Valve & Intel Work On Open-Source GPU Drivers

[Jonno]

There are several other texture compression formats supported by Mesa, and while not being compatible with pre-compressed S3TC textures, Valve could easily re-compress their textures for their Linux ports.

While I agree it is technically possible I highly doubt this will attract other major developers to Linux/Steam if they have to modify their game resources. I might be wrong but this is probably not going to fly, something else needs to happen.

They don't have to modify their texture sources in any way. Essentially it's a re-compile, which they will have to do for Linux anyway, so I don't see the big problem.

[petrs]

There are several other texture compression formats supported by Mesa, and while not being compatible with pre-compressed S3TC textures, Valve could easily re-compress their textures for their Linux ports.

Additionally, most recent distribution releases (including Ubuntu) now ships S2TC by default, which is S3TC compatible and not affected by the S3TC patent, making S3TC textures work out-of-the-box. Sure, the S2TC algorithms are worse than the S3TC algorithms, but that don't matter for the use-case discussed here (passing through pre-compressed textures for hw decompression).

While I agree it is technically possible I highly doubt this will attract other major developers to Linux/Steam if they have to modify their game resources. I might be wrong but this is probably not going to fly, something else needs to happen.

[benmoran]

Yeah, I've noticed a game using S2TC the other day, but can't remember which. I'm glad it's being used at least.

[Jonno]

Because, honestly, without Valve being able to use the pre-compressed textures without any extra tricks, they are probably heading to hell (especially on the Intel hardware). So what is the current situation on this matter?

There are several other texture compression formats supported by Mesa, and while not being compatible with pre-compressed S3TC textures, Valve could easily re-compress their textures for their Linux ports.

Additionally, most recent distribution releases (including Ubuntu) now ships S2TC by default, which is S3TC compatible and not affected by the S3TC patent, making S3TC textures work out-of-the-box. Sure, the S2TC algorithms are worse than the S3TC algorithms, but that don't matter for the use-case discussed here (passing through pre-compressed textures for hw decompression).

[petrs]

So, S3TC issue is resolved?

Because, honestly, without Valve being able to use the pre-compressed textures without any extra tricks, they are probably heading to hell (especially on the Intel hardware). So what is the current situation on this matter? Do they have the S3TC "patent" license cleared?

I'd be very glad to see this _anyhow_ resolved as we have all of our recent production compatible with Linux (we have developed _all_ of our projects natively on Linux), but without being able to run natively without the hassle, we have refrained the platform to avoid technical support issues.

[crazycheese]

Has anyone seen "pulseaudio" soundcard under Windows? I don't think so

Pulseaudio exists under windows.

[9a3eedi]

11.04 is the last ubuntu with Gnome 2.32, new uses will default to unit but you can switch it on the log in screen (i will remember your preferences) 10.10 is out of support so don't bed on any thing coming to it. 11.04 will be EOL in October then you cold move to 10.04 that should have you going until April. Have fun.

There's always MATE
http://mate-desktop.org/

It works exactly the same way as GNOME 2 as it is a fork, except that the programs are all renamed, and it should be supported in Ubuntu.. it'll probably eventually get added to the official repositories at some point. Also, Linux Mint uses MATE as the default desktop, and that distro is a fork of Ubuntu.

So no worries!

[AJSB]

Well the game types... Basically every source engine title is the same gametype, just some are better for single player and others are better for multiplayer. All are first person shooters, did you see something else directly from valve?

The survey of the game types is important also to their partners....and to them and Valve confirm them selfs if we are more players of FPS, RPG or RTS....or even sports games.

[AJenbo]

Then run the survey on wine :-P

I'm sure they factor in some percentage as would be migratory users.

[entropy]

The Windows Steam client explicity asks for the Wine version string. A native Windows will report nothing, but wine exposes this information if the app requests it.

That's great for sure. Nevertheless, I am a potential Linux-only user but still have my Windows partition for games (mainly Steam games).
I don't use WINE. How do they get that into their statistics? Ofc, they don't. On the contrary, it strengthens the Windows statistics obviously.

I guess there's no official Steam/WINE statistics available?