Xfce Forum

AxXium

Member

Registered: 2006-08-11

Posts: 1

Add categories to "game" menu item

Guys,

I searched the forum posts and could find no simular topic.

Some info about me. I am part of the Zenwalk Linux team. One of my tasks is running the gaming site for Zenwalk, ZenGamer. My problem is that we have over 90 packages there and when a user installs the games, they all are displayed under the "games" menu section. This gets very large and "scrolling" kicks in once you have enough games installed. We do use the "usr/share/applications/*.desktop" files correctly as in "Categories=Application;Game;Action;" but no "Action" submenu of "Games" is displayed.

I would like the XFCE menu to display game submenus as the *.desktop files dictate. For example, I would like to see the following:

games: Action
------------ Arcade
------------ Board
------------ Card
------------ Children/Education
------------ Emulation
------------ First Person Shooter
------------ Game Engines
------------ Programming Games
------------ Puzzles
------------ Racing
------------ Roguelike
------------ Simulation
------------ Sports
------------ Strategy

Do you know how I can accomplish this? Is there a config file for XFCE
somewhere that sets these options? Or is there certain submenu items allowed, i.e. Action, Arcade, Child, but no Roguelike. Either way, none of the submenus ever show up.

:-(

Thanks in advance,
AxXium

tuppe666

Member

Registered: 2004-12-13

Posts: 5

Re: Add categories to "game" menu item

I've replied to posts like this before. You don't know it but your suffering from 2 problems. The first being that XFCE4 is in a transitional period between its proprietary menu system, and the new standards set by XDG have not gone far enough in when it comes to gaming categories.

These are a good read if you are serious.
http://standards.freedesktop.org/deskto … ec/latest/
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/

Now the fun part.
edit cat ~/.xfce4/menu.xml and change the include line to

<include type="system" style="multilevel" unique="true" legacy="true"/>

As for your game sub-types you will be quite happy with those in the standard specification.

ActionGame    An action game
AdventureGame    Adventure style game
ArcadeGame    Arcade style game
BoardGame    A board game
BlocksGame    Falling blocks game
CardGame    A card game
KidsGame    A game for kids
LogicGame    Logic games like puzzles, etc
RolePlaying    A role playing game
Simulation    A simulation game
SportsGame    A sports game
StrategyGame    A strategy game

and yes these all work nicely and IMO are well thought out categories, the bad is that games is something some of us have a *lots* of and need a sub-sub category e.g. RolePlaying---->RougeLike, ActionGame---->FPS etc etc. Although I do think "Engines" should not be a separate catagory.

What I don't like seeing is that "Emulation" is actually under the system sub menu as the bulk of emulation is for gaming I would imagine.

You *can* select your own sub-categories to tailor your system, but *I* and increasingly others are hitting similar problems. The real solution is not at an XFCE4 menu level but actually higher up and I suggest that you join the mailing list at x-org and have your voice heard early and benefit everyone.