I use mint currently, but a good effort. Unfortunately what annoys me most is that every distro has its own package management system. I kinda miss the Slackware-type tar.gz method. An archive and a script ought to be enough :D.

I am working on scripts creating Debian packages from GOG installers.
Maybe you could find in it some ideas to help you in your project.
Here you can download an example, creating a Debian package for Baldur's Gate. It's WIP but it does work :
http://www1.datafilehost.com/d/04a710d9

(the readme is in french only, but you should be able to understand what the script does without it)

@ blotunga : My scripts should work on Mint.
Contact me via PM if you want to try some of them, I'll translate the README and upload them.

This is great, nice job. I don't use a Debianite distro myself but this is a good insight in package creation for that. I like the icon extraction - I never thought about using official icons, so I may steal that trick for the Arch scripts if you don't mind ;)

I wonder if we can find some convergence and install the games in a similar way. At the moment you send them to /usr/local but if both this script and ours installed to /opt with the whole unionfs shebang to go with it (you can use our launcher scripts, of course) then there would be some uniformity between the two.

That is if you intend to use this to start your own project or whatever. If you get a repository set up I'd gladly contribute what I can.

Or maybe that's all rushing it. Whatever - I like your script as it is, anyway :D

Yeah, that's rushing it a bit ;)
It is nothing more than a personnal project/exercise yet.

Each time I think it is ready to publish, I find a new way to improve it turning the previous version totally obsolete. I think I need to mature all this stuff a bit more...

If you want to have a good laugh, here is what my scripts looked like no more than four weeks ago :
https://secure.gog.com/forum/zeus_poseidon_acropolis/guide_install_zeus_on_gnulinux

Of course, you're free to reuse anything you find useful in my scripts (including the wrestool | icotool stuff if you like it).

I'm going to have a look on your work too (haven't taken the time yet), and I totally agree with your idea of unifying all this!

Now we just need someone who knows how to make .rpm packages and we're ready ;)

-----

Anyway, I'm going to post here the tricks I could discover while working of this, hoping it will help.
(Baldur's Gate II is a good example of game where GOG messed stuff and turned it mod-unfriendly, game that can be turned back in a good shape in a couple lines of bash)

I "kinda" miss... I don't miss all the hassling :D. I've used slack for about 3 years, but for the last 3 years I've used debian based distros, and somehow I got lazy. And I prefer LTE releases because it's hard to support every version for everything. For example if a new version of perl comes out, it might mess up our build scripts and so on.

I notice you don't have nwn. I ported the nwn-diamond aur package to work with GOG's files awhile ago: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nwn-gog/

We need a new set of guidelines for AUR packages now that GOPG supports Linux.

Hello Archer friends!

GOG has changed the way InnoSetup files are built recently, I think the following topic I just opened may be of interest to you:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_has_anyone_be_able_to_extract_the_rar_innosetup_installers

For the benefit of Google, I'm bumping this so it doesn't go into the ill-thought out thread merge. (http://www.gog.com/forum/general/general_discussion_archive_creation_what_will_be_moved)

Hi,

I've ported the Debian game-data-packager project to Arch.

This is basically an engine that repacks all the setup_.exe of
games supported by free engines (scummvm, quake{*}, doom{*} engines)
into native .pkg.tar.xz packages for local use.

There's also support for lgogdownloader

List of supported games:

See GOG mix "games_supported_by_debians_gamedatapackager" (links disabled ?)

You can't post links if you have less than 7 rep, and you get one rep for every day you make a post. You get additional rep when enough people rate a post of yours positively, as well as when you get credited for answering a question thread.

And here goes a shiny clickable link ;)
Games supported by Debian's game-data-packager

----- Still working on your project?

I was thinking of extending my ./play.it scripts so that they can be used to install game on non-Debian-based distributions, and Arch might be a good candidate for the first prototypes. But I’ll need a bit of help as I’ve never used Arch (yet) and so don’t know anything about its package format.

Nah, I have a job these days and that's a bit distracting. Besides, GOG's Mojo installers work just fine (and the next step of this project, at least mentally, was just to make Mojo installers anyway).

I'd happily fiddle around with ./play.it when I get a weekend free, seems quite cool. But tbh I think Mojo is the way forward and I'm glad GOG are already on the case, not to detract any value from any work you've already done. I can also give you pointers on Arch packaging if you like, but the best reference (and how I learned to write them) is one of the many thousands of existing PKGBUILDs and the Arch Wiki.

If I start actually making installers again they'll be Mojos. GOG hire me plz.

Thanks, I’ll ping you when I’m ready to start the real work on Arch support.

By the way, I second your suggestion to GOG ;)