A Message From Valve's Gabe Newell

[elanthis]

makes me wish I was born a few years earlier, so I would be done with my ECE degree and apply.

Valve does not hire people fresh out of school, ever, aside from some very exceptional exceptions (e.g., the DigiPen grads that inspired Portal and Portal 2). You'd need to be born about 10 years earlier, have finished your degree, and then gone and made a name for yourself proving your talents, and then maybe Valve would consider even talking to you about an interview. Or have gone to DigiPen and made a truly innovative IGF-winning game while living a few blocks away from Valve's headquarters.

[snuwoods]

It all makes sense now. If you're referring to the Steam Box...
I can virtually see the case design based on parts of GLaDOS.

Just kidding.

Btw, I wonder what this job position is actually for:

makes me wish I was born a few years earlier, so I would be done with my ECE degree and apply.

[entropy]

She's now reportedly up and running on the AMD blob.

It all makes sense now. If you're referring to the Steam Box...
I can virtually see the case design based on parts of GLaDOS.

Just kidding.

Btw, I wonder what this job position is actually for:

Software Engineer?Firmware
Do you like programming directly to the bare metal?
If so, as a Valve firmware engineer you will write the code that brings all kinds of new devices to life.
Your expertise in writing firmware that communicates via various protocols will let players interact with
their games in ways they?ve never experienced before. By efficiently communicating between PC and hardware,
the microcontroller code you write will be the backbone of various input and output devices.

[snuwoods]

she ? LOL its a lady ?

yup, it's like a seafaring vessel or something.

[Michael]

She's now reportedly up and running on the AMD blob.

[mawww]

http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man4/...aderBinary.xml

OpenGL 4 does indeed support binary shader loading and retrieval, but there is no standard binary format. So GLSL sources still need to be available for the initial compilation.

[Desti]

OpenGL does not support precompiled shaders (it may in the latest 4.x, I don't know; certainly not in 2.x and 3.x)

http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man4/xhtml/glShaderBinary.xml

[curaga]

OpenGL does not support precompiled shaders (it may in the latest 4.x, I don't know; certainly not in 2.x and 3.x)

[jonwil]

As someone who is involved with a project that supports programmable shaders (albeit on Direct3D9 on Windows) I don't see anything specific about "shader compiling" that is an issue here.
We ship pre-compiled binary shader files (compiled with the Microsoft FXC compiler tool) with our mod and not HLSL source and it works just fine on all the GPUs we target.
I also know of plenty of games that ship these same binary shaders with the same shader files for all GPUs and dont have problems.

So can someone explain to me how Linux or OpenGL or the Source engine or whatever is different and why it has to ship source and not off-line compiled binaries?

[Caine Thanatos]

Of course it'd be nicer if it was using native stuff. But hey - even if they do a winelib thing - at least we get some sort of support then. They fix bugs (and maybe even contribute to wine) instead of they break it and wine has to fix it or we have to use strange workarounds. They'd probably even test changes and updates before releasing them. Yaaay.

That'd be so much better than what happened with EVE and their new launcher lately - every update broke something. And they even had a linux client once.

EVE-online did not have a native client , but rather a modified version of Cedega (Transgaming), In the end the "Eve-online windows client" worked better with Wine than their "Cedega integrated" version.
So they dropped the support and uses those resources for something else.