One Of The New Valve Linux Employees Is...

[smitty3268]

Ideally, I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't. That stuff should be ready and accepting for others to use, not to fix.

One of the benefits of OSS drivers is that 3rd party developers can debug bugs and performance problems they are seeing in their software and fix the drivers directly, rather than having to come up with hacks around it in their software.

But I agree that I certainly wouldn't expect Valve or anyone else to need to hire full time developers just for fixing Mesa. That can't be expected.

[Vadi]

Perhaps overall, there are black spots dragging it down.

As an nVidia customer on Linux with a modern and high-end gfx card, I don't think I'm getting any worse performance that I'd be getting on Windows however (even when playing games via CX, which is a pretty nice miracle). I treat myself to highest gfx settings as well since getting the new card, too!

[M1kkko]

Ideally, I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't. That stuff should be ready and accepting for others to use, not to fix.

Ideally. Should be. I don't think it's Valve's job either, but what else could they do? The games rely heavily on the graphics stack after all.

I still predict problems. I don't see the performance of the drivers/games matching the performance of their Windows siblings any time soon. I hope we'll gradually get there over time, but it'll be a rocky road.

Linux is worse than Windows when it comes to gaming performance.

[Vadi]

I wonder if we will see any work from Valve into X.org, Wayland, DRI, Mesa, Gallium3D, the OpenGL and OpenCL state tracker, etc.
To the open-source radeonhd and nouveau drivers?

Ideally, I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't. That stuff should be ready and accepting for others to use, not to fix.

[M1kkko]

I'm still waiting for a native HL (the first one) port. I hear the game is really good

And you're not at all wrong. The single player campaign is good, but the multi-player mode is also more fun to play than Counter-strike. In fact, Half-life is one of the few games we still occasionally play with my friends. I'm going to a big LAN party soon, and guess which one game I'll be taking with me.

On a USB stick to share with my friends.

[devius]

Although a real native (non wine) linux release of the previous episodes would also be awesome.

I'm still waiting for a native HL (the first one) port. I hear the game is really good

[Julius]

Isn't that the guy who sold nexuiz out to illfonic?

Not as far as I know... he developed the engine not the game and wan't really part of the original Nexuiz developers.

His overall stance seems to have been that of trying to see the best in this comercialization of Nexuiz and got even hired by them to work on the open-source engine (before it was decided that they would switch to the Cryengine). That he seems to be fed up with them and switched to Valve speaks for him I guess, but I would have loved to see some more work on the Darkplaces engine by him too.

But I guess this is a good match as the source engine is supposed to be quite quake like still, so it's similar to Darkplaces... maybe they will even allow for some backporting and open-sourcing of code *keeps kingers crossed*

[AnonymousCoward]

Valve better hurry up with hl2ep3/hl3, whatever it's going to be. Although a real native (non wine) linux release of the previous episodes would also be awesome.

[9a3eedi]

Valve had better make Steam and/or Source open source.

Never going to happen. There are just way too many issues involved with making Steam opensource. Steam is a form of DRM after all.

[blinxwang]

Valve had better make Steam and/or Source open source.