Flatpak package for linux

[aryan02420]

Hi Eric, I was going through the wiki and noticed the section about Tool/Pipeline Improvements

I would like to help you distribute BombSquad as Flatpak package for linux via Flathub. Flatpak is integrated into many Linux App stores by default, which might boost the discover-ability of bombsquad.

The bombsquad executable will be pulled directly from ballistica.net and bundled with its dependencies, so no changes are needed in this repo :)

[Dliwk]

Oh cool; I didn't see anyone using Flatpak here before :))

Actually, I have my own flatpak manifest for BombSquad and I'd love to share it here if it would help (though I'm not at home right now).

But it has some visual glitch (it started when I updated to Fedora 36 which also forced me to use nouveau instead of proprietary nvidia driver):

(this appears only with flatpak version of game)

Which distro are you running? Or maybe anyone else has seen this too?

[efroemling]

Weird. I'd be curious if things behave better if you set graphics settings to medium or low. But I haven't seen things misbehave in that exact way before.. (especially the blue tinted buttons)

But it has some visual glitch (it started when I updated to Fedora 36 which also forced me to use nouveau instead of proprietary nvidia driver):

[aryan02420]

I am using openSUSE Tumbleweed, Intel UHD 620

[Dliwk]

Weird. I'd be curious if things behave better if you set graphics settings to medium or low. But I haven't seen things misbehave in that exact way before.. (especially the blue tinted buttons)

Haha oops this blue outline happened because of one of my plugin, but exactly the same problem exists even without any mod. 😬

[Dliwk]

Only wanted to mention that I finally got home and installed back nvidia drivers and everything became normal.

[efroemling]

That sounds great; thanks!

One thought:
The test builds on the ballistica.net site might not always be in a fully stable state and will always show 'Test Build' in the menu. If by chance you'd like to add a module under tools/batools or something that creates the Flatpak I'd be happy to set that up to run whenever I push out official stable builds. Though if you prefer to just keep things on your end and pull from the ballistica.net test builds that's fine too. 👍

[Dliwk]

I'm not an expert, but flatpak packages often use extra-data field, which points to some static data, which downloaded by the client separately from the package itself, reducing package size and perhaps load on the repository with packages. So basically storing somewhere 'stable' build for Flatpak, without 'Test Build' in the menu would be fine.

[aryan02420]

@efroemling Great!
Do you have any preference for the application ID? net.froemling.bombsquad, net.ballistica.bombsquad or something else?

Also what should be the license of the final package? Can I label it as Proprietary and link to LICENSE

Custom licenses which are not in the SPDX registry, like proprietary licenses, can be denoted using the LicenseRef notation. LicenseRef-proprietary can be used to denote a proprietary license, with an optional URL to the license text following after a = sign.

The license given in the project_license tag should be the ‘main’ license of the project. For a software project, this is typically the license for the code.

flatpak supports branches, so we can have stable and latest branches. You can either create a webhook to notify the flatpak repository about a new stable release or we can just use an older build from https://files.ballistica.net/bombsquad/builds/old/ as the stable version.

For webhooks, we can set up an action with on: release: types: ['publish'] trigger or configure one from github.com/efroemling/ballistica/settings/hooks/new. I prefer using an older build (for now) since it requires almost no change to either of our setup

[aryan02420]

@Dliwk
There is an x-checker-data field to find if newer versions of resource exist.
Each downloaded file is cached and requires its hash to match the one provided in the manifest file. New versions will only be downloaded when the hash changes.
x-data-checker can be used to specify a version pattern, all matching patterns will be recorded and the latest version will be downloaded and reported to the maintainer. This can work nicely with Github Actions.

I am not sure if different branches share their cache. If not, then it is only one extra download/stable release

[Dliwk]

Hi there, I finally got home 🥳

@aryan02420 Here is what I use: https://gist.github.com/Dliwk/eaec7766e32859a86d096591ea12bc41 This is pretty simple manifest generator but hope it may help.