Gaming on your LMCE system?

[seth]

 
We all know Thom's work with Mame, and its integration into LMCE. Its nothing short of fracking fantstic. As is Thom. But I was recently forum hopping and I saw this:

indulis - its certainly true that you might want the extra grunt for other reasons. eg I recently added Savage 2 to the Computing menu (actually works v nicely, makes it much easier for my partner to play games!) Savage 2 is V heavy on graphics, my 7300GT is just about coping, so I'm glad I got it in the end.

The AGP thing is very strange! In fact according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NvAGP it really shouldn't make any difference even if it was an AGP card....

Now this intrigues me. And rather than Highjacking that particular thread, I thought I would start a new one here, and see how many other people are doing something like this.

So I raise some questions, particularly for Colin, but this is a community forum, so that opens up all kinds of possibilities.

1. Would this have to be done on a core, or would a MD be able to pull off an OpenGL game?

2. What kind of control would/does one use.
  a.) Just standard keyboard and mouse
  b.) A gamepad
  c.) Gaming joystick

3. If running on an MD, what kind of stress would this place on a regularly used deployment, i.e Multiple MD's

4. How well would Multiplayer (internal) work out between MD's
    * Battle for Wesnoth
    * Nexuiz: FPS game based on Dark Places, an advanced Quake 1 engine
    * Sauerbraten: Single/multi-player FPS game
    * Second Life: 3D MMORPG virtual world
    * All the Quakes
    * All the Unreal Tournaments
    * All the Doom's
    * The Valve Games

5. Would an MD with a good Nvidia based or ATI based GPU be adequate to run games of these types over a diskless network based OS?

Please add your experiences, and input here. Maybe we can even get a Wiki going. In fact, if given the opportunity, I might even start it myself.

How cool is LMCE?? Huh? Huh? 

Regards,

Seth

[skeptic]

I think there is a thread or two in the devs section where Thom mentions extending the game stuff to things other than Mame.  I'm not sure if he is working on a way to easily add additional games or if he is talking about manually adding each game similar to the way Mame was added (ie - beyond the ability/knowledge of most of us without spending significant time in HADesigner and learning the nuts and bolts of LMCE).  I'm hoping it's a fairly easy way to plug in new games, but I'm going to wait until it's complete before I really look into it.  Maybe Thom can comment further.

As for Core hyrbrid vs. MD...  Remember, all this LMCE stuff should be fairly transparent on where stuff lives.  I did have to do a bit of setup on both my core and MD for mame, but that's 'cause it's not fully integrated yet.  I would expect in the future any game that's available on the core is by default available on the MDs.  CPU/video/memory would be the deciding factor, not whether it's a core or md.  Just keep in mind there is overhead for things like recording tv shows (could be on the core or a MD), core is also the firewall/router and where the databases live, storage that could be anywhere and shared elsewhere, etc.

You may also run into issues running two instances of a game from the same physical directory, but I'm really not sure how that will all work out.  Likely it's game dependent.

[tschak909]

In short, my planned extensions are to support each and every single emulator type by hand, creating a controller, and player object for each. This is the only way to do it in an integrated fashion.

And I'm sorry fellas...beyond a single hybrid setup, the approaches you guys are coming up with are going to fall flat on their faces without some serious thought.

-Thom

[seth]

 
Well I was not referring to emulators. But native linux games. Just like you would install on your desktop or laptop. So no real need for being able to pipe them in through an orbiter, just launching the game locally. On a per MD basis. I am not sure you could distribute a Quake 4 game around the system.

I other words, I would install Nexuiz on each MD, which I would put a link to in the Computing menu, and then play using whatever MD I am on at the time.

I figured if Colin had Savage 2 running, a game like Nexuiz or Sauerbraten should run ok. I was more curious about how they would preform with the resources. Shouldn't be too intense at 640x480 with a good Nvidia card.

Regards,

Seth

[tschak909]

look at the computing page on the wiki, specifically on how to add new computing apps.

-Thom

[skeptic]

In short, my planned extensions are to support each and every single emulator type by hand, creating a controller, and player object for each. This is the only way to do it in an integrated fashion.

That's cool.  I doubt I'd play much else on LMCE anyway. 

And I'm sorry fellas...beyond a single hybrid setup, the approaches you guys are coming up with are going to fall flat on their faces without some serious thought.

-Thom

I'm confused.  What approaches are you referring to, being able to plug in any old game or having any LMCE supported emulator that you add be available on any MD?

[tschak909]

The former.

-Thom

[colinjones]

Seth - sorry I'm away on holiday in Europe so I'm not getting much Internet access (but I'm nursing a cold and tooth ache in Madrid at the moment so I logged on!)

Yes, I have found that most OpenGL/SDL games work just fine on my core. The only issues I have had really are 1) with sound, sometimes it just doesn't work or crackles badly and cuts out. 2) leaving a game that has a different screen resolution than LMCE is configured for often screws up the screen size in LMCE

For the first one, I believe this is a more general issue as I have similar crackling sound when I login to KDE Desktop and the intro sound plays. Others have had this as well. Don't know how to fix this, and it wouldn't be high on the devs list as it doesn't effect sound in LMCE itself. But I note that it does only seem to effect certain types of games - particularly one game engine that is used for many different games. Can't remember which one but you can find it in some of my previous posts.

The second one, I just override the game resolution (in the settings files or with shell command options) to match my LMCE resolution (1080p) and then switching back doesn't cause a drama

As Thom said, you can then add the games to the computing menu by following the wiki article on how to determine the window class, etc.

Just to note, extending full LMCE support to other games (meaning removing them from the computing menu and making them a media type) is not likely to happen generally across all games. Thoms mame extension is all about the emulator, and being able to move the emulator and state between MDs.

Each of these games you are talking about may use a common or similar gaming engine which is broadly analoguous to the mame emulator, but they each come with their own instance of the engine rather than relying on a shared one - and you would have to provide a modified shared one so that you could do all the "moving" between MDs and integration with LMCE. I agree it would be great, but I'm sure Thom has plenty of other things on his plate at the moment! For now, the computing menu works well (although I know Thom hates it )

Nexuiz works as well, btw.

On the MD questions.... they are full LMCE/Linux boxes so functionally they will run the games the same. But be conscious of the diskless angle. I believe  that most of these games load all their textures and data, etc into memory before starting, so this may not be an issue. But if they start wanting to slave data from the core it will slow the game right down. So bottom line is, if it is going to work well, then heaps of RAM for the MDs as well... but that's cheap!