to do anything. You can log in to your existing GOG account as well and directly hit install inside Lutris. This is already in the Fedora repos.
b) Emulators - Awesome, some of them are already packaged into Fedora. Most are available as Flatpaks. Retroarch (combined frontend for a lot of older (pre 2000) emulators) is trending these days. Retroarch is already in the repos.
c) Flatpak - some proprietary but native linux games have flatpak builds. Ex Runescape or Minecraft. These flatpak wrappers are unofficial but maybe publishers can be convinced into making official flatpaks seeing they do so for the snap store. Flatpak is an excellent platform for native proprietary games.
d) Native Open Source Games - the repos have some decent games like xonotic or red eclipse but quality free and open source games are few.
e) Steam - I know we can’t ship Steam with Fedora but I have to mention it when talking about gaming. Note some native Linux Steam games have issues with the lack of 32 bit libraries which can be fixed by using the Flatpak version of Steam instead of the rpm. Steam’s Proton is the single biggest thing that has boosted Linux gaming. When anyone thinks of Linux gaming, they think of Proton. Valve as a company has done a lot to encourage Linux gaming. All of Valve’s self published games are Linux native including Half Life Alyx which is a VR title.
f) Game development: Blender and Godot are fantastic pieces of software and they must be included if Fedora makes a gaming oriented lab. While they are available in the repos, the godot rpm lags afew versions behind upstream.
I also do all my gaming on Fedora including VR (Valve Index) and it works out great but the new user experience could be improved.
There are already packaged a lot of useful projects like gamemode, lutris, corectrl, etc. It would be really useful if there was a dnf group that install all these packages like “Gaming Booster” or a better name Containing all or most of the utilities/applications that improve the gaming experience like:
I know that all games (to my knowledge) are in a “Games and Entertainment” DNF group and that is also great.
VR is definitely a niche market that will be difficult, but important to cover. Providing all the insight you can will be very useful!
One of the things I remember when installing Fedora Workstation (approx. 1 year ago) on my AMD Zen/Radeon gaming machine was missing udev rules for controllers (knuckles/gamepad). I think this is an easy thing to improve.
For the life of me, I can not figure out how to actually join this SIG. The only doc I can find says it is out of date. Looking at the games mailing list it says there has been exactly 1 message in 30 days. If that is still the way to join I’ll do it, but I don’t want to have to do a bunch of different things pew pewing into the void.
The mailing list is not very active, you can post stuff here.
A couple months ago, I had a conversation on Twitter where some game developers were interested in the idea of having a “Creators’ Edition” based on KDE Plasma to build native Linux games in an awesome Linux environment similar to the Steam Deck (which also uses KDE Plasma). I made a ticket about this on the KDE SIG tracker to discuss it back then.
If this is something that folks in this SIG want to do, I’d be happy to collaborate as a member of the KDE SIG.
Do you think packaging proton would be helpful to that end?
Most of what makes up Proton is already part of our Wine package. We’re mainly missing the following things:
The Wine part itself is largely Wine-Staging, which we already ship in our Wine package.
You seem to be correct. I have found that up to date wine in the fedora repos actually performs with less bugs for World of Warships and World of Tanks than the various versions of proton I’ve checked, including some GE versions.
Note that these are separate things (like how Wine DXVK is a separate thing). So getting those packaged and integrated with our Wine package is probably a good idea.