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How the itch.io app sandboxes games
- elisee 10y agoContext: http://itch.io/ http://itch.io/ is a place for publishing indie games and other creative stuff. There is no greenlight process like on Steam, people can share content very easily without gatekeepers. (Disclosure: I know the devs pretty well but I'm submitting because I think it's interesting content for the HN audience) They recently released a Steam-like app for browsing, installing & updating games. There's an awful lot of interesting stuff being done like https://itch.io/docs/butler/ https://itch.io/docs/butler/ (CLI tool for efficiently patching games with diffing for both upload & download). The latest feature they added is experimental sandboxing which allows transparently running the games you download from itch.io as a separate restricted user / in a jail. The submission link details the research done to make it work. More info here: https://itch.io/docs/itch/using/sandbox.html https://itch.io/docs/itch/using/sandbox.html and https://github.com/itchio/itch/releases/tag/v18.0.0 https://github.com/itchio/itch/releases/tag/v18.0.0
- ben_jones 10y agoI remember reading the other day in /r/sysadmin how a school initiative to teach with video games was completely thrown out because their was no way to sandbox Steam in such a way that it could be rolled out to school computers. Steam community was unhelpful and a lot of people were disappointed. Could be an interesting application of itch.io.
- fasterthanlime 10y agoHi! I'm Amos, the main developer behind the itch.io app. I'll check this thread for comments tomorrow, thanks for your attention!