Game fixes

- Botanicula: Add missing build dependency on identify
- FTL: Faster Than Light: Fix archive version string for game version 1.6.12
- Into the Breach: Fix dependencies list
- Sunless Sea: Fix data package "provide" declaration

Game updates

- Caesar 3: New Julius releases
- Stellris: Rename expansion packages
- Terraria: New archive
- Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War: New archives

Game fixes

- Litil Divil: Fix an issue with the binary file presence check

Game updates

- Risk of Rain: Syntax update
- Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Add support for gog.com Russian version
- Deus Ex : Set OpenGL as default rendering engine

Hi, have you thought about writing scripts for id Software shooters that have open source engines in the debian repos? doom 1/2/3, quake 1/2/3, wolfenstein3d, return to castle wolfenstein, maybe I missed some.

why games are way more laggy in linux?

I have thought about it already, and will probably add them at some point.
But they are quite low priority, as most of these games are already supported by game-data-packager.

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They are not, unless you use some broken setup.
Using the same hardware, my experience is that performances are often better on Linux than they are on Windows.

I do not use either Steam nor Lutris, because I do not like to add extra layers on top of my games. So I do not know what kind of a performance impact they could have.

Most of the time, performance issues are related to a misconfigured graphics driver or some missing kernel firmware. But a lot of other things could be part of the issue.

Can't tell for Starcraft.

But current Diablo II and D2 LoD installers you can download from your Battlenet account do not require discs.

And you can download these regardless of game ownership.

Same for StarCraft and Warcraft Ⅲ, no CD check and no ownership check,
Of course, you still need a valid CD-key to start the installation process. But the installers download itself does not require the CD-key.

./play.it website maintenance is interrupted, with no plan to start working again on it. This short post goes over the reasoning behind this decision, and why it was required to preserve the good health of ./play.it development, and its developers and maintainers.

A short history

When ./play.it started, we used to discuss about it only through a couple French-speaking forums. Once we reached thirty supported games, I began working on a website draft to promote this software, kindly hosted by Debian-Facile DokuWiki instance.

Near the end of 2015, I launched our own dedicated DokuWiki instance so we no longer had to rely on Debian-Facile servers. It was still a website in French only, listing usage instructions for fifty games.

As ./play.it popularity grew, an English version of our website has been added in 2016, causing the number of web pages to maintain to double. At this time, we supported one hundred games.

Of course our collection of supported games kept growing, and the current version of our website shows usage instructions in both English and French for almost 600 games.

An unmaintainable website

./play.it website now includes roughly 1,200 pages, all hand-crafted, maintained by a single person. Unsurprisingly, this takes far too much time and energy when you compare them to the result. And of course it is detrimental to a lot of other tasks, including the handling of contributions to the actual ./play.it software, or welcoming new contributors and users.

Developing a new website relying on dynamic content could help a lot alleviating this huge workload… But this again requires time, time that is already taken by the current website maintenance.

So I decided to stop all maintenance of ./play.it website, to no longer waste so much time on an alienating task, and invest back this freed time to ./play.it actual development, and helping our other contributors.

What’s next?

A new website will come some day. Maybe. Well, let’s hope it will.

To avoid starting a new unmaintainable mess, we started working on a new tool that can get some informations by scanning ./play.it files: Game scripts database. It should help us make sure that what was the bulk of the maintenance work on our previous website should be mostly automated for the next one.

Meanwhile, it is still be possible to add or update instructions on our website for specific games, but we will only do it on explicit request by our users. For such requests, you can go through the usual contact methods.

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Update on GOG forums, including the threads in game-specific sub-forums, are discontinued too. As for the website, we can make exception for specific games on user requests.

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Original announcement, on our blog: End of website maintenance

Sorry to hear that you're having to cut back but glad to hear you're still working on the important bits! Hope you and all of the contributors are doing OK.

The main effect is going to be a games library growing much faster, and updates being much more frequent. At the cost of a big visibility loss, but I think it is worth it.

Everyone seems to be doing fine ;)

I'm not even a linux user and I found your posts interesting (partly because they were about making accessible a set of games that I love, I guess). I'm sad to see you go, and I wish you all the best.

I’m not going anywhere ;P

This is only about spending less time sharing news and updates on the forum, and more time actually working on the software itself. But I will still be reachable through GOG forum and will keep posting about big updates in this thread.

What was too much work was maintaining the several hundreds (!!) of threads in game-specific sub-forums, now that we support a lot of GOG games. So from now on these will only be updated on request. Same for the project website.

We’re tuning down the communication, but this is only so we can tune up the rate of updates and additions ;)

To give an example, support for 25 new games has been added to ./play.it collection since this last message. It would have taken several days of work if I still had to update the website to create the required 50 new pages (one in English, one in French, for each game), and post new threads in the related game-specific sub-forums here on GOG.

Thanks to not having to handle the communication around these new games support addition, it barely took a half-hour.