Game symlinks for Lutris

[palob]

From this Papirus issue it looks like there's another culprit à la appimagekit-. https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme/issues/2167

At least they added symlinks prefixed lutris_.

Don't know if this is about desktop launchers or in-Lutris icons.

[maxtron95]

Does this mean I have to go through every one of my (current) steam game PRs and add a Lutris symlink to them or are we just blanket removing prefixes?

The good news is that the icon names are not hardcoded from what it seems.

It is not just Steam games that runs in Lutris; This includes GOG, Origin, Battle.net, and Windows-only games as well (Halo, World of Warcraft, The Sims for example)

I can go ahead and add symlinks to all valid game entries on Lutris.

[palob]

No, we definitely won't add such prefixes here. Maybe it would make sense to have the https://github.com/Foggalong/hardcode-fixer/ script remove those.

[maxtron95]

The problem is that the Lutris Icon name can be different from the original. (broken-sword.svg for example, The lutris icon name would be lutris_broken-sword-1-shadow-of-the-templars-directors-cu)

[palob]

Why do they do this???

[maxtron95]

What do you think would be the best course of action regarding those icons?

[palob]

Asking upstream why they consider this a good idea and where they get their icon names (the changed ones) from.

[palob]

Note that I haven't done any research on this myself, I just stumbled upon the Papirus issue.

[maxtron95]

Here is the link of upstream's Github (https://github.com/lutris/lutris) (https://github.com/lutris/website)

From what I see they fetch their icon names from an id found on an url, similar to what steam does with steam_icon_"appid". (From that Broken Sword example, that url is https://lutris.net/games/broken-sword-1-shadow-of-the-templars-directors-cu/)

[Foggalong]

Aghhhh this is such a terrible practice. If anyone wants to drop a upstream and issue about getting this fixed that'd be much appreciated. Between appimage, snap, and now Lutris I'm not liking this trend of pseudo-hardcoing icons being the packaging default.

In my hiatus this practice and how we as a theme address it is something I've been thinking about occasionally. While I definitely don't want pander to some of it (especially the appimage version-specific icons), I think we may eventually have to if other themes crumble and start to include this icons in their themes. With issues like this it'd be useful to have some kind of a "guild of icon theme developers" which organises collective responses to things like this. If some do and some don't it hurts those who do in making unnecessary work and those who don't in having less coverage by comparison.

I might put out some feelers and see how much appetite there'd be for creating something like this, even if it was a very loosely defined group.

[maxtron95]

@Foggalong I believe the worst offender of those icons is Canonical's Snap because those icons are actually hardcoded.

[maxtron95]

@Foggalong Regarding the issue to upstream, I can't tell if it is the client that is doing this or the website.

[Foggalong]

@creepertron95 It's almost definitely going to be the client pulling data from the website

[maxtron95]

Maybe we can discuss with @strycore and the other Lutris developers about it?

[strycore]

what's up? we pull icons from the website with the name matching the game's slug. icons get pulled from the website on each game update. is there any other info I can provide you with? I don't understand what is the problem you're trying to solve...

[Foggalong]

Hey @strycore, thanks for stopping by! I was going to suggest we drop this issue in one of the Lutris repos but happy to have this discussion here instead.

Would it be possible for Lutris to drop the lutris_ prefix from its icon names? For example, our icon for World of Goo currently has a root icon corresponding to the stand-alone version (world-of-goo) and then a symlink for the Steam version¹ (steam_icon_22000). As it stands we'll also have to add an additional symlink lutris_world-of-goo for that and the many hundred other games we currently provide icons for.

Even just changing the format of the icon name from lutris_$SLUG to $SLUG would massively decrease the number of new icons needed. While some slugs wouldn't match with an icon we already have (like the Broken Sword example @creepertron95 referenced) I'd wager a lot would (like World of Goo whose slug is simply world-of-goo as in the stand-alone client), and they are at least generic rather than tied to a specific Lutris installation of the game.

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¹ - We unfortunately long missed the boat on stopping Steam using IDs as the basis of their icon names; it's a holdover from their Windows client that was already quite firmly entrenched by the time they started working on a Linux client them 10 years later.

[strycore]

Can someone else deal with this? It wasn't my decision to add the lutris_ prefix. I don't even use XDG shortcuts for Lutris games.

[Foggalong]

@strycore Sure thing! We were just discussing where to report in in the Lutris repos; where do you think would be most appropriate?

[strycore]

The repo for the lutris client, that where we would have to make a change if needed.