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Steam'd Penguins
- Ralith 14y agoWhile I applaud what they're doing, it's a bit weird how that post keeps throwing around open-source rhetoric when neither Steam nor any of Valve's games are open source. The only regard in which this has anything to do with open source software at all is that the platform happens to be predominately GPL-licensed, and may conceivably become an indeterminate amount more popular if more games than L4D2 get ported.
- sswezey 14y agoWhat 'open-source rhetoric'? It isn't a Valve Open-source blog, it's a Valve linux blog - open source is not really relevant at all to this post.
- jpgg 14y agoIt's mentioned three times in the article, including: "We want this to be a community of open source game developers, communicating with each other and talking about current efforts and future efforts in a powerfully creative environment."
- Danieru 14y agoAnd the most damning: >After all, isn’t that what open source is all about – the idea that collaboration and teamwork achieve amazing things?
- slurgfest 14y agoDamning in the sense that a game company wishes to sell games commercially? God forbid that they do such a thing! Yes, I suppose it is better for Linux if nobody attempts to sell commercial software which could work with Linux, ever.
- Ralith 14y agoHe means that a closed source platform isn't exactly conventional open source collaboration. Sure, it might be a boon anyway, but that doesn't make the rhetoric accurate.
- lsh 14y agoDon't be melodramatic. Damning in the sense that open source, the idea, is not what they are interested in but are riding it's coattails in order to encourage developers who are interested. This thread is a little overblown and it's too early to point fingers and thump chests - lets see what they put on offer first.
- weego 14y agoUnfortunately it's never too early for the Linux union to go big on the blame and drama. Sometimes the product doesn't even have to be out before someone starts the bile because they can't see the source.
- slurgfest 14y agoIt is ridiculous to begin talking about things as "damning" when a company is doing nothing but dedicating resources to the cultivation of Linux as a platform for video game development and (yes) the sale and consumption of commercial games. The word "damning" should not even arise. Don't lecture me about thumping chests and waiting to see what they put on offer, I am responding to inflamed language being applied to a company for no reason other than that they sell software.
- ergo14 14y agoIt is, since they recently hired SDL developer - and it appears he will be working on it full time, same goes for darkplaces engine creator. So this is direct help to open source libraries.
- steauengeglase 14y agoThat is awesome news. Always glad to hear positive bits on the SDL front. http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/2012-July/085112.html http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/2012-July/0...
- Ralith 14y agoThey've been hired to work on their respective libraries and publish the code openly? What's Valve getting out of that?
- baq 14y agothese guys know linux graphics and audio stacks from the inside out. having such people around the office which you can come to, ask pretty much any question and get a meaningful answer is practically priceless IMHO.
- ergo14 14y agoTheir libraries (especially SDL) are used when games get ported.
- gcb 14y agoWhat if they open source it? I'd love to have a community scrutinized game to prevent cheaters
- nacs 14y agoI'm sure as they work on the Steam client and as they port L4D2 to Linux, they'll start finding and fixing issues in the kernel/OS/related projects, thus contributing to opensource.
- baq 14y agothey already found at least one bug in the kernel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/22/338 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/22/338
- InclinedPlane 14y agoIs there something unclear about this? "Our mission is to strengthen the gaming scene on Linux, both for players and developers. This includes Linux ports of Steam and Valve games, as well as partner games. We are also investigating open source initiatives that could benefit the community and game developers."
- w1ntermute 14y agoWhat will make this truly interesting is if 3rd party game developers follow in Valve's footsteps and start porting their games as well. Because that will hopefully then lead to more attention from graphics card driver makers, solving one of Linux's last remaining weaknesses compared to Windows. With Microsoft following Apple into the post-PC era (or "PC Plus", as MS COO Kevin Turner likes to call it), Linux will be the last major OS with a traditional desktop metaphor as its dominant UI. Despite all the statements that the PC is dead, I think it will still have widespread uses, at least until brain-computer interfaces become a reality, because touchscreens simply cannot replace keyboards/mice in a large number of contexts.
- Produce 14y ago>at least until brain-computer interfaces become a reality A little late to the party. Sent from my iBrain.
- DeepDuh 14y agoWait, OSX is loosing its desktop metaphor? Did I miss something? And since when is the desktop metaphor essential to mouse / keyboard control?
- mitchty 14y agoHaving used Mountain Lion, I'd argue its more bringing mobile innovations and things that are successful there to the desktop. To be honest the desktop hasn't fundamentally changed much for a long time so its nice to see something new and being tried. That said, I'm not the biggest of fans.
- DannoHung 14y agoI know it doesn't work well for multi-displays, but I freakin' love Command Center on my laptop when I'm not near an auxiliary monitor... so they got something a little right at least.
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- columbo 14y agoI'm going to show my lack of linux history here... why not Debian? Are they really building something that is native to ubuntu that you wouldn't work in <insert-debian-fork crunchbang or mint>?
- biomechanica 14y agoI think it has to do with their familiarity with Ubuntu server and the popularity of the distro. They wrote on that post that they do indeed want to support other distro's in the future. I suspect they just want to get some stability before committing to a wide range of distro's. Ubuntu is very popular, so it makes sense. Distro's can take the .deb files and extract them through their package managers to fit their systems, probably without much hassle.
- grakic 14y agoI expect it will eventually work on any recent distribution, and there would be community docs everywhere on how to install dependencies, configure and run their software on distribution X. Saying that, Ubuntu is popular, there may be some commercial connections with Canonical, and picking one distribution to do the testing should streamline their efforts.
- mbell 14y agoSimple answer is that most of the differentiation between Ubunu and Debian is in the areas of audio and video. Specifically regarding drivers, which is a critically important component of game development.
- Ralith 14y agoThey're working with Canonical to make sure that it's well supported, and they chose them because Ubuntu in particular is focusing on making Linux for the mainstream. In this context, "supported" on a particular platform doesn't mean "can run," it means "should work out of the box for absolutely everyone." I have no doubt that, come the release on Ubuntu, unofficial packages will come into being for nearly every distro--and on Debian you probably won't even need that.
- trotsky 14y ago
- rubergly 14y agoI read the title as "Valve Linux Box" and was a fairly disappointed.
- LinXitoW 14y agoI would think that this is just the first stage towards said box. First, they make their software work on the only OS you can ship for free and then they make their own distro, which they put on their box. If they're smart about it, their distro will be fairly common, with few customizations, so that they can pull in a lot of the open source fixes.
- fingerprinter 14y agoI said this somewhere else in this thread, but making their own distro would be just craaaaaazy. Ubuntu is already free, comes in several varieties and is, frankly, better than anything they could do for the cost. If they make a game console, which is rather likely it seems, they could just license Ubuntu embedded or ubuntu core (can't remember what it is called) for orders of magnitude less than it would cost them to build their own distro. Anything else just doesn't make sense. Now, not saying they'll do that. The game industry is notoriously bad with NIH syndrome.
- JDShu 14y agoOutside the Quake series, I think Left 4 Dead 2 would be the most impressive game ported to Linux to date.
- jlgreco 14y agoMore recent than the Quakes, Doom 3 had a Linux build.
- jiggy2011 14y agoNot more recent than quake 4
- jlgreco 14y agoAh! Good point, I completely forgot that existed.
- baq 14y agoneither can be honestly called "recent", though... more recent than quake, while technically true, doesn't really say anything.
- krakensden 14y agoAnd Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which was actually pretty great. It also had megatextured maps, which were nifty.
- rplnt 14y agoI think that Amnesia has a native Linux support and it is a great game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesia:_The_Dark_Descent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesia:_The_Dark_Descent
- larrik 14y agoNo mention of the fact that a bunch of games on Steam already have Linux versions? Or do their blogs usually ignore non-Valve software?
- grimgrin 14y agoYeah it would have been nice to see that mentioned. I was curious at how many games could possibly launch with the Linux Steam launch, and there were more than I realized: http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_Games http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_G...
- StavrosK 14y agoI buy mostly indie games, usually the Humble Bundles, so a very good chunk (maybe most?) of my library of 100ish games have Linux versions.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoNot only that, but they are also available on Desura, which supports linux.
- dkhenry 14y agoWell I will not put money where my mouth has been and buy Left for Dead 2. I have been wanting a lot of Valve games, but I swore off all non-native games after Minecraft ( if Notch can do it so can everyone else )
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- monkeyfacebag 14y agoIt seems like Microsoft has really tied Valve's hands here. Unless something has changed recently, all apps installed on Windows RT will have to come from MS's app store (marketplace? bazaar?), which doesn't bode well for the future of Steam on the platform. I'm hoping they end up doing a lot more than porting Steam to Linux, because outside of Valve's efforts, most of the games on there are not (and will likely never be) Linux compatible.
- StavrosK 14y agoThis would mean that (pretty much) the only way you could game on non-Apple hardware would be to install Linux, which would make Linux the go-to OS for gaming, something I doubt Microsoft would let happen. I really doubt Microsoft wouldn't allow Steam to run on Windows.
- jiggy2011 14y agoThey will still allow people to game, just you will have to buy all of your games via the Microsoft Store rather than Steam/Normal Download/DVD
- andrewfelix 14y agoSteam and Adobe are the only 2 things stopping me making the switch the Linux.
- mitsche 14y agoThis. And flakey drivers. I think this is a big step for Linux on the Desktop. I look forward to the day I can ditch OS X and Windows and replace it with a Unix that has a nice UI, stability, and is open.
- derpmeister 14y agoGNU is Not Unix
- jiggy2011 14y agoFlakey drivers are a really big sticking point now, for certain hardware like video cards (most of my drivers "just work"). I've started using Unity (shock, horror) and the whole thing provides such a polished experience that most of the time I forget that I'm using a desktop linux distro. Problem is that when everything is so well polished, problems stemming from bad drivers (nvidia) become really jarring. I'm hoping that wayland will go a long way to addressing this somehow.
- Ralith 14y agoWayland can't do anything about drivers. Gallium3D, and manufacturer support for it, might. Most of all, though, if Valve starts supporting Ubuntu as a first-class platform, they might be able to put pressure on GPU manufacturers to improve their drivers.
- jiggy2011 14y agoI thought (correct me if I am wrong), that part of the reason that graphics drivers were so messy was that they had to integrate with X which is archaic and not really designed with hardware acceleration in mind. IIRC the nvidia Linux drivers actually replace parts of X with their own proprietary stuff which makes things hairy when integrating with software designed around "standard" X. For example nvidia "twinview" seems to make many applications believe that my two 1920x1080 monitors are actually a single 3840x1080 monitor. I can correct this by using a seperate X session for each monitor but then this stops compiz from working.
- jebblue 14y agoValve may be sealing their fate as the most successful game publishing company for this century.
- philwelch 14y agoThere's a lot of century to go.
- jlgreco 14y agoQuite so. The differences between 2000 and 1912 are hard to truely fathom. I don't know how you could possibly attempt to predict at that sort of timescale. Even a decade would be pushing it as far as I am concerned.
- jebblue 14y agoI don't think it's too long of a time span considering these guys started in 1911: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM
- malkia 14y agoAmong other things, porting their software to Linux might bring other fruits: * You can run many instances of a dedicated game server (roughly in the hundreths mb of ram usage) on the same OS, or through virtual machine so it could be moved. * Gaikai/OnLive live kind of game streaming - again no cost for OS - so they can run each instance of the game per one installed OS and stream video for the rest. * Console - probably customized version of Linux, and if possible the game running in ring 0 with the kernel. Drawing almost directly to the hardware, without going to API's, user and then kernel functions. (Avoid vertex/index buffer checks, and many other things).
- Ralith 14y ago> You can run many instances of a dedicated game server (roughly in the hundreths mb of ram usage) on the same OS, or through virtual machine so it could be moved. As this very blog post explains, Valve's dedicated servers have always supported Linux. > Console - probably customized version of Linux, and if possible the game running in ring 0 with the kernel. Drawing almost directly to the hardware, without going to API's, user and then kernel functions. (Avoid vertex/index buffer checks, and many other things). A system like that would be so different as to barely benefit at all from the reality of what Valve is doing.
- obtu 14y agoIt allows them to amortise porting efforts with sales on multiple platforms.
- jiggy2011 14y agoGames running in ring 0? I don't think even consoles do that anymore.
- baq 14y agothey do, except they run in a hypervisor. no idea if that counts.
- jiggy2011 14y agoWill be interesting to see what happens to games sales/usage figures when they release this. I'm going to guess that most people who are Linux users but are also interested in games will already have a Windows partition that they use for gaming. So it might be that any increase in Linux gaming on Steam is exactly matched by a decrease in Windows gaming. I doubt there are many gamers out there who would love to play AAA proprietary games but are holding out until they are ported to Linux.
- naitbit 14y agoWell I did not buy AAA games that I wanted to play that were windows only(like Portal 2[1]), but I would bought them if they are ported to Linux, so I would argue that they will expand their user base(a little). I must admit that in case of some games were to good to miss and I played them on wine(like Witcher 2 - my excuse is that it was DRM free and different enough that it was worth rewarding even when there were no Linux version). edit: [1] - I mean games with no native Linux version(Portal 2 have also Mac version)
- jiggy2011 14y agoPerhaps, but I imagine the number of people in the entire world like this are measured in the 100s.
- aristidb 14y agoSo, there are multiple approaches to Linux software distribution (for free-as-in-beer closed-source software, like the Minecraft client, Skype, Chrome or Steam): 1. Pump out versioned tarballs, and let distro maintainers deal with packaging. 2. Create a very thin launcher, and deal with updates yourself in the Launcher. Minecraft does this. 3. Provide package repositories for Ubuntu and Fedora and deal with updates yourself. Chrome does this. I think (1) and (2) are preferable. (1) is also the easiest to implement (!), but may result in delayed distribution to the end user. It is possible to mix (1) and (3), of course.
- fromhet 14y agoThe chromium project releases their updates for Ubuntu users thru a PPA, but Canonical also distributes stable packages. A mix that is working really well. God forbid #2, a system-wide system for downloading and updating applications is one of the zen-things about using the Linux-based OS's. How it works on Mac OS X and is chaotical, and the way Microsoft does it, with countless messy installers and self-updating apps is hell to deal with.
- aristidb 14y agoWell, Steam is by necessity an independent package manager. So you can't really have that Zen if you want to use it. Might as well update itself, too. ;)
- pinkbucket 14y agoThat old ye problem of how to deal with package managers dealing with package managers.
- obtu 14y agoTo pinkbucket: you seem to have been hell-banned when your account was new. You will need a new account. My condolences.
- Corrado 14y agoHonestly, I dislike the way Chrome works on Ubuntu. I don't like using PPAs and I'm never sure how/when Chrome gets updated. Sometimes it seems like the OS does it and sometimes it seems the Chrome updates itself (just like on other platforms). Maybe its just me. So, I think my vote for how Valve updates would be (2). Give the Linux vendors something to package but since they move very slowly you need to be able to fix bugs in a timely manor.
- dudus 14y agoI wonder how much of this is really Valve's effort into making Linux a Gaming platform and how much is just to put pressure on Microsoft to relax the policies on Windows 8 that would make the Steam model invalid. If this path will lead to a world where gamers don't depend on Windows, that would be awesome for users and really stink for Microsoft.
- baq 14y agomy personal belief is that valve wants to do a linux/x86/steam game console and this effort is a "let's see what we can do with linux" proof of concept.
- fingerprinter 14y agoMy biggest hope out of all of this is that Nvidia will get its act together and release proper drivers for Linux now. I honestly don't care all that much about games except that they might force Nvidia to actually care about Linux.
- cookiecaper 14y agowut. nVidia has always cared about Linux. They've supported non-Windows platforms well for a very long time. They've done a lot of work to provide a good workstation experience on Linux. Today the notable exception is Optimus, but I'm hoping that's going to come down the pipe as nVidia pushes its inevitable KMS branch further down the line. AMD drivers are still not really usable; you can work around some of the bugs with open-source drivers, but then your speeds are severely crippled. The mantra among Linux users has always been "buy nvidia". Those with ATI quickly grow to regret it in my experience; a meaningful illustration may be that my parents have two Linux boxes, both relatively low-end PCs with onboard graphics. One of these is almost four years old now, and has an onboard nvidia GPU. The other was purchased three months ago and has an onboard AMD GPU ("APU" according to marketing material. Bobcat? Or was it Bulldozer?). We still use the 4-year-old machine for gaming there because the nvidia drivers are actually sufficient to play the game; the new machine is using an open-source driver due to Catalyst bugs and runs games at probably 20% the performance of the machine 16x its age. That's the experience you get with nVidia's competitors.
- freehunter 14y agoSounds like you missed the discussion on Torvald's "Fuck You" video and nVidia's response. nVidia only cares about Linux when it's easy.
- munchor 14y agoI just hope they release tarballs of executables or something, because targetting Ubuntu and Ubuntu alone is quite bad. They might say "We'll support other distributions in the future". Yeah, I know that, you will support Fedora. If you released tarballs (or even open sourced Steam and all your games {just kidding}), it would work, out of the box, on every single distribution.
- onli 14y agoI sure also hope they release tarballs. But supporting officially only one distribution makes sense. With proprietary games, they are in the land of consumer rights and consumer support. They can only say "we support X" if the software really runs on X, X being Ubuntu here. If it doesn't run, the consumer has the right to get his money back (instead of getting it back out of goodwill). If another distro patches a driver and thus L4D2 runs worse or not at all (or something like wayland changes the infrstructure more than we expect and another disto moves first), this would be an issue for them without that official focus on Ubuntu.
- jiggy2011 14y agoHopefully they won't actively try and prevent people from running it on other distros though, providing they find a way to do so. If you're a die hard Arch/Gentoo/Slackware user you're probably used to not having much in the way of commercial support anyway.
- fromhet 14y agoIn a worst-case scenario, it would not be all to hard to write a script to extract the content of a debian package into a tarball.
- lucian1900 14y agoIf it'll be anything like the windows version of Steam, it'll likely manage games in parallel with the package manager, thus about as distro-specific as tarballs. As long as Steam itself is packaged as .deb, .rpm and tarball, it'll probably work as well as other linux games.
- fromhet 14y agoWhy not releasing it in the Ubuntu software store instead of making a new one? It would be the sensible thing to do if they cared about gamers on Linux. But I guess Steam is more about owning and controlling the channels of software sales and distribution.
- jiggy2011 14y agoThat's exactly what Steam is about and always been about, what else could it be about?