Games community infrastructure

[Josef Spillner (ggz-travel)]

Hello,

I'm going to participate in the UDS and will work on service integration into 
the desktop, or more specifically, gaming services such as online games and 
club management. The backend project for this would be the GGZ Gaming Zone, 
which already implements several client-side components for both KDE and 
GNOME. Starting with GNOME 2.17 it will be supported by gnome-games out of 
the box and we hope to achieve similarly with KDE 4.
Since there is no special mailing list for games/entertainment on Ubuntu, I'm 
going to ask here if anyone already considered such projects or if there are 
competing infrastructures considered better suited for the task.
There is a debian packaging project (pkg-ggz) which could be used as a base 
for the work. Quite a lot of work is still needed in proper menu integration, 
some artwork, supporting more games and maybe something like a launcher for 
game servers on the LAN.
Most of our current users are the sort of "casual players" which do not need 
fancy games but they do need easy access and stability. The framework itself 
however also accomodates other client-server games.

It might make sense to create a spec for this but consultation on this list is 
something I want to take into account. It might then be a bit late for the 
current UDS but I'd better not rush to something which doesn't cover all the 
wishes of gaming people since there are no other gaming specs yet.

On a UDS-related note:
I have also attended the FSG OpenPrinting Summit and will join Till and others 
in improving the printer dialog(s), although this is a rather mid-term 
project since especially the usability work needed for guidance on the dialog 
designs has just started at the FSG meeting and will take many months.
Issues like (automatic/manual) PPD updates were discussed here and are 
certainly on the TODO list for me.

Josef

P.S. Relevant URLs:
http://www.ggzgamingzone.org/ - project page
http://www.ggzcommunity.org/ - community page
http://games.ggzcommunity.org/ - temporary java applet community page
http://www.freestandards.org/en/OpenPrinting/SummitLexington - FSG/PWG meeting