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Games on Whales - Stream multiple desktops and games from a single host (games-on-whales.github.io)

submitted 2 months ago by abeltramo@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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After 3 years in the making I'm excited to announce the launch of Games on Whales, an innovative open-source project that revolutionizes virtual desktops and gaming. Our mission is to enable multiple users to stream different content from a single machine, with full HW acceleration and low latency.

With Games on Whales, you can:

Multi-user: Share a single remote host hardware with friends or colleagues, each streaming their own content (gaming, productivity, or anything else!)
Headless: Create virtual desktops on demand, with automatic resolution and FPS matching, without the need for a monitor or dummy plug
Advanced Input Support: Enjoy seamless control with mouse, keyboard, and joypads, including Gyro and Acceleration support (a first in Linux!)
Low latency: Uses the Moonlight protocol to stream content to a wide variety of supported clients.
Linux and Docker First: Our curated Docker images include popular applications like Steam, Firefox, Lutris, Retroarch, and more!
Fully Open Source: MIT licensed, and we welcome contributions from the community.

Interested in how this works under the hood? You can read more about it in our developer guide or deep dive into the code.

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[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

How so you force steam to run multiple instance of the same game ?

Or just multiple different games at once?

[–] abeltramo@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

As others have pointed out below it's going to run multiple separated instances of Steam with the limitations that Valve impose (there's not much we can do there). This project is not limited to Steam though, you could easily run another session from a different device with something like Lutris or Pegasus.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

As far as I can tell, it's creating container VMs that have Steam installed inside separately.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It looks they are just containers. No hardware or kernel emulation needed.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That doesn't necessarily seem to be the case:

[–] abeltramo@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure what you are referring to but in the chart Mesa and Kernel layers are shared between the running applications and Wolf in a single host, no VMs involved. One of the main reasons behind the project was to allow exactly this so that you wouldn't incur in the big penalty hit that incurs in GPU splitting

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah okay, thank you heaps for clarifying :) That's awesome that you've been able to limit the overhead like that, I'm excited to test it out!

[–] abeltramo@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

No worries! Let me know how it goes, any feedback is highly appreciated!

[–] ErwinLottemann@feddit.de 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

still steam prevents you from running more than one game at once from one account. can't start vampire survivors on the deck and play manor lords on the other pc using the same account. family sharing and using multiple accounts should work, though 🤔

[–] kambusha@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I believe this is akin to an open-source version of Stadia or Geforce now. Essentially, you have a powerful server that can be used by multiple users to play their own games. So, along with a couple of friends, you could purchase a powerful server, and then connect to it with a weak home computer.

[–] abeltramo@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Well said! That's exactly the idea!

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I think that's the general idea. They are seperate instances of Steam that could be signed into different accounts. So yeah, if you're doing multiplayer of one game, each account would need to own it. That would be the exact same limitation at a LAN party anyway. This just lets you host said LAN party on a single beefy box, and use thin clients for each gamer, like an RPi4, a tablet or even an Apple/Android TV.