About the technology behind

Published by Antoine Turmel on July 25, 2011 in News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

RunnersBox is an ambitious project. It will need to run on the three main desktop computers operating system : Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.
To do that, there is a great platform I still believe in : Mozilla Platform.
You should wonder… it’s about Web ? No it’s not only about Web.
The Mozilla Platform have a great set of tools and technologies to allow rich applications. It’s featuring a great render engine Gecko but also some fast JavaScript engine.
To compare Valve’s Steam use the WebKit engine.

There are some concerns about the death of XUL platform and the rise of HTML5. I think HTML5 is not yet ready to handle all of the application process but it’s sure a great technology to explore for the interface. There are still great apps that are based on XUL like Songbird, Nightingale and Instantbird.

Mozilla Platform also allow products to be shipped and localized easily, plus it can be extendable with add-on support.

Last but not least, I’m interested into exploring some Mozilla Labs projects to connect RunnersBox such as Mozilla Labs Gaming, Open Web Apps and BrowserID.

RunnersBox will try to be based only on open technologies : XMPP for communications between players for example. The goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but to use the bests pieces of cakes ;)

You can contribute on the wiki hosted on Google Code, share what feature RunnersBox should support and discuss here about the project :)
Also you can get in touch on IRC : #mozplay at irc.mozilla.org

Let the steam out…

Published by Antoine Turmel on July 3, 2011 in News. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Games are fun. I used to play games on both consoles and computer since I’m young. I did enjoy the Game Boy but also PC Games like Age of Empires series. Today there are more and more games on consoles and a new market is on PC/Windows since 2004, downloadable games. Imagine you can now buy your games online, and play them now. Installation process is pretty quick and easy : after you paid the game, it begins to download and once it’s done, double-click on the icon and you are ready to play !

To compare, all PC games I bought before 2004 comes on a CD or DVD box, I put the disc on, run the setup, enter the CD-key, install Direct-X, install the game, (reboot the system for some cases) and it was finally ready.
Valve, did understand there was a new market, and today they are the best, delivering a big catalog of block busters games, it has Counter Strike, Call of Duty, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead… even the new Worms game ;)

Thing is, OK all of these stuff are mostly commercial. On the open side, there are also many good games, but it’s not easy to tell which game is good or how to get it. Also communities of games are disconnected. Some games includes automatic updates, some not.

What I want to do, is to build an open source tool to let people download and manage their games. It will be featuring open source games, but will support commercial games too.

What about Lutris, PlayOnLinux, PlayOnMac, and DJL ? All these software are good but mostly for Linux platforms. I want to build a tool compatible on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Of course not all games are compatible with all three OS but the software will be available for these OS.
How ? RunnersBox (code name) will be based on Mozilla toolkit “XULRunner“, it allow building applications using XUL, JavaScript and XPCOM and it runs on Win/Mac/Linux.

I did begin this software one year ago, but did not touch the code since then. I’m setting up this blog to post details about the development and other related things.

There is also a Twitter and Drumbeat page. Yup RunnersBox will be also supporting web games.