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.
Please submit a pre-built docker image to the unraid app store!
Why MIT license and not GPL variant?
I’m really curious about the motivation behind such permissive licensing too.
The project is yours, you can always distribute a commercially licensed version of it regardless. GPL or any other license will never be a hindrance.
The only thing a permissive license does is allowing everyone else to issue commercial versions of it without even sharing source code.
How so you force steam to run multiple instance of the same game ?
Or just multiple different games at once?
As far as I can tell, it’s creating container VMs that have Steam installed inside separately.
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 🤔
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.
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.
It looks they are just containers. No hardware or kernel emulation needed.
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.
I’ve passed my display through to a VM in Proxmox for transcoding and now I can’t get the GUI for that VM.
Is this something that would allow me to connect to that VM on another PC and use a virtual desktop?
If so, I may have to have a play with it. I mean I’m happy away using SSH but why not have UI if I can?
Does the server have to run headless, or can one person still run games locally on it while another has a remote session? That is, would I be able to play on the monitor/mouse/keyboard directly attached, while my partner has a session on a laptop?
Yep that’s perfectly possible, the sessions that will run under Wolf will be completely isolated from the host. Besides, that’s how I run it on my desktop dev machine!
