Former Valve Developer: Steam Linux Project Was The Hardest

[gerry_here_to_learn]

Am I reading into this correctly? Hardest part of porting games to linux was getting gpu driver teams to "wake up"?

I wonder what thoughts Rich would have about the amdgpu stack now and how its coming along and the direction its going. or if much/ anything has changed since his original posts.

[Kemosabe]

idiot, vulkan removes layers, not adds. and it is not linux-specific ffs

Wow, you copied the content of #6 and insulted another person. You are so "alpha" - this is what the kidz say these days, right?

[Beherit]

Vulkan lol. I'm sorry, not to offend anyone, but that's totally typical Linux. It's like we have an awful pile of buggy layers, so instead of fixing them, how about adding another layer?

Vulkan isn't "another" layer onto anything, it's a new one replacing OpenGL. Using your confusing onion analogy, it has less layers.

However you like to describe it, it's nothing "typical" to Linux. AMD developed Mantle, which is Windows-only, because they thought DirectX isn't good enough. Likewise, Apple developed Metal.

Yeah, the guy's a pioneer and all, enjoy your NV-only, or AMD-only, or version x kernel-only, or version y xorg-only, or version z mesa-only or whatever games.

Ouch. No matter what anyone responds to that, it'll only add fuel to the flame war.

[Illasera]

Valve... Valve, The same company that brought us the client & server side endless crashing platform "Steam" ?
or every source-1 based game ending up with "HL2.exe is not responding"
or debian&linux-alchemist?
or "VOGL" (i don't think i need to say more here)


Is there a way to eject someone from the open source community? Not talking about preventing contribution by rejecting pull requests to other projects, but i am talking about rejecting as a whole, Perfect example for a company you don't want in.

[pmorph]

Valve... Valve, The same company that brought us the client & server side endless crashing platform "Steam" ?
or every source-1 based game ending up with "HL2.exe is not responding"
or debian&linux-alchemist?
or "VOGL" (i don't think i need to say more here)

And... what did you bring?

[MaCroX95]

Vulkan lol. I'm sorry, not to offend anyone, but that's totally typical Linux. It's like we have an awful pile of buggy layers, so instead of fixing them, how about adding another layer? Yup, that will magically solve the underlying problems FURSURE.

Yeah, the guy's a pioneer and all, enjoy your NV-only, or AMD-only, or version x kernel-only, or version y xorg-only, or version z mesa-only or whatever games. Quite ridiculous

You clearly don't have idea what you're talking about from the fact that you don't even know what Vulkan is and how linux is changing these days... Not sure why do you even comment on such topics.

[Staffan]

The whole point of Vulkan is to remove a layer. OpenGL is a big, complicated, high-level API while Vulkan is closer to what the driver translates to internally.

But we don't "have" Vulkan unless we have the very latest hardware and even so, most games don't support it anyway so claiming that our problems are over because of Vulkan is naive at best.

[MaCroX95]

Vulkan lol. I'm sorry, not to offend anyone, but that's totally typical Linux. It's like we have an awful pile of buggy layers, so instead of fixing them, how about adding another layer? Yup, that will magically solve the underlying problems FURSURE.

Yeah, the guy's a pioneer and all, enjoy your NV-only, or AMD-only, or version x kernel-only, or version y xorg-only, or version z mesa-only or whatever games. Quite ridiculous

Well, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about and how Linux is changing these days... I am one of the people that already experienced the power of Vulkan on my laptop with Dota2 which improves performance A LOT, also check what Vulkan has done to the performance of Doom 2016 and it is now availible through Wine WITHOUT any translational layers or middleware. Things are changing very positively for linux users especially on the gaming department and we've never been happier about that. If you don't mind or don't care about linux and good aspects of changes that are going on please just spare us with your provocative comments.

[Illasera]

And... what did you bring?

Nothing, I am just ranting, highlighting that open-source should have high-standards due to lack of quality control.
Valve is not that high-standard i am referring to (not even close).

[Beherit]

But we don't "have" Vulkan unless we have the very latest hardware and even so, most games don't support it anyway so claiming that our problems are over because of Vulkan is naive at best.

Naive enthusiasts started buying AMD graphic cards years ago on the premise that AMD's future open source drivers would kick ass, only to discover that by the time the drivers were released, it lacked many features at best. At worst, their now obsolete graphics card isn't even supported.

There are Linux gamers still paying €50+ for unreleased games on Steam being promised that a Linux port of the game will be released in the future...

I learned a long time ago not to trust any promises made in future tense that appeal to fanboys or FOSS zealots.