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SteamOS

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Re: SteamOS

#321

Post by AJ007 »

rkalla wrote: post #26

This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch. Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform? Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time portin…

Porting old games no, porting new games yes.

Using the word easy liberally, Unity makes it easy to develop multi-platform games. Unreal is going the same direction.

In the past each platform had its unique limitations. Now all devices down to a tiny smart phone are very powerful. The mobile market is gigantic. Users go from device to device.

Take a look at Occulus Rift + the wireless devices used to control it. The days of sitting down with a keyboard and mouse are passing, even for the desktop users.

Google, Apple, Amazon, and others are gearing up for what are in effect micro-consoles. Other than Apple they are all Android. Its as good of time as ever for Steam to move forward.

Re: SteamOS

#322

Post by Cyranix »

Here's hoping that this effort is where they've been concentrating some of their non-game devs. There have been longstanding issues with Valve-produced UX once you look beyond the in-game aspects. TF2 server list couldn't sort properly on the first update for years, the Steam browser is often dog slow, etc. -- things that are front-and-center pain points for me. A perfect initial release isn't a reasonable goal, but I do hope that they'll be able to polish the out-of-game experience better than they have in the past.

Re: SteamOS

#323

Post by icebraining »

machbio wrote: post #266
matthew-wegner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve has three announcements this week: http://kotaku.com/looks-like-well-hear-about-valves-new-hard... One of the announcements is widely believe to be the long-rumored Steam Box hardware...

Steam OS needs to be on the Public Domain like an Opensource Project..Which it will most likely be.. In addition to that the Hardware should also be opensourced, like how to build the most optimal gaming console to work on Steam OS... But It will all come down to the gaming pad, how the gaming pad will be designed and how it will integrate with build your own systems

Steam OS needs to be on the Public Domain like an Opensource Project..Which it will most likely be..

Steam is a DRM platform with a few user features on top. Releasing an open source platform would be as uncharacteristic as suicidal.

Re: SteamOS

#324

Post by gambler »

rkalla wrote: post #199
nightski wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a good chunk of games that barely make it to the consoles... (or just simply never do). I think it is much more rare to not make it to PC/Windows. A hunch I have is that developers are unwilling to target linux because of its diversity. By providing SteamOS they are providing a stable target for developers to release games against instead of trying to support all Linux distros.

Sure, but I would argue that one AAA title is worth the entirety of those games that aren't ever making it off of the PC as far as sales go (thinking from a publishers POV). Absolutely agree with you on the unifying effect of SteamOS being a single target for devs; that by itself, as you are pointing out, will drive more development for the platform. Gives everyone a target to aim at.

As far as sales - yes. As far as profits, or at least ROI is involved - no.

Re: SteamOS

#325

Post by mbell »

rkalla wrote: post #26

This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch. Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform? Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time portin…

> A good chunk of the console games barely make it to PC/Windows as it is, let alone a PC/Linux platform... seems like a tough sell.

True today but both the PS4 and XBone are now 8 core x86 platforms with desktop style GPUs. I would imagine most developers already abstract away the OS/graphics APIs as much as possible to facilitate porting to both consoles, adding a third platform for a 'PC port' should be much easier this console generation, particularly given that the relative pain of coding for the PS3 cell processor is now gone.

Re: SteamOS

#326

Post by hamburglar »

jhaywood wrote: post #170
hamburglar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical that they can convince regular people to put PC hardware in their living rooms. Microsoft and manufacturers made a ton of effort in this direction last decade, and it wasn't half bad: Windows Media Center was a pretty decent user interface for TV-watching, and lots of "living room PC" form factors popped up (remember the ubiquitous Shuttle case?). But nobody cares. It was just too weird and clunky for t…

Microsoft had trouble getting people to run Windows in their living room. They had no trouble getting millions to put PC hardware in their living room as evidenced by the XBOX.

Calling the XBox "PC hardware" is really picking nits and missing the point, in my opinion. The problem with PC hardware in the living room is that no matter how you dress up an HTPC to resemble a piece of consumer electronics, it's all cosmetic, and it's still a PC in that it's not a fixed hardware configuration like a console. This makes the software more complicated, adds driver issues, support costs, hardware reliability is unknown, etc. The result is a tradeoff in how polished the product can ever really be. Geeks will put up with it. Regular folks probably won't. Again, my opinion.

Re: SteamOS

#327

Post by ZeroGravitas »

suby wrote: post #317
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the Valve documents explicitly sell the porting to Linux/OpenGL process as a stepping stone to mobile. And given their talk of breaking pointless silos I can imagine a steam store on Android that can play any Steam game you've got the horsepower for.

link to said documents?

https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/game...

Re: SteamOS

#328

Post by hrkristian »

devx wrote: post #271
matthew-wegner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve has three announcements this week: http://kotaku.com/looks-like-well-hear-about-valves-new-hard... One of the announcements is widely believe to be the long-rumored Steam Box hardware...

If I were them I'd make Half Life 3, Portal 3 and whatever next versions they have of their own games, exclusive to their own Steambox, at least first months or so. They might not get as much money on the games themselves initially, but they'd make so much more on the hardware (they don't need to all Blu-ray and all the extra crap, so they could be profitable on it), and it would also be a great way to seed their con…

Alienating their main user-base for the sake of promoting their own console seems like a high-risk play when most people already are aiming at spending their "console-allowance" on the PS4 or One. The Steam Box is supposed to be modular (upgrade-able), while being strictly plug&play, this alone gives it a huge edge over existing consoles. Now we know SteamOS will be Open Source, and we know both Nvidia and AMD are commited to improving Linux drivers. What that means is AAA-titles don't even need to be ported, the Wine layer is able to provide 1:1 performance as proven with for instance World of Warcraft. The Wine devs don't even have the luxury of source access like game developers to.

All in all, if Valve does this right they're sitting on a potential goldmine.

Re: SteamOS

#329

Post by rocky1138 »

simias wrote: post #291
asdasf wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1080p video is nowhere near 1458 bytes. It doesn't matter, that's the point. Your MTU is almost certainly 1500 bytes. You are sending 1500 byte packets at the most. That does not cause latency. If you want to argue that we're incapable of encoding or decoding video with acceptable latency go right ahead, but doing it in response to me correcting a misconception about network latency doesn't make much sense.

Having worked on the particular issue of streaming real-time video over wireless, I can say that the main issue is not link latency. The main lag comes from encoding/decoding. If you do it naively you encode frame-per-frame (encoding slices is more difficult), and the encoder does not only outputs iframes: you get partial frames that depend on both previous and future frames. Also the decoder does not always output f…

What about scrapping the conversion to streaming video entirely and replacing it with a networked graphics protocol that allows one PC to draw on another's graphics natively?

Re: SteamOS

#330

Post by pippy »

xSwag wrote: post #10

Oh my god. This provides a genuine chance for year of the linux desktop in 2014, for gamers at least.

I am incredibly excited for this. This may well push Linux into the hands of everyday people.
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