Valve Looking to Port Games to Linux?

Martin Bozic writes "Valve is apparently looking for senior engineers to port games to Linux. They have an ad up on the official site looking for a Senior Software Engineer with experience in 'systems engineering designing and developing communications software and hardware solutions including resolving problems surrounding real-time and non real time PC- based systems using C++ and network programming algorithms and their interaction with physical devices.' One of the lines under the job description is the simple statement: 'Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.'" No reason to get excited about this before they make an official announcement; while this may eventually mean Half-Life 2 running under Linux, they may just want penguin-based folks to play Peggle.

Comments

Re:AMD opened up ATI drivers, so this makes sense

[tolan-b]

There are already real games on Linux. Just not so many. All the Quake games and most of the major Quake / Doom3 engine games are on Linux (ET: Quake Wars is coming soon for example). Same for the UT series.

Re:i hope not

[malevolentjelly]

In my experience developing games on the playstation 3, Linux is fine for gaming. ;) Eventually, companies will invest in better opengl implementations for linux- such as the one used by ... you know... Linux Gaming Machines. Sony has some sweet libraries for it.

Peggle?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article omitted a link to Peggle, so here's a link: http://www.popcap.com/games/peggle

Maybe it'll work with wine?

Re:If they do port HL2...

[AlexMax2742]

Half Life 2 and its ilk already run reasonably well in Wine these days. All you have to do is have the Taholma font installed in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts and Steam ought to work great, and from there CS:Source works great too. I notice maybe a 10fps difference between Windows and Linux, and I have a shitty throwaway Geforce FX.

Re:IF, just, IF

[QuantumG]

I didn't demand anything.

Valve's roots are in Mac, Not Micorosoft

[AHumbleOpinion]

It seems unlikely that Valve would go in this direction. Valve's founders are ex-Microsoft employees.

Valve's founders started as Macintosh developers who ported their products to Windows. Microsoft eventually bought them.

That said, I agree with others, this job is most likely to port new game code to Linux for use in game servers only.

Re:Valve's roots are in Mac, Not Micorosoft

[mrchaotica]

You sure you're not confusing Valve with Bungie?

Re:Linux gaming market is far smaller than most th

[Chandon Seldon]

I agree that cross platform development can help, however it makes far more sense to target Mac than Linux. Adding a third platform, Linux, would not improve things much over two, Win32 and Mac. Even when portions of a game are ported to Linux in order to create a server there is still a lot of work to be done with respect to getting the user interface and other client side code running.

Is it really the third platform, or the fifth? I hear that the PS3 and XBox360 are pretty big gaming platforms. When you look at it that way, you quickly realize that the Mac, Linux, and PS3 ports are largely the same code (OpenGL renderer) - as are the Windows and XBox360 ports (DirectX). At that point, the question of a release on Mac or Linux is basically installer testing rather than any sort of significant extra programming effort.

That seems to be why both ID and Epic make both Mac and Linux releases of their games. They're already writing a cross-platform game with an OpenGL renderer - releasing for a couple of extra similar platforms has trivial costs compared to a non-zero number of extra sales and some good PR. It also future-proofs their engines in case Linux happens to hit an inflection point in uptake during that engine's useful lifespan.