Hi guys,
we’re excited to reconnect with you all here on Lemmy after our project “Crackpipe” generated quite a buzz recently. With its brand new name, we proudly present “GameVault”!
In case you missed our, let’s say - “controversial” debut on reddit and lemmy, let us give you a quick rundown of what GameVault is all about:
GameVault is a fantastic gaming platform that you can host yourself, allowing you and your friends to enjoy “alternatively obtained” games on your own terms. It simplifies the whole gaming experience by organizing, downloading, installing, playing, and tracking your favorite games right on your file server. GameVault automatically detects game files, builds a metadata database, and offers a user-friendly client for seamless downloading and gameplay. Imagine having your own personalized Steam for games stored on your file server!
Linux users, please note that we don’t currently have a native client available. However, our documentation includes a community-driven approach to running the client on Linux, which you can find under “Advanced Usage.”
Are you ready to add another Link to your Dashboards?
Feel free to pay a visit to our website and join our Discord and Lemmy Community to become part of an awesome community!
First of all, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it, game preservation depends on DRM-Free packages. And there is no other software that I know of that is trying to offer the closest thing to a Steam-like experience for this scenario.
With that out of the way, I must bring up a specific section found in your documentation.
https://gamevau.lt/docs/client-docs/how-to-use
From what I can read in the docs, the installation is completely manual. Even games that don’t have an installer, they get compressed and must be manually decompressed to the proper gamevault folder.
If games that don’t require an installer, actually do get automatically “installed”, then my suggestion is that you add that to the documentation. If that is not the case, then I suggest you stop advertising this functionality as if it was true.
As for Linux, if this software does offer an advatage over just copying games, I guess someone will eventually make a plugin for Lutris or Heroic. But one thing that I suggest for GameVault is developing a way to automatically add the games as a non-Steam game to the Steam application. The majority of users prefer Steam over any other launcher, specially for people using their PCs connected to a TV, Steam Big Picture is just superior to anything else out there.
We’re on it right now. It seems like it made its way into the documentation a bit too soon, and for that, we apologize.
Would you mind submitting a feature request for adding non-Steam games to Steam? If you need assistance with that, please let us know. Additionally, do you happen to know if there’s an API or protocol available for such functionality?