jldugger:
Do you mean the time of project development, or the APT loading time? If it’s the former, I’d say that there could be a somewhat mature UI by the end of the summer. The LiveCD portion will be somewhat delayed - I’m going to be doing that as part of my student project, but everything else should be ready real soon to work on and package for. As for APT/dpkg speed, there isn’t much to speed up. I suppose packages could be directly extracted instead of installed, but even then there is an unnecessary overhead of extra files.

As someone who’s worked in the games industry (mainly as an artist), I’d actually had a very similar idea myself. There was one major difference though. I thought about why console games did so well and were quicker and easier to create, and it mainly came down to that they have a standard hardware set.

One target hardware set means programmers know that they *only* need to program for a specific model of gpu, cpu, gamepad etc. If you have a standard set of specs, then games can be developed and tested much more quickly. They may still work on other systems, but that’s where all the dev’s streamlined efforts go.

With a standard box, hardware vendors (Dell, New Egg, System 76, HP, Asus etc) can then sell boxes that are guaranteed to run all the approved games, 100% hassle free. Instantly you get rid of all the geek tinkering to get your specific hardware working properly that scares the mainstream away from Linux. You get a consumer ready, “almost never hangs,crashes,has X misconfigured” device. Because these boxes all use the exact same hardware they could be bought in bulk by anyone and sold cheaper too, exactly as game consoles do right now.

Linux games that already run fine under Xeiso could be given permission to use a “Xeiso Ready” logo. Later on this logo could even be licensed to non-open source games and hardware vendors as revenue for the project. Work with Ton Rosendaal (of the Apricot open game at apricot.blender.org), get John McCormack (Id games) and Mark Shuttleworth to endorse it as a Linux Gaming Standard and you could get some large scale momentum behind it. That could be snowballed by re-investing a good portion of licensing revenues into seed funding promising open source games which could then be pre-sold Peach/Apricot style with extra’s to raise further funds.

Anyway, as someone who is a better artist / businessperson than coder, I’d be curious to know your thoughts.

All the best for the project!

The problem with dpkg is that it is rather slow for what is needed. Every time a package is installed or removed it has to update its database and keep track of system files and changes. Since we’re simply dealing with loading packages into either a single folder or into RAM, there is no need to keep any sort of database other than a simple file listing, and thus there is no need for the overhead of dpkg or apt.

This all said, I’m glad someone’s put together a centralized effort to integrate games on Linux. Having toyed around with games and input methods on Ubuntu, its definitely a pain to deal with configuring controllers on a per game basis. Having a universal configuration and policy sounds like a good way to give game makers in the future a good reference on the subject!