It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux!

[deanjo]

this is ajoke??2 year for developing linux application??

Hey almost all of linux is still a WIP.

[Khudsa]

A podcast from podcast17 with a Gabe Newell interview.

Extract:

GABE @ 02:13: I don't think that our motivation is to delay the next Half-Life game. I think one of the things that’s useful for people to, at least understand is: Whenever you are trying to figure out what we are doing, it's useful to know we have way too many things to do than people to do them. So we’re always sorta measuring things in terms of trade-offs; so we look at how much time something will take versus how many of our customers it’ll benefit. So for example on Linux, we obviously would like to have a Linux client and we’d like to have our games running on Linux, a lot of our--- I mean our servers run on Linux, so we’ve been supporting Linux since ‘98 in terms of having server support, but whenever we look at that we have to compare that with "Okay, well we can spend that time making the Mac version better, or the Windows version better, or the 360". Recently we started supporting the PS3, and for us that decision was mainly motivated by Sony's willingness to be more open than the console companies have traditionally been around being an internet client. And to us that seemed like something we should really get behind, that sorta tipped us over in terms of doing a PS3 version. But that's the thing that we’re always faced with. It's not "What would we like to do?" it's “What five things would we give up in order to do the one thing we are able to do?”. And that is the constant frustration we have is, there are only so many hours in the day, and we'd love to be doing all those things simultaneously.

[Moller]

A podcast from podcast17 with a Gabe Newell interview.

Extract:

So I guess all the hype regarding Steam for Linux have finally come to an end?
-> We won't see a Steam client for Linux before they think it benefits themselves more than doing something else. This could most likely turn into years.

There's still some Dampfnudel to be eaten and while they may not make it as good as the Bavarians do, there's some interesting recipes in Bellevue.

And this means what?

[Moustacha]

So in essence he's been saying what some people have been saying for ages, Valve won't release a client until there's enough demand (sales) for it.

[Larian]

So in essence he's been saying what some people have been saying for ages, Valve won't release a client until there's enough demand (sales) for it.

I didn't get that as the takeaway message at all. To me, it seemed he was saying that it would take time to expand to another platform and they're spread pretty thin. But I agree that things are looking kind of grim.

[imamdxl]

Steam for Linux

I dont understand this, Valve's Source engine is not even ported to OpenGL renderer for Mac, what they used instead used a OpenGL wrapper to the engine pretty much like WINE and Cedega (I hope it is not WINE). The engine still itself interects with DirectX.
That's why they did not provide OpenGL renderer for Source engine games on Windows like Blizzard Entertainment's game, which is pretty much same thing, will cause additional overhead instead of increasing performance.

If their engine is not native to the specific platform than We can use WINE instead.

Cheers.

[Khudsa]

It's relevant the way he has brought the Linux topic. He hasn't been questioned about it! This shows that he is aware about people that want a Linux native port.

[d2kx]

Basicly what he said is: "we want to have the Linux client out there, but we had less time than we liked due to PS3 and Mac etc.".

[mirv]

It's basically a case of limited man-hours, and you apply that to things which will be the most productive for the company (bring in the most money), which is fairly obvious really, and so like a politician's answer, nothing was really said.

[Naib]

I dont understand this, Valve's Source engine is not even ported to OpenGL renderer for Mac, what they used instead used a OpenGL wrapper to the engine pretty much like WINE and Cedega (I hope it is not WINE). The engine still itself interects with DirectX.
That's why they did not provide OpenGL renderer for Source engine games on Windows like Blizzard Entertainment's game, which is pretty much same thing, will cause additional overhead instead of increasing performance.

If their engine is not native to the specific platform than We can use WINE instead.

Cheers.

Valves source engine was ported to OGL a while back