Lutris 0.5.8 is released!

We are happy to announce the release of Lutris 0.5.8! This version is a really big milestone for the project because it shifted several aspects to make it more aligned with how the project should be. The biggest change in this release is the addition of a “Sources” section in the sidebar where resides all 3rd party services we support. At this moment, this includes Steam, Humble Bundle, GOG and Lutris itself, which is now treated as a service, with a few special features, like the ability to search the whole installer database from lutris.net.

Direct access to services made it possible to eliminate the need for the “Import games” window. This system required lutris to keep a tight and complete integration with the games from a store and their lutris.net counterparts. Installing games from 3rd party services also required install scripts to be published on the website. This is no longer the case. Lutris will now show your full library directly in the main client view and will be able to install every game whether or not an installer script has been written on the website. This is made possible by generating dynamic install scripts from the game information. For example, we generate either Linux or Wine installers for GOG/Humble Bundle based on the platform availability returned from their respective APIs. Those self-generated installers do not have a 100% success rate at running games but they will in most cases at least get it installed. During testing with Humble Bundle, the success rate of self-generated installers was surprisingly good. In many cases, old and unmaintained installers had to be deleted in order to let the self-generated one do a better job.

In every way, the goal was to make the client less reliant on the lutris.net website and API. In Lutris 0.5.8, we pull all game media directly from the services themselves, and in various formats.

This opens up a lot of possibilities. We currently only have the services that we previously

supported in “Import games”, even less than what we started with, since we haven’t deemed the “XDG” service to be valuable enough to keep around. However, this current architecture allows us to add support for a lot of other services in the future. We are now one step closer to the planned EGS, Itch.io, Uplay, Battle.net and Origin integrations. But let’s not limit ourselves to remote services. Anything that can provide a list of games has the potential to be integrated as a source of games in Lutris. MAME, Retroarch, ScummVM could benefit from tighter integration.

Under the hood, a lot of the Lutris internals have been reworked. We are now less reliant on Gtk features and more reliant on database queries to update and refresh the main view. There are been an ongoing effort to pay our technical debt that is starting to show in the overall stability of the program. There has been a lot of code deletion in the past few weeks, so don’t expect everything to behave exactly as it were in the previous release.

Another major change, this time very visible, is the removal of the sidebar on the right. Selected game information displayed at the bottom of the interface in a much more space efficient way.

Note that runner specific actions (eg. Wine) are in their own popup menu, next to its runner icon.

This design change makes Lutris fit in very small screens, which could come in handy if running the client on handheld devices.

Lutris 0.5.8 also comes with a bunch of new features:

• Prevents deletion of folders used by multiple games or important home folders
• GOG installers will offer extras such as game manuals to be downloaded during install
• Lutris runners (the interface between a program that runs games and Lutris) can now be written in JSON. This fits most basic needs for passing command line arguments to a program, more complex behavior still needs to be coded in Python. I can inspect our existing JSON based runners for reference in `share/lutris/json` in the source tree.
• Games logs are kept until lutris is closed and can be saved to a file
• MangoHUD is a system option, with support for OpenGL and 32bit games
• A bash shell can be opened in the environment of a Wine game, with the correct wine version aliased to `wine` and WINEPREFIX set. Select “Open Bash terminal” in the Wine runner actions to see it in action.
• A bash script can be generated to run any game with its lutris configuration but without the lutris client. For example `lutris quake --output-script quake.sh` will generate a shell script that will launch Quake without lutris being open.

Lastly, all non GPL v3 content was removed from the main source tree. Having icons from various sources and with various licenses was causing a lot of trouble for the inclusion of Lutris in Debian. Icons used in Lutris are now part of the Lutris Runtime, if you wish to any contributions for them, please send pull requests to the following repository: https://github.com/lutris/lutris-runtime/

With the project’s license in a clean state, keep an eye on the Debian repos ;)

In the next release we will focus our efforts on Steam, Proton and Wine. We are strongly considering deprecating the WineSteam runner in favor of a better Proton integration. If you still have games that are only compatible on WineSteam, please let us know so we can try to improve Proton compatibility.

WineSteam will still carry on its legacy, code-wise, in all the subsequent Wine based runners for EGS, Battle.net, etc. This is the main reason why the runner hasn’t been deprecated yet. There is a lot of code useful for future integrations.

With the advancement made in both 0.5.8 and the upcoming 0.5.9 release, we should have all planned integrations done fairly quickly in the 0.5.x cycle.

In the immediate future, expect some updates on the website, mainly for the installer submission process. The current process is overwhelming for our moderation team and would benefit from being more open to the community, with some kind of voting / self moderation system.

We really hope that you enjoy this new release. Please give your Humble Bundle a fresh look, there are a bunch of hidden gems in there that were overlooked, did not have a Lutris installer and are now a few clicks away!