Valve Is Not Commenting On Steam, Source Engine For Linux

[Dragonlord]

Believe me I get bitten by this yo-no-more-edit crap all the time so welcome to the club there. I had an edit in there which would have remove some fuel from this discussion but yo-no-more-edit made it vanish and I had been too pissed to write it again.

Anyways. Concerning gaming on general purpose computers I don't think it's dying. This is something the AAAs want people make believe since they smell more cash in the console market than in the PC market which they ruined themselves. This though is a lie since you loose money due to piracy a lot faster (and in larger quantities) on a console than a PC. On a PC you have to crack each game. On a console you have to crack the console once and you can play all games. That's quite a difference which should not be neglected. So in general I am convinced that PC gaming is always superior to console gaming no matter how specialized these machines might get in the future. They are okay for party games if all your buddies are so drunk they can't even figure out anymore how stupid the game is they are playing right now. Aside from that though, and therefore for "serious" gaming it's just a nuisance.

[dopehouse]

We are getting very off-topic. Please move your discusion to another folder in the form and lets return to the topic 'Valve Is Not Commenting On Steam, Source Engine For Linux'.

[kUrb1a]

Ok,..we hate DRM,we like Steam because where's fire(games) there's steam(shit).
We like Bioshock,CallOfRyan :P ,and other games but no luck on steam.
Valve think we smell because we like freedom so obviously we are booger eating NERD brother of Apple .

[gilboa]

We are getting very off-topic. Please move your discusion to another folder in the form and lets return to the topic 'Valve Is Not Commenting On Steam, Source Engine For Linux'.

I fully understand you comment, but please keep in mind that Steam is a games delivery and DRM system that was more-or-less designed to mimic the gaming console user-experience (when it comes to delivery, installation, setup, etc), in-essence, making the PC a better console compared to "real" consoles.

As such, the viability of the PC as gaming platform also determines the fate of a possible Linux Steam port.
If, in-spite of Steam, the PC continues to lose ground (in-favor of gaming consoles), Valve will slowly wind down Steam/PC and switch their resources to consoles.
If the opposite happens, we just might see a Linux port.

So in short, the PC vs. console is very much on-topic.

- Gilboa

[Dragonlord]

Not really. With an engine designed like mine there would be no difference between a console and a PC and this entire problem would be void. Consoles also do not use DD by default except for DLC. On PC you can get games without a hard-case and DVD while on a console you need all this. So I don't think the PC is really loosing ground. That's just AAA talk.

[b15hop]

Fair enough. I thought that was where things were going on that remark- but I wanted clarification.

It's exactly why I don't want steam on my computer. Linux or Windows...

I enjoy the odd LAN here and there. I've managed to LAN UT2k4 with one machine on windows with another on Linux. Gave me goose-bumps thinking that different architectures could co-operate like that. Now to be able to LAN some more decent games, without needing the technical skills of a Linux Dev or Windows Admin will be a feat in my books.

Yes, there are. Back before we had broadband out here, I used a Linux PC to share a 28.8 modem with my friends at our LAN parties. When you've got no fast Internet and no public places to hang out, what do you do? LAN party.

Exactly. Some of my mates don't have broadband at home either. So when they come to my house they are tempted to surf the www rather than LAN. I'm seriously getting sick of the Anti virus / firewall factor of windows killing the fun of LAN parties... People stop Lanning when difficulties like that emerge. Esp after hours of setting up. We just want to buy the game and have some fun. Not to mention the risk of getting a virus because of a LAN party. Linux has far less of these problems.

Under Windows this is not possible, but under Linux I don't see a problem. I do it often in fact, especially while deving. For example running the game while doing hacking and file manipulation at the same time to locate bugs. Nightmare under Windows, easy to do under Linux so I don't get this point. Besides disk IO stalling is in general a problem with the game design. Disk IO is always considered slow in game deving.

Sorry but that's major league bullshit there. Windows is in no way "much better" in these issues or does not have them. That's simply fanboy talk to claim so.

In all fairness. I play UT2004 in linux and I do get LAG. Even with 500fps. It's not a software issue though. More a game issue. I'm more likely to blame my 1TB green western digital hard drive for it's slow access times than blame linux. Why? Because in windows 7, the game still access the hard drive randomly even though I have 4GB of ram. Plain annoying if you ask me. It's never the max fps that kills gameplay it's always the half second pause due to some dodgy caching. I would like to know if it's the OS or just the game itself.. ~sigh~ That's not even using vista... God Help me if I was! I don't want steam running in the background as another service to allow more disk I/O and cpu waste.

[b15hop]

*Not a OS issue, it's more of a game caching issue.
(Stupid 1min edit crap)

[Dragonlord]

Strange as I never had such an issue with UT2k4. I had issues with Q4 for example what goes for sound but with UT2k4 I had no problem. That though does not exclude one existing in a particular situation. Since it works with me I would say it's a hardware/software related problem. Not sure though what it is from a distance. I would though exclude a caching problem since UT2k4 (to my knowledge) pre-caches the game world on load time as prior UT and other game titles do. And With 4G of RAM I doubt you get into paging-hell as the specs for this game recommend 256M or more as the recommended amount. So I would bet more on a mis-configuration of the kernel somewhere but this depends on what distro you are using.

[b15hop]

Strange as I never had such an issue with UT2k4. I had issues with Q4 for example what goes for sound but with UT2k4 I had no problem. That though does not exclude one existing in a particular situation. Since it works with me I would say it's a hardware/software related problem. Not sure though what it is from a distance. I would though exclude a caching problem since UT2k4 (to my knowledge) pre-caches the game world on load time as prior UT and other game titles do. And With 4G of RAM I doubt you get into paging-hell as the specs for this game recommend 256M or more as the recommended amount. So I would bet more on a mis-configuration of the kernel somewhere but this depends on what distro you are using.

I'm using Arch Linux. I do agree that compiling my own kernel speeds the system up. But compiling a kernel is a bit of a headache these days.

[gilboa]

I'm using a stock kernel on F12/x86_64 and playing UT2K4 on a semi-powerful machine (AthlonX2 5000 / 4GB / GF8600) at 1080P without any type of lag. (And Fedora is not a highly optimized distribution)

Distribution specific issue?

- Gilboa