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Steam-powered Blender
- ngoldbaum 13y agocopy/pasted for readability: Hi everyone, I work for Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/ http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/). We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam (www.steampowered.com<http://www.steampowered.com> http://www.steampowered.com>) one of the places where you can download Blender. The long-term goal would be to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games with Blender and share these mods with other gamers. So I was wondering if there are any Blender users on this list who are interested in PC games and could see themselves working on an integration between Blender and PC games that offer official modding support such as DOTA 2. Long story: Valve is a company that is built on modding. The original Half-Life was built on a modified version of the Quake engine. All our major games since then started out as mods which we found cool, hired the people who built them and released them as major game titles. This is true for Counter-Strike, the original Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and DOTA 2 (Portal was not technically a mod but a student project - but you see the pattern). Similarly, one of the most successful features of our Steam platform is the Steam Workshop (http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/ http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/), which is an interface for users to share, discover and install mods for their games. Essentially, you can publish your mod there and other gamers can bring your mod into their games with a single mouse click. This is something that we think would be a cool feature for Blender to tap into. Like modeling a sword in Blender, pushing a button and having it available to all users of Skyrim. But we bet there are more creative ideas out there than this one. What we are currently looking at is offering a completely vanilla version of Blender as a free download on Steam that is completely the same as that offered on other websites. We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop. If you think you might be interested in being part of that, we'd be happy to hear from you! Best, Jan-Peter
- kbar13 13y agoyeah... OP formatting is jank as hell. Thanks.
- mschuster91 13y agoI wonder why Mailman doesn't ship a better GUI by default :/
- anigbrowl 13y agoOK, I'm not the only person what wondered why this didn't wordwrap.
- rossy 13y agoI opened up the dev console and added white-space: pre-wrap; I guess they assume emails to be hard wrapped.
- wmil 13y agoIt makes sense if they post a lot of code.
- ngoldbaum 13y agoMarkdown's syntax highlighted code blocks are a superior solution. Pure-text e-mail is a terrible medium to read code in.
- dchest 13y agoI clicked "View Source" and read it. (It automatically wraps text in Chrome; in Firefox you have to click View > Wrap Long Lines).
- bvttf 13y agoHands up who else read the post before coming to the comments, saw this and cursed themselves.
- foolfoolz 13y agoI even stopped, "Wait a second, this has nothing to do with blenders powered by steam", realized the context, and still continued on scrolling back and forth.
- shurcooL 13y agoThat's exactly what I thought of.
- zooka2 13y agoI stopped halfway and asked myself if this was 2013?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- slacka 13y agoAfter about 2 lines, I gave up and copy/pasted the text into an editor with word-wrap. Funny thing is I have this exact same problem of horizontal scrolling when reading HN comments on my iPhone. It's also the only reason for me to use a app to view this site.
- m0shen 13y agoThese are pretty handy: http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ is nice too, but doesn't properly wrap <pre> lines.
- BurritoAlPastor 13y agoYou know, with a link title like that, I was really hoping to see a food processor powered by a steam engine.
- mikeash 13y agoAgreed. It would be a great followup to Top Gear's V8-powered blender and their occasional obsession with steam trains.
- mschuster91 13y agoMe too, but then I looked at the URL :D
- joyeuse6701 13y agoThird, I'd like to see this. Or a steam powered coffee grinder, who's with me?!
- j2h6mW 13y agoYes! And if you could somehow re-route the steam from the steam-powered coffee grinder to an adjoining moka pot... automatic steam-powered coffee-grinder-brewer?
- zooka2 13y agoI'm all for it, now I just need to find that free steam source
- nwh 13y agoGo full-circle and make the steam with a Bitcoin miner.
- tobych 13y agoMe too. Thought it sounded cool.
- jlgreco 13y agoSame. I was expecting something along the lines of the pulse jet powered tea kettle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fDM9Eb16Do http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fDM9Eb16Do
- GhotiFish 13y agoIt seems strange that steam would want to put blender in steam. Wouldn't they just work on integrating with blender if they wanted blender? I suppose the strategy is to get the devs currently working on blender to look closer at making blender more compatable with the formats DOTA 2 is using, and putting a little more focus on the UX for that. Then again, steam is basically a content distribution system, and windows doesn't have one of those (or at least doesn't have one that anyone wants to use. I'M SORRY http://chocolatey.org/ http://chocolatey.org/ I LOVE YOU, DON'T BE MAD)
- karlshea 13y agoFrom the follow-up posts on the list I take it Blender is already popular with the mod community and they are trying to make Blender easier to install and get going to make a mod.
- teamonkey 13y agoSteam already sells several pieces of game-related software, such as Cakewalk and GameMaker. A 3D modeling package fits right in. Blender is pretty much the only choice of 3D package for Valve's portfolio, being multi-platform, stable and costing less than $3000.
- wickedlogic 13y agoIs an interesting proposal, some of the early day blender games + the blender browser plugin really did show the potential of having the browser be the delivery system for games... some day, and with webgl, someday sooner! I'd really love to see this, but only if it comes with a character narrated walk through of the blender ui... it would do a lot for the future blender userbase.
- brokenparser 13y agoI read this is as "Hey, can everyone do our work for us? That'd be great."
- madsushi 13y agoExcept that you can sell the items you make for cash, and a lot of people make thousands of dollars making hats for Valve games.
- endianswap 13y agoYup, over 10 million dollars paid out for TF2 items as of June apparently: http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=10843 http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=10843
- mh- 13y agoReally? It felt more like a genuine attempt to gauge interest, and possibility recruit for, a project they're considering.
- brokenparser 13y agoI quote: We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services Recruiting you say? Certainly so, they appear to be taking volunteers.
- IanCal 13y agoShame on them for hoping people will contribute to an open source project.
- brokenparser 13y agoNo, I do that myself. This is like writing a plugin to integrate WinSCP with Azure. Who the fuck cares except Microsoft?
- reedlaw 13y agoAlthough I'm happy to hear this news, it highlights the importance of Blender's choice of GPL as its license. If it weren't for the GPL, Valve would be free to modify Blender and then sell it without contributing anything back to Blender. Blender is an amazing app that I've enjoyed using for many years. It's definitely in my top 10 ten list of best open source projects. Hopefully the increased exposure through Steam will only help the Blender Foundation continue to provide incredible free software.
- Dylan16807 13y agoI don't understand what your GPL comment has to do with this situation at all. Nobody is even talking about modifying blender in the first place, let alone improving it in ways that could be contributed back, let alone would they have any reason not to contribute back. This is just asking the blender community what they think about some distribution and upload scripts.
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago"We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop." doesn't sound like a modification to you?
- Dylan16807 13y ago'make a plugin for' doesn't sound like a modification of the original, no. And even if it was, I don't see why BSD changes wouldn't get shared back here.
- TheZenPsycho 13y agoDoesn't sound like, but (probably) is. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html "If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in? (#GPLAndPlugins) It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them. If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed. If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case." http://www.blender.org/education-help/faq/gpl-for-artists/#c6711 http://www.blender.org/education-help/faq/gpl-for-artists/#c... "Can I sell plug-ins for Blender? Yes you can, but only if you provide the plug-in and the sources to your clients under the GNU GPL license. The client then benefits from all rights the GPL offers; free to use it, or even distribute it when they wish. Only if the plug-in doesn't work within Blender as "acting as a single program" (like using fork or pipe; by only transferring data and not using each others program code) you have the full freedom to license the plug-in as you wish."
- coderhs 13y agoWOW, it would be awesome if it becomes a reality :)
- thomasfoster96 13y agoI clicked on it thinking that blender technology might have come into the 20th Century...
- frakkingcylons 13y agoGreat news. I'm almost surprised this hasn't occurred sooner. Blender is used all the time in the item and mapmaking community.
- Rovanion 13y agoHow is it used for making maps? For models that are imported to Hammer?
- johnchristopher 13y agoWait, what ? What happened to the tools developed by Valve for HL2 and the integration with Lightwave and their facial animation tool ? Those were awesome and already proved their usefulness. How does it fit with Hammer and the fact that... well... modding is never going to be what it was in the 90's again ? * * I am looking at all those modders that got folie des grandeurs and turned into studio with 7 years dev. plan.
- dirkk0 13y agoI am not sure if I understand this right - what I understand is, that they try to attract Blender users (which is a good thing (tm) ). But are they referring to developers that integrate towards a certain game? What kind of integration? You fire up Blender and have an exporter? Or artists contributing to mods? Or are they looking for ideas in general? And where would I post them?
- przemoc 13y agoI hate the papermail web front-end... I'm not sure about papermail, i.e. whether it supports "format=flowed" or not. Perhaps the mail lacked it anyway. Use gmane for your own sake and sanity: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/40386 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/40386
- j_s 13y agoThe Unity game engine calls their equivalent to this the Unity Asset Store (http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/07/19/funding-indie-games-asset-store/ http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/07/19/funding-indie-games-asse...) which was discussed previously here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500426 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500426 ("Unity Asset Store: $3000 revenue in 5 days from a spline drawing tool").
- ergest 13y agoIt's be cool to build an actual steam-powered blender, but the article title is misleading (in a funny way)