Valve is porting it's source engine

blackgold>>

Things just got a whole lot brighter.
Valve is porting it's engine to gnu/linux

PogMoThoin

Great news.

Piracy has the pc gaming industry crippled. Crytek has now confirmed though that it will no longer be a PC exclusive developer because of industry pressures resulting from piracy. More here Steam is one of the ways that pc gaming can continue, and if its ported to linux, well then its BYE, BYE Mickeysoft for me

Epic Tissue

If this happens, it would be great

FruitLover

Deadly, this will be a boon for linux gaming. About bloody time!

Hopefully this will encourage other developers using the Steam distribution system to think more about multi-format coding.

conceited

This is the biggest thing to happen in open source for a bloody long time .
Great news.

FruitLover

Actually, I doubt that this will be an open source project (this should really be on the Unix forum). Anyone got any info that clarifies whether it'll be open or closed?

sobriquet

It hasn't been confirmed that it's happening, Phoronix are furthering a rumour. Still, hiring a Linux engineer is a pretty big indication of intent, and Valve would be the people to do it, they're apparently quite cash rich and (like with Portal and releasing the Steam software) aren't afraid to do possibly risky things with it. I can't imagine it's because they're projecting huge profits in the desktop Linux market any time soon.

Highly unlikely it's going to be open source, there's no precedent for it on Valves part, or particular reason for it. As for the Steam platform, the Id games are already Linux friendly, as are Introversion (Defcon, Darwinia), and it may encourage more publishers to go that way. For most games that are written to be cross platform, supporting another certainly isn't impossible. It does add to the complexity of testing and QA substantially though, so I can't imagine many going that way until there's more users out there.

Just a thought, but there's a raft of popular casual games on Steam, perhaps they're looking to the sales of low cost Linux based PCs like the Eee or the Walmart PC? No other distribution mechanism is catering to it. It'd be interesting to see if they are thinking ahead to the increase in those markets.

It's good news if it's true, but the biggest thing to happen to open source is probably overstating it.

Orion

FruitLover wrote: »

Actually, I doubt that this will be an open source project (this should really be on the Unix forum). Anyone got any info that clarifies whether it'll be open or closed?

It'll have to be closed. But good news all the same.

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Steam is one of the ways that pc gaming can continue, and if its ported to linux, well then its BYE, BYE Mickeysoft for me

If Steam is the only reason you're on Windows then look at this screenie

PogMoThoin

Macros42 wrote: »

If Steam is the only reason you're on Windows then look at this screenie

Nope, love COD4 too much & a few other games 2 that'll never be ported.

Orion

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Nope, love COD4 too much & a few other games 2 that'll never be ported.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqilAkR7Q1w (click on More Info)

And I was reading somewhere that they're doing away with Punkbuster or that it's being ported - can't remember which.

conceited

It's good news if it's true, but the biggest thing to happen to open source is probably overstating it.

I got to know this guy a few years back


Alfred Reynolds - Software Developer Alfred joined Valve as a software engineer in 2002. Since his arrival, he has contributed to the development of Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, and Steam. He also does his best to maintain the Linux ports of our games.


Anyway yes they are portng it to linux that you can be sure of.
And don't underestimate how big this will become.

sobriquet

conceited wrote: »

Anyway yes they are portng it to linux that you can be sure of.

Never seen that a reference to his job post before, it does seem pretty conclusive. If they'd just meant HLDS they wouldn't have said 'Linux games'.

conceited wrote: »

And don't underestimate how big this will become.

I don't completely disagree, it's a big symbolic gesture, lends the platform a lot of legitimacy - and Valve could be setting themselves up to be the de facto distribution platform for games on Linux, with all the infrastructure to go with it, engine included.

But I'm curious as to what you're basing this on?

(Biggest thing for all open source software is still a stretch.)

conceited

Yes it's going to be a bright future for them on linux.
I'm basing this on the fact that i know the man as i said I helped him with some code a few years back .

sobriquet

conceited wrote: »

Yes it's going to be a bright future for them on linux.
I'm basing this on the fact that i know the man as i said I helped him with some code a few years back .

I meant what are you basing your statement "don't underestimate how big this will become" on.

Not that it's being ported. Colour me convinced.

PogMoThoin

Macros42 wrote: »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqilAkR7Q1w (click on More Info)

And I was reading somewhere that they're doing away with Punkbuster or that it's being ported - can't remember which.

Well, not jus COD4, i've just splashed out for a dx10 gpu, dx10 games will never be ported.

conceited

Linux distros are about <5% of desktops roughtly and linux is getting more user friendly so it's fairly obvious.People (nromal people) now have a choice so it's going to happen.

Orion

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Well, not jus COD4, i've just splashed out for a dx10 gpu, dx10 games will never be ported.

No they won't - not in their current form anyway. But as the market for non-MS grows the market for proprietary code shrinks. WoW is one example - written and optimised for DX but supports OpenGL natively. I'll admit it's not a graphic intensive game but the principle is there nonetheless.

And it's only a matter of time before some genius figures out a way to make DX10 or an alternative work in Linux - just as they did for DX9.

PogMoThoin

Macros42 wrote: »

And it's only a matter of time before some genius figures out a way to make DX10 or an alternative work in Linux - just as they did for DX9.

Quite right, but by that time I'll be blasting away on Crysis 2 on windows 7 with dx11, It'll always be a generation or 2 behind and doesn't look like changing. FFS I cleared HL2 in 2004/5.


This is a step for the good tho

conceited

Thats a very good point I agree 100% .

blackgold>>

Please god they will have it out soon

matrim

Another good thing about this is that if valve do it then it's also a greater incentive for GPU manufractures to start supplying better drivers for linux.

rogue-entity

Well if game developers were using OpenGL instead of DX from the start, it wouldnt take much to release a game that worked cross-platform.

Thing is, from what I understand it, OpenGL is harder to implement, it assumes various features within a given spec, are supported by the card, and if they are not, no fallback. DX in contrast, will software-emulate the missing features, so at least a game will still be playable, but dont quote me on it.

sobriquet

rogue-entity wrote: »

Well if game developers were using OpenGL instead of DX from the start, it wouldnt take much to release a game that worked cross-platform.

Plenty do - most (all? probably) big engines will perform some degree of abstraction above what is really only an API. Besides that, the PS3 and Wii both use OpenGL (the ES variation for embedded systems) or some subset of it, so there are plenty of developers coding against it.

The thing is, GL is just a graphics standard, not a gaming platform, which is what DX provides beyond D3D. Plenty of sources I've seen rate the newer DX iterations very highly, since, say DX6 or 7, including John Carmack and others. GL has been stagnant for years, the only substantial addition being shaders, GLSLang in 2.1. There's a big announcement promised in august at Siggraph from the OpenGL ARB, so it could be the delayed announcement of 3.0, which'd be great. Funnily enough I was reading about it just today.

rogue-entity wrote: »

Thing is, from what I understand it, OpenGL is harder to implement, it assumes various features within a given spec, are supported by the card, and if they are not, no fallback. DX in contrast, will software-emulate the missing features, so at least a game will still be playable, but dont quote me on it.

Not as far as I can make out, but I haven't coded graphics stuff in a few years, so this might be outdated. It assumes a certain amount of features will be available, and Independent Hardware Vendors are bound to support if they want to call themselves GL X.X compliant, as with DX. Extras are implemented through extensions, so ATI and NV define their own (ie GL_NV_Foo) and it's up to the developers to support it if it's there if they so choose. If a developer implemented code riddled with NVidia specific extensions, it won't run on an ATI card, so it means the developer needs to work around that.

DX I can't speak to as well, I've never written any worthwhile code in it, but AFAIK is the much the same, a card can say it's DX8 or 9 or 10 compliant only if it implements the spec. Things are easier given that you don't have to special case your code for particular extensions. AFAIK though, if your code tries to run DX10-specific calls against a DX9 card it'll fail. It's up to the developers to test for their availability and fall back gracefully. It could plausibly be that in some cases calls that aren't updated might fall back itself gracefully. (ie DX10_Foo_Bar isn't changed at all from DX9_Foo_Bar so it calls it itself without complaining). Any DX developers care to comment?

That was way longer than I intended.

sobriquet

sobriquet wrote: »

It's good news if it's true, but the biggest thing to happen to open source is probably overstating it.

There's currently a press conference just gone on at Valve that's been live-blogged here. Reading it the thought I had above came back to me, that Valve aren't so much fighting for market space as trying to grow the market - and a lot of that seems to be via casual-gamer friendly games that are either already Linux ready on Steam (that new Penny Arcade game, Darwinia) or more plausibly portable to Linux than larger and more complex games.

Gabe Newell (apparently) wrote:

“The number of connected people we aren’t selling our products to dwarf the number of console gamers out there.”

They've announced Steamworks, which is Steam for third parties, but also Steamcloud, which keeps all your configs and saves stored online, meaning you can play all your games wherever a copy of Steam is installed.