What if SteamOS were released to a group of perspective and current gaming hardware manufacturers à la Android? The DirectX platform may be incumbent on the mid to high-end x86 PCs, but if Valve were to target the Wii/smartphone gaming demographic they'd stand a decent chance at commoditizing consoles.
SteamOS
141–150 of 532 posts
Re: SteamOS
#142I don't like that Valve says that SteamOS is "freely licensable". They must know by now that the word "free" often means "libre" in the GNU/Linux community, but they've made no indication of what the license terms will actually be.
Presumably the GNU/Linux core is libre and Steam is freeware. Why would it be anything else?
Re: SteamOS
#143As someone who's had a lot of fun writing game hacks for ET:QW and QuakeLive back in the days and while I greatly enjoy seeing this move to Linux, I'm quite worried about game hacks on SteamOS. There are so many attack vectors on Linux and, currently, VALVE's Anti Cheat (VAC v3) does not, as far as I know, cover any of those. You can still inject your hack via LD_PRELOAD + detouring dlsym/dlopen. Even were that not p…
Is there even an expectation that anti-cheat utilities can work? They're worse than DRM - unless the anti-cheat software is certified and your system can do hardware trusted execution, it's going to be worked around. (it's most likely also possible in case of trusted execution...)
They do have some limited success at deterring "script kiddies" and similar, however I think that this is far more difficult to do on Linux than Windows.
Back when there were a few games around on Linux that used PunkBuster (America's Army, Enemy Territory), PB offered almost no real protection and, e.g., ET's mod developers decided to build in some anti cheat protection of their own into the mods which was superior to PB's. (Which, of course, also got bypassed eventually)
Re: SteamOS
#144They never seem to define what a Living room machine is ? I wouldn't consider a desktop be a living room machine.
Re: SteamOS
#145Since I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen and not a tv, I hope they also roll out some improvements to the steam client as well. Things like the ability to tag my games with multiple categories; To see trailers and descriptions of the games I "bought and forgot"; Pause the game and read the user manual; and the ability to actually PLAY a game right now instead of being forced to wait for hours while…
I'd settle for The old steam was snappy and fast, new steam is a bloated pile of garbage by comparison.
That's cause the new steam browser uses a customized chromium engine, while the old steam just used the trident (internet explorer) engine that's part of windows.
Re: SteamOS
#146Since I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen and not a tv, I hope they also roll out some improvements to the steam client as well. Things like the ability to tag my games with multiple categories; To see trailers and descriptions of the games I "bought and forgot"; Pause the game and read the user manual; and the ability to actually PLAY a game right now instead of being forced to wait for hours while…
"being forced to wait for hours while it downloads and applies updates to itself and the game I already have downloaded, installed, and partly played."
The default is to keep the game updated, I believe. Do you have it set to not do that? But then, I also have steam set to start on boot up. If you rarely start the steam client then it's going to need to apply updates. Do you have it set to start steam on boot up?
Re: SteamOS
#147"In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing". I assume they mean in comparison to other Linux OSs. Beating windows drivers seems a bit far fetched?
I think they mean in comparison to Windows. They have previously reported getting better performance using OpenGL on Linux than DirectX on Windows[1]
Re: SteamOS
#148I'm not a software dev, so this might be a really dumb question, but how hard is it to port/co-develop Windows/Mac games to Linux? From what I can find out, PS3 is based on FreeBSD and WiiU is a heavily modified version of Linux, possibly Android. XBOX obviously Windows. Would it be that much harder to also have a SteamOS version in the mix too.
According to John Carmack its a few weeks worth to port, and maybe even less to extend wine. But that is like saying that according to Superman going to the moon is a few minutes of flight.
And while Superman might be a hell of a Super Hero, what he said doesn't mean much. Its heavily dependent on libraries/frameworks/engines and technologies used to make the game.
If you use something like C++ and SDL it shouldn't be too hard (if not automatic), but if you use something like C#/XNA it could be harder (if not impossible?), but anyway I think (hope) most C# game developers and ex-XNA users use MonoGame these days.
Re: SteamOS
#149"In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing". I assume they mean in comparison to other Linux OSs. Beating windows drivers seems a bit far fetched?
Valve has reported better performance in Linux than in Windows 7 for at least one of their titles [1].
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/valve-linux-runs-our-games-faster-than-...
Re: SteamOS
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would turn their most vocal supporters into enemies, destroy their plans to make Linux a viable gamming plataform (and Valve needs Linux to be viable, for keeping MS from destrying them), assure that nobody ever uses their new SteamOS (people that don't care are already doing similar stuff with Windows), and alienate everybody that is selling specialized Steam hardware. Unless they get a MS-like world domination…
Don't be ridiculous -- Canonical has taken control of Ubuntu development and now they have a reputation for being authoritarian and secretive. There are fewer ways to alienate the open-source community than that and yet Ubuntu's popularity soars. The more critical people are of Canonical, the more fervent Ubuntu supporters become. "How will they make money" will be parroted just as loudly, if not more-so.
And Canonical has GPL'd everything they've done. What proprietary bits has Canonical added? Free software isn't some hippie co-operative - it's about the ability to freely modify software the way you see fit. If Canonical's changes were worthless, people wouldn't adopt them. But Ubuntu is #1...