Hi All,

I don't know if any of you realise it, but this month its a year ago that
Tibbs started the games SIG. Hence this "Games SIG State of the Union".

So where do we stand after a year, lets take a look at this using our self
formulated goal from the wiki:

Goal: to make Fedora Core enhanced with our Extras the best Free software
and open source gaming platform there is for both developers and users. 

So where do we stand, I think Fedora these days thanks to our work is a
great gaming platform both for:
-End users: lots of great games, and all packaged with pretty high and bug free packages
-Developers: most important gaming libs are available pre packaged and bug fixes applied
 where nescesarry.


Then the wiki continues with"
We aim to accomplish this goal through a variety of activities: 

1) Creating high quality packages of games, gaming-related libraries,
   and game development tools 
2) Documenting the available games, including wiki documentation and listing in comps.xml 
3) Providing a forum where users and developers can discuss issues related to current games,
   requests for new games to be packaged, and game packaging issues (but not game playing
   help, so don't bother asking how to kill the wumpus!) 
4) Seeking publicity for games in Fedora 
5) Actively review each other's game packages to shorten the time it takes to get games
   approved and imported into Extras 
6) Design additional guidelines on top of the Fedora Extras guidelines that are specific to
   games
7) Help each other fix bugs that have been filed against game packages 
8) Alerting each other about orphaned and soon-to-be orphaned games so that we can prevent
   their removal 

I think that we've been doing a great job at 1, 5, 6, 7 and 8. But I find it troublesome
that the pace is slowing down these days. I think this because our failing todo 3 and 4.

We need better PR, to tell others about the great work we are doing and to extract fresh
blood. Both developers, as most of us currently are handling quite a pile of packages, and
non-developers (for example artists, writers), so that we can for example also do a better
job at 2) 

Some ideas for this:
* Write a spiffy article about how cool we are for linuxgames.com and other linux gaming
  websites, and try to motivate people in this article to join us
* Send the same article to fwn (Fedora weekly news) and various Fedora mailinglist
* send the same article to lwn (Linux Weekly News)

So who's up to the challenge of writing said article?


Other random thoughts:
* We really could use help from some artists, examples:
  - pingus in FE has 2 level sets and the second level sets needs to story line talking
   the levels into a whole written.
  - I know various cool game clones, which unfortunately almost copied the original
    graphics. The code is fine, the levels often are fine too, but they need new artwork
    sets to be truely free.
* There are still a gazillion games out there to package, many are not worthy (because they
  plain suck), many are legally troubled. But many are also fine games, where does this
  stop at 500 games in Fedora at 5000?


Your opinion on the future of the Games SIG is much appreciated, add your 2 cents please!

Last but not least many many thanks to all of you for a great year!

Regards,

Hans