Re: Thoughts on XFire-like features in linux
Originally Posted by
Polygon
the hard part comes in that, unlike in windows, things in linux do not get installed to the same directory, usually
xfire works by just having a giant inf like configuration file showing the filepath to the games binary, and it searches all of the paths that it knows a game binary can be in, and if it finds a file there, then it marks that game as installed
however, on linux, the game might not be installed in the same place. Some people might have it in /usr/games, or like me, i keep my games in /home/markgames, and maybe some other person keeps it in /home/joe/Games. Some thinking is going to have to be done on how to get around this, either by specifying a directory where games are installed and just having it search and use md5hashing/filenames to put game binaries against a list to see which game that games belongs to...etc
and of course the staple of xfire, the concept they built themselves around in the early days is fast joining, as in you see your buddy is playing a game of X game, and you can see what server he is in (again hard, you have to figure out how to ping and parse information from every time of videogame server out there....) and then you click a button, and somehow get the game to launch and join the server ip your buddy is in. I'm pretty sure for most cases this can be done by just adding parameters to the executable, like ./game +join_server 000.000.000.000 +password something
but otherwise its very possible. except for the last problem, we really dont have very many 'real' ' commercial' video games to support.
than make it so that you select the exact file path's that you have each game in, i think its a good idea.
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