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Portal 2 Beta for Linux officially released
- lvs 13y agoThe Enrichment Center is required to remind you that you will be baked, and then there will be cake.
- winslow 13y agoOhhh goodie I love cake
- sk5t 13y agoRest assured that there is absolutely no chance of a dangerous equipment malfunction prior to your victory candescence.
- recentdarkness 13y agoThe cake is a lie!
- simias 13y agoMemes and popular quotes as the top comments. I had to double check the page's URL to make sure I really was on HN.
- ansimionescu 13y agoOh, man, I love seeing the typical uptight HNer in action. ONLY SERIOUS BUSINESS HERE, GUISE, PLEASE. cries and hides
- simias 13y agoThere are plenty of places on the web to spout memes and references to popular games/movies/whatever, I don't see why we have to bring this over here. It's the very definition of "noise". I also fail to see how the parent's quote has anything to do with TFA, besides being from the Portal game. It offers no insight whatsoever.
- cal2 13y agoI agree with simias. When I want to read memes, popular quotes, etc, I go to reddit or something. When I want to read potentially interesting technological discussions, I come to HN. These aren't the right words, but even if HN is "uptight" and "only serious business", that's pretty much why I come here.
- dandellion 13y agoI don't know, as long as it's just one thread I think it's ok to have some fun every now and then.
- giblaz 13y agoWhat's fun about it? It's not like it's an original witty thought. It's just regurgitation. And it's about as palatable to read.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoMisread that as Postal 2 beta (with an "s"), even though Postal 2 for Linux on Steam has been around for a while now. RWS is planning a big update this year, too. This is good, too, though. I might consider checking it out, though I'm hardly a gamer.
- xfalcox 13y agoIt's a really good game, that deserves it cult status. Go ahead, but try to play the first one before if you can.
- kenrikm 13y agoYes play the first one.. there's some really yummy cake at the end!
- sandyarmstrong 13y agoPortal is quite low-stress. It's a really fun puzzle solving game set in a great environment.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoI'm not sure Portal qualifies as low-stress.
- MBlume 13y agoViewed just in terms of gameplay, it's low-stress. You can pretty much always stop and think, very few puzzles are timed, very few puzzles come down to "twitch". On the other hand the antagonist of the game is an abuser, and directs a steadily increasing stream of gaslighting and verbal/emotional/physical abuse at you as the game proceeds. Personally I find it over-the-top enough to just be funny, but YMMV
- sandyarmstrong 13y agoRight, exactly. There are not bad guys running around and shooting at you. You don't have to watch your health bar or manage an inventory. You can save whenever you want. It's easy to play for a short time and come back to it when you feel like it.
- 2mur 13y agoAwesome. I already played through on xbox, but I've been buying/playing the linux ports of the valve games as they come out to support them.
- Berrywt 13y agoGot it working on my arch linux laptop with Intel HD 4000 it is super smooth. This is great news.
- Ellipsis753 13y agoAwesome. I've already played through it on my Gentoo computer using wine but will enjoy playing through it again and doing the online co-op missions when this version is out of beta. It's a great game, very worth playing if you haven't already.
- mpnordland 13y agoBest news I got all day. Downloading now. It worked pretty good in wine (atop Arch) for a while, then developed keyboard issues. Hoping to say goodbye to those.
- voltagex_ 13y agoOh jeez. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/issues/21 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/issues/21
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agohttps://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/commit/e1490adc43bd6967fcaf1feaafd5da18a0d5ce9b#commitcomment-5490562 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/commit/e1490adc43bd...
- bliti 13y agoI don't get what's the issue. People use github to host things other than code and no one doesn't seem to complain. Why not let them use it to track issues and whatever else? Github != open source. It is an important hub of the open source community, but is not the basis for it. Could you explain (facts, please) more about your take on this? I might be missing something.
- voltagex_ 13y agoWhat do you hope to achieve with this?
- baby 13y agoSo there are github whiteknights. The ridiculous thing here is that they're thinking that they're "protecting" github when github doesn't need at all. Valve is doing free publicity for github by doing that and as I said there, an issue tracker is taking negligible resource from the servers.
- throwawayaway11 13y agoOP (from github) here. I apologize. I didn't understand Github welcomed this sort of use. Common cases of hosting other people's infrastructure (e.g. Sourceforge, freedesktop.org, Atlassian, ...): * Charity (free) for open source * Pay-for-use commercial users I haven't seen a lot of companies volunteering to host other profitable companies' infrastructure before. So, I posted that with my knee-jerk reaction to the situation. That being said, I take issue with your assessment of the situation and the criticism. I object to the designation "whiteknight" — I believe I am actually acting quite selfishly. It is in my best interest for Github to continue to be in business as long as possible, to keep hosting open source software for my projects and projects I consume. The net gains/costs of Github hosting Valve's issue tracker are pure speculation without an insider's view, and I can't pretend to have that. I'm guessing you don't either? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your claim is drawn out of thin air.
- alexeyza 13y agoGreat news, now just waiting for a Humble Bundle deal with Portal in it.
- archagon 13y agoCurious: how is performance compared to the OSX port? All the Source games I've tried run horribly on OSX compared to Windows on the same machine. Strangely, they play just fine through a Parallels Windows VM running inside OSX, so it can't be the OSX graphics driver's fault. What's going on over there?
- rjzzleep 13y agoi'm guessing you're talking about a discrete graphics card right? i can't really give you an answer on this, but if i had to guess i'd say it works better on anything but radeon cards(but then again are radeon cards supported on macs nowadays?) also, not exactly the same, but still interesting measurements. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu1304_apple_osx1083&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu130... valve worked closely with nvidia and intel to improve the performance and compliance of the drivers. check this out for example http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoI believe OS X has graphics drivers provided by Apple, not by the hardware vendors, so that likely has something to do with it.
- archagon 13y agoYes — but as I said, running the game in a Parallels Windows VM results in 2x better performance than running the same game natively. The same OSX graphics driver is used in both cases, except the VM has to do extra work! How does that make any sense?
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago>The same OSX graphics driver is used in both cases Are you sure? I'd think it isn't passing function calls, but rather direct hardware access. I might be wrong.
- ekianjo 13y agonice, but i wonder why they took so long to release it after all the other source engine games.
- nness 13y agoHas got to be either low priority or technical limitations. I guess a Linux port of Portal 2 isn't likely to provide returns anywhere close to PC sales, so it may not have been approach furiously by Valve. I also wouldn't be surprised if there were some DirectX specific stuff in there that wouldn't easily make the transition to OpenGL either. Not to mention all that driver testing they would have to do...
- objclxt 13y ago> I also wouldn't be surprised if there were some DirectX specific stuff Shouldn't be, Portal 2 was released for OS X the same day as the PC release.
- nness 13y agoI stand corrected.
- AimHere 13y agoLikely technical; the last three major source games to be ported were Dota2, this and Counterstrike: Global Offensive (as yet not running on Linux), which were their three newest games, and presumably used their shiniest, glossiest versions of the Source Engine. I'd imagine that CS:GO would have been prioritized much higher if it was purely a business decision, given it's still high up in their top-played games; Dota2, likewise, is their top played, flagship title, so if it was a pure business decision, that would surely be #1 instead of third-last.
- MLR 13y agoI'm not going to pretend I know when CS:GO was ported, but for a very long time (until the crate update) it was easily the least played version of Counter Strike. I think it was ported to Linux before it was successful, but I can't be sure.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- notthemessiah 13y agoHas anyone tested to see if it would work with co-op with non-beta players?
- optymizer 13y agoI would like to see the SDK and the 'Authoring Tools' working on Linux.
- abvdasker 13y agoBetter late than never I guess.
- wikwocket 13y agoReminds me of http://xkcd.com/606/ http://xkcd.com/606/ ... Clearly, there are no downsides!
- darkstalker 13y agoLooks like I'm gonna buy a Steam game for the first time.