Keen Games Center

All discussion about the Commander Genius project (a Keen interpreter + more).
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gerstrong
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Keen Games Center

Post by gerstrong »

Heya,

since I had some trouble with distributing CG because there are different licenses within those games, I would like to offer Commander Genius without any data and you can put your bought version or download some shareware stuff compatible to Commander Genius. Some distros wanted to offer Commander Genius in their package manager, but never were allowed due to that reason.

This will please some Linux distributors because they won't have to ship the games. Also the downloads will be much smaller than now and we won't have to offer special bundled versions with games included. We can still do that though.

Also this is interesting for modders, because their mods will be there to be selected in a nice GUI. You won't have to unpack them manually ever again. HQP (High Quality Pack) will be there as well.

For that purpose upcoming Commander Genius 1.9.4 is using libcurl, zlib and with some code already able to automatically download and unpack zip files in the games directory. Also Android users will have access to that center.

The functional code is already there, I only need to design it a bit with the UI CG already offers.

For now the files to download will be stored at Sourceforge.net.

Now, I would like to add more mods and extensions. Let's see what nice games we can offer to the Keen Fans.

Let's open up a "Keen Game Center" where Mods are nicely shown. :-)
Having fun developing stuff...
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Roobar
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Post by Roobar »

Shouldn't be called Keen Mods Center?

I think you should begin with Keen 8, 9, Atroxian Realm, Terror From Outer Space and Marooned on Mars Galaxy Mod.
gerstrong
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Post by gerstrong »

wiivn wrote:Shouldn't be called Keen Mods Center?

I think you should begin with Keen 8, 9, Atroxian Realm, Terror From Outer Space and Marooned on Mars Galaxy Mod.
That's the plan though I need to see they get patched with some Keen 5, 6 the user provides.
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gerstrong
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Post by gerstrong »

Here we go, a small sample:

Image

So far we have three nice games. More games and mods will be uploaded soon.

CG can be tested if you build it yourself. There are still bugs left so the release has to wait a bit more.

I'm also tinkering how we are going to integrate mods that require original games that are not shareware.
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Keening_Product
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Post by Keening_Product »

Oooh, nice. I assume you're planning to put a preview image/description column in too?
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gerstrong
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Post by gerstrong »

I want to add those features so you can choose before let it download but first I need to tinker a bit with the data around such kind of structures and find a way to create a catalogue efficiently.

Not sure if it will make into the upcoming release, but it's the next thing I want to provide.

The data structure will contain folliwing information (I want to keep it simple):

- Name of the Mod (or Game)
- Download-Link
- One preview Bitmap
- Description

Yeah, you can do more than that, maybe later, but that should improve the user experience a lot.
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Keening_Product
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Post by Keening_Product »

Simple is good, and that's a good selection of essential information. Simple = accessible. :)
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Post by gerstrong »

Keening_Product wrote:Simple is good, and that's a good selection of essential information. Simple = accessible. :)
Here we go!

Image

This is not a mockup! The latest code already is able to download and shows you what you see here.

Also CG now registers what you already have downloaded and what the user does not have yet.

This means the store will show the user only what he does not have. If user has everything, the store won't be shown anymore, unless something new is uploaded of course.
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gerstrong
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Post by gerstrong »

Well, version 1.9.5 beta has it!

Take a look:

https://pckf.rigeltechnical.com/viewtopic.php?t=367 ... highlight=

And let me know if you like it :-)

Happy Keening!
Having fun developing stuff...
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