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Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

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Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#161

Post by StavrosK »

sandGorgon wrote: post #48
danssig wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.

yes it will - Steam is a juggernaut which will trigger purchase/usage decisions. Creators of libraries and frameworks will have to comply with the standards that Valve will come up with (and come up they will). For example what audio framework will your distro use - Jack? OSS? Pulseaudio? They will have to use what Valve wants you to use, if you want to play their games. Multimonitor support ? HDMI? use the toolkits…

How is all this going to happen? Steam is just the thing that downloads a game and runs it, it has no other say in what your game is written with or how it runs or where.

Valve/Steam is not a SDK. It's just a sort of package manager. What you say makes no sense to me.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#162

Post by vibrunazo »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #143
vibrunazo wrote: post #99

I would be really excited by this news 3 our so years ago. But it's to late now. Valve missed their chance. Gaming is moving away from desktop. In fact, while gaming is increasing extremely fast overall, desktop is actually setting decrease on revenue. It's the worst time to invest in it. It won't help valve, and it won't help us Linux gamers. Game studios won't suddenly go back to support dying desktop only because…

> But it's to late now. Valve missed their chance. Gaming is moving away from desktop. In fact, while gaming is increasing extremely fast overall, desktop is actually setting decrease on revenue. This is strictly wrong. Desktop gaming is growing, not shrinking, has done so for the past 4 years, and is projected to do so for the next 4. http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Nvidia... Desktop gaming was…

You're confusing 2 different things. Native Desktop apps vs Browser apps. (don't blame you, I do a lot of game market research and it's really hard to tell which reports are talking about what)

If you sum them both, the industry is growing. (which is what nvidia is showing in the link you posted). But the native desktop game market alone is decreasing:

http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_Essential_Facts_2010.PD...

Which is exactly my point. The industry is moving away from desktop and towards browser and mobile. Both are growing absurdly fast.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#163

Post by vibrunazo »

jdkilby wrote: post #145
vibrunazo wrote: post #99

I would be really excited by this news 3 our so years ago. But it's to late now. Valve missed their chance. Gaming is moving away from desktop. In fact, while gaming is increasing extremely fast overall, desktop is actually setting decrease on revenue. It's the worst time to invest in it. It won't help valve, and it won't help us Linux gamers. Game studios won't suddenly go back to support dying desktop only because…

Relevant: http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/when-the-consoles-die-wha... Essentially, the presenter makes the argument that the same thing that happened to the arcade industry is happening to the console industry. It really made me reconsider what I thought the future had in store for console games.

This is great. I had never thought of comparing the shift from arcade to console to the shift of console to mobile. There are really a lot in common.

Thanks a lot for sharing.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#164

Post by maxbaroi »

xsmasher wrote: post #129
benologist wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it won't. Login to steam from a mac some time and watch the awesomeness unfold as 1/10th of your games are available. Now make it 1/10th of 1/10th! Unless they convince a significant number of other publishers to do linux versions (while they won't even do mac versions) it's not going to be very exciting.

What if Valve expanded "Source" from an engine to more of a platform? If you create your game for Source you can release on Win, Mac, Linux, and a SteamBox/console with relative ease? It's pie-in-the-sky, but that would be a game changer. A linux steam client would be one piece of that plan.

Yes, a lot of people throughout the world are working on write once run everywhere and they're the Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Lua... language developers.

And I have to imagine that what you're proposing is Valve write some virtual Steam-Machine that they port to every major OS, then they write a compiler that outputs Steam-Machine byte code. And maybe that could work (though different graphics libraries seem like a very hard problem to overcome). And maybe it would work really well for smaller indie games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, etc.

But I don't think it will work for AAA, computation intensive games life LFD2 or Portal 2. I don't know much about game development but from what I've heard, if you're making a game with whoa-mygod graphics then you're doing some really close-to-the-metal programming trying to save every cycle you can. And all the effort (and results) are for naught if you're running your super optimized code on a virtual machine. Portability would be amazing, but are people willing to cooperate and say "I'll live with a game that looks last generation because so someone running a different OS than me can also enjoy it."

I don't think so.

Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer, I could be wrong about the technical challenges, and if so, please correct me.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#167

Post by jebblue »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #146

I see a few things to think about here: Will "Steam for Linux" be something that you can just apt-get into your free as in freedom Distro and start running AAA games, or will it in fact be something highly proprietary which is designed for a specific subset of devices which happen to run Linux kernels? I see a lot of people here discussing "market share" but as has been proved by Apple market share is certainly not e…

I'm an old gamer, run only Linux and I _will_ buy and pay for native Steam games.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#168

Post by Ralith »

maxbaroi wrote: post #164
xsmasher wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Valve expanded "Source" from an engine to more of a platform? If you create your game for Source you can release on Win, Mac, Linux, and a SteamBox/console with relative ease? It's pie-in-the-sky, but that would be a game changer. A linux steam client would be one piece of that plan.

Yes, a lot of people throughout the world are working on write once run everywhere and they're the Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Lua... language developers. And I have to imagine that what you're proposing is Valve write some virtual Steam-Machine that they port to every major OS, then they write a compiler that outputs Steam-Machine byte code. And maybe that could work (though different graphics libraries seem like a very…

Much as a game built on Unreal or Frostbite can trivially support Windows and a variety of consoles, a game built on a future version of Source could easily support OSX and Linux.

Platform-specific code tends to be in the guts of the engine, not the content and gameplay code that characterizes a particular game running on it.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#169

Post by Ralith »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #144
soup10 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2012 is the year of linux on the desktop! Seriously reading some of these comments makes my head hurt... even if valve does port the source engine and their games to linux, that's only a handful of games... Most developers are still not going to target linux because it's painful to develop games for* and the market is relatively tiny. *I've never developed for linux but from what i've read the summary is: video drive…

Hopefully Wayland will fix some of this and make it easier for video card drivers to be written.

What will Wayland do to make video drivers easier to write?

Perhaps you're thinking of Gallium3D?

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#170

Post by jebblue »

danssig wrote: post #102
sciurus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The one problem Linux does have in regards to businesses is integration with Exchange" You're forgetting active directory and group policy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Policy

Yes, I'm still hoping some day someone will make a Linux Distro that uses OpenLDAP for configuration as much as possible instead of flat files scattered all over the system, all with different syntax.

LDAP is a PITA. Flat files usually have three things to remember:

# is a comment key value

That's the format of most config files I see.

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