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Left 4 Dead Demo Includes Linux Steam Client Libraries
SheeEttin writes "If you've been longing to play games from Steam on your Linux machine, you may not have to wait much longer — the Left 4 Dead demo includes some Linux libraries, in particular, one named 'steamclient_linux.so.' While the game's full release does not include these libraries, their apparently accidental inclusion in the demo suggests that Steam games will have native Linux clients in the near future. (A job listing at Valve looking for someone whose responsibilities would include 'Port[ing] Windows-based games to the Linux platform' would seem to support this.) The libraries also include several strings nonessential to a pure server, including references to forgotten passwords. Hopefully, this indicates that at least some Valve-affiliated games will have native Linux clients."
"(A job listing at Valve looking for someone whose responsibilities would include 'Port[ing] Windows-based games to the Linux platform' would seem to support this.)"
And so what if the whole movement only starts with some Wine support? For alot of people its a pain to get steam up and running with linux, and so if Wine becomes integrated into Steam, then that will save alot of people headaches. That's far better than just continuing to ban all the people on their forums who cry out for a Linux client.
Because for those of us who've chosen Linux as our 'workstation' OS, having to maintain (albeit minutely) a second OS (install, AV/Firewall as much needed for gaming, hardware drivers, etc) simply for a game or 5, becomes a chore. I usually leave chat or web-browsing windows up on my gaming machine (Still running windows because the hassles are too many) but if it were a one-time setup (not every time a new major patch comes out) I'd switch to Linux on the second machine too.
Why buy a PC when a 'net appliance' will do?
Parent being modded funny is probably the funniest response there could be to his question...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
That's just lazyness. Instead of storing the actual game artwork the server could just store a list of the hashes - and save a couple hundred megabytes (sometimes gigabytes) of diskspace.
...and Mac OS, and PS3, and Wii...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Dude! WTF!
I'm tired of people assuming that, just because something might (sorta) run (maybe) under WINE that that's all that really matters.
The article is about native Linux support. NATIVE.
Native means you don't need WINE and you don't need a VM. It means you slap the disk in, run the installer, and go. No emulation layer, no reverse-engineered Windows APIs.
Relying on Codeweavers is not going to be a good idea for a commercial software house. Relying on Codeweavers is what end-users do while they wait for the software houses to realize that they are ignoring an entire market *AND* invest the resources necessary to service that market.
In the case of steam though, a VAC ban and you lost the game.. forever. The only cases where a person can escape a VAC ban and not lose their account is with internet cafes. But i know some places automatically kick all SteamIDs in the internetcafe band of ids. Voogru made a mod that specifically does this.
Something else Valve does to complicate matters is once your hack is detected.. they don't do anything for days or weeks. They randomly wait and pretend it didn't happen. Then bam, VACbanned. So someone researching vulnerabilities won't know which one was detected, or which game, or when.
Is it worth cheating if you get VAC banned and have to rebuy the game? That arms race sounds very expensive..
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman