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:IF, just, IF

[Ash-Fox]

So because you can kludge your way around the problem, it does not exist?

The problem I discussed was not quite the issue you brought up. As your issue didn't exist except in a specific instance.

My point was that none of that work is needed on other platforms.

Your point was on binary compatibility, not shared resources. And guess what, even Windows has issues with different versions of shared resources. Just try running a C++ application compiled with the latest windows xp sp2 platform SDK on a Windows XP (no service pack system). msvc71/msvcr71 may exist on Windows XP, even have the same APIs, but it won't be 100% compatible either (can cause runtime errors).

Additionally there have been past bug issues with riched20.dll, where new versions caused problems with programs compiled with older platform SDK packs and so on (can cause runtime errors).