Hey everyone!
./play.it had the release of its new bugfix release
2.12.1 on the 25th of November 2020. This version is already available for Debian Sid or Arch Linux users (through AUR for this last one), others are invited to check
the ./play.it Repology page to know which version is available in their distribution repositories and contact their maintainer if required.
To numbers lovers, this update brings support for roughly 80 new games since the previous 2.12.0 release, and updates related to a little less than 200 other games. I do not have the motivation to list all of them (you will have to wait until the more complete announcement for our future 2.13 release), but amongst my favourites we now have support for
Factorio,
Spring Falls and
The Pedestrian.
Changelog This new release brings no new feature, its objective being to reduce the amount of bugs and counter-intuitive behaviours that we let slip until now. Actually this update go as far as dropping a new feature (selected files extraction from
.zip archives), that did not get enough testing and caused too much issues. This probably is a good occasion to remind you that we depend on our users to report issues with our stable versions (this part actually is done quite well already) and to test our release candidates before the actual releases. On this last part, I’m more than often quite alone…
So, let us have a look at the list of fixes and improvements coming with this new version:
• Wrapper fixes:
• Fix script detection from archive name
• Archive-related fixes:
•
.zip archives: Drop selected files extraction using unzip
• Package-related improvements:
•
Arch Linux: Use multithreaded
xz compression by default
•
Arch Linux: Fix packages building failure when using
--output-dir with a relative path
•
Arch Linux: Generate a
.MTREE metadata file
•
Debian: Improve APT version detection
• Dependencies-related improvements:
• Show a more explicit message if
icotool or
wrestool is required but missing
• Launchers-related fixes:
• Avoid broken
.desktop Exec field when using spaces in the install prefix
• Icons-related fixes:
• Fix
icons_move_to failure when targeting a non-empty directory
• Codebase improvements:
• Drop the dependency on
hostname • Unset variables that we do not want to import from the user environment
original changelog, on our forge MiniDebConf Online #2 "Gaming Edition" During the preparation of this new version, we got invited to give a presentation of ./play.it to the
MiniDebConf Online #2 "Gaming Edition", an English talks session proposed by the Debian team, with a thematics around video games for this edition. After a bit of stress at the idea of a fully online talk (we are quite used to talks in front of a full room of fine people, or an almost full one… well, OK, at least 2 or 3 people physically in front of us) and in English (most of us are not native English speakers), we gave a 20 minutes presentation with Mopi. The recording can be found online for those who missed it:
./play.it, a packages generator for DRM-free games, on Debian Peertube instance.
If you happen to have difficulties listening to English without a written support you can download
the speaker script on ./play.it forge. Any translation proposal is of course most welcome ;)
Whatʼs next? Our objective is to support 100% of video games distributed with no DRM, and there is still
a little bit of work on this front, so we do not take a break and work already begun on
the next bugfix release 2.12.2, and
the more impactful 2.13.0 feature release. Aside from these we have a couple big tasks that are not yet assigned to a specific release, including
CD-ROM support,
improved support for Unity3D games and
the ability to generate Flatpak.
Please join us if any of these topics is something you would like to see added to ./play.it soon ;)
Until then, enjoy this new release guaranteed without bugs, uh… with less bugs than the previous one, and remember that
DRM are a nuisance that should
never be tolerated in any way or form!
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Original announcement, on our blog