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Hello all,
I'm certainly not a newbie but also not a guru. In the middle, with some programming knowledge to boot. So I will try my best to articulate my thought.

KDE should have some sort of gaming platform and (of course) program to run the games written for it. When I Download a rom for my snes emulator I get a zip file, and when I select this zip file using my emulator a game starts and, depending on the game, i have hours of fun.

I hate installing games from source. There. I said it. THere is always some lib that is not up to date, and then I need to find new dependencies for that lib but I can't install them because of some arcane configuration issue is some file in my /etc folder.

Now, I'm aware of things like SDL, openGL and those sorts of things. I must admit I have not thoroughly thought threw or researched this idea but there must be a way to come up with a platform that only requires the resources that already comes in a basic KDE 4x install so that all I have to do when i find an open source game written to comply with said format is download the .tar and select it using a program made to automaticly make from sources. It would also be cool to have an application that would manage the games in the same way MAME manges roms.

I guess it could be said that it is easy to install games from repositories but then you have to worry about having internet access, if the developer has it on a repository and your flavor of linux. It'd be nice to have a stabily platform so that one game will behave the same on every machien (with the exception of performance power).

Ok, that's all, just my idea.

This is already possibly existant in the form of QPainter supporting OpenGL, Phonon, etc. which will all support Binary compatability throughout the Qt 4.x series.

bcooksley wrote:This is already possibly existant in the form of QPainter supporting OpenGL, Phonon, etc. which will all support Binary compatability throughout the Qt 4.x series.

Maybe so, but considering that most Linux-native games do not rely on libraries/technologies associated with either of the two main DE's I think that rather misses the point. For KDE/Qt, it's mostly the games that are a part of kde-games. And likewise for Gnome (I checked the libraries needed for some of the non-KDE games I have installed. None relied on either gtk/gnome or qt/kde). And those games aren't exactly pushing the boundaries of what games can be - which isn't necessarily bad (knetwalk is too damn addictive even without it). It just depends on what you want from games.

Still, for games not a part of KDE it's a non-issue since they wouldn't know about QPainter. They do, however, know about SDL and OpenGL. And as long as there is a choice of DE/toolkit, SDL, OpenGL, OpenAudio are the best we have for games. Or maybe I should say: Qt and KDE alone can not fix this problem. The Gtk and Gnome folks have to be on-board as well. If they can agree on a common gaming platform, it would probably be much easier to publish games you could just install without compiling (which would make things easier for proprietary games publishers as well).

Well I think we're perhaps thinking at opposite ends of the spectrum. I think I thought of a better way to explain what I mean.
Every Super Nintendo game work the same because every Super Nintendo is exactly the same. Every Super Nintendo Dev kit is exactly the same. If I take all the source code for one complete game it will compile the same on all Dev kits and run the same on all Super Nintendos.

KDE should think of specs for a "vapor" console gaming system.
KDE should make a development kit for this console.
KDE should write and emulator for this console.

In result, the source code for games for this 'emulator' will be more standardised and will be easier for hobbyists to tweak.