Right from the time I found about the Gluon project (which I found on the GSoC ideas page), I've been very excited and having loads of fun with the Gluon team (as usual 🙂
I'm happy to announce that the Plasmoid has taken its first step, displaying a Gluon example game on an OpenGL rendered Plasma applet. The applet is a Plasma::GLApplet which uses the Gluon Framework to create game graphics and output game audio alongwith support for input.
Here's a screenshot (yes, the transparency is a bug)-
[flickr-photo:id=4565854077,size=-]
The Plasmoid is able to display the game content pretty well (thanks to Zack Rusin for the awesome GLApplet work), but you might have to try the following workarounds currently-
- The Plasmoid has to be resized down to display the graphics, i.e. after resizing to a desired size, just make it a bit smaller and it'll work
- If the game isn't receiving your input, try restarting plasma-desktop and It will work
People have complained about the Plasmoid reporting “Your system does not support OpenGL widgets”. We're trying to figure out the problem, but mostly people with latest trunk should be able to use the Plasmoid.
To try it out, grab the source from http://gitorious.org/gluon/gluon and build it. After successful build and installation, the Plasmoid should be listed in the Add Widgets… list.
Thanks a lot to ahimestra and leinir for their constant support and motivation (and for making the Invaders the example, which in turn is the first video game I had played (remember Galaxian on those early game consoles?)
That said, more stuff coming soon, stay glued 😉
Shantanu Tushar 
Woooh! Hey, thank you for taking on the project! i have high hopes for the next few months’ worth of work, i tells ya 😉
p.s.: Apparently my captcha is “cache late” …odd instruction, i must say 😉
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This is very cool… It means mobile phones running plasma become a gaming platform right away 😉
World domination in sight!
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Cool, sounds like Plasma is capable of lots of things! So what's the usecase for this?
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The main use case for the Plasmoid is to let people play Gluon powered games on their Plasma desktop. If you want to know more about Gluon, visit http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/ It will provide still more features such as online High Scores, Feedback system etc. Just stay glued !
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I am happy to know that you have completed first step in Gluon project.It looks very interesting to play games on plasma desktop. I hope you finish it as soon as possible.I hope ,I'll enjoy it lot.
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Yeah, I know what Gluon is, but I thought the recommended way to open a Gluon game is opening a Gluon-window, as this is movable, resizable, can be maximized and you can easily close and open the program. Therefor I don't understand the advantages of a plasmoid right now though I'm sure you can explain! 🙂
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Nice, so you will also be knowing that Gluon has been envisioned to run on many diffrent types of devices and UIs. Having a Plasmoid is one of those UIs, and having it run on Plasma gives us the advantage of running it on other Plasma shells as well, plasma-mobile or plasma-mediacenter to name a few. Again, all of the above except maximizing are possible for the Plasmoid too ! 😉
P.S. – That shouldn't give you an impression that a window-based Gluon player won't be there. We are having that too, its just that there is no “recommended” way of playing a Gluon game – its your fun, your choice 🙂
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Hi!I would like to know where didi you finda that wallpaper…it's absolutely gorgeous!Thanks a lot!Daniele
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Thank you for the encouragement 🙂
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I guess the wallpaper is part of the wallpapers in KDE Plasma Addons, there should be a package in your distribution's repositories for that. For example, on ubuntu its plasma-wallpapers-addons .
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