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."

Comments

Just in time

[kbrasee]

for the Year Of The Linux Desktop.

Re:Just in time

[Opie812]

1985-to present and for the foreseeable future.

Re:Just in time

[StuartHankins]

Does this mean I can now kill a Linux system's performance and stability with the DRM sh*t too? W00t!

Re:Just in time

[PsyQ]

If you run Steam through WINE and use Gecko as the HTML renderer, performance is much improved. The whole store feels lightning fast.

If they did the same with their Linux version and perhaps used Gecko on Windows as well, maybe they could fix that problem.

It is for the server..

[evilNomad]

steamclient_linux.so is used by the dedicated linux servers to connect to steam and check for updates and such, it was probably just included by mistake..

Re:It is for the server..

[cjfs]

steamclient_linux.so is used by the dedicated linux servers to connect to steam and check for updates and such, it was probably just included by mistake..

The article quotes a large string of names and says:

These strings plus hundreds of other technically shouldn't be needed if this were simply for Linux server usage -- even though no Linux server binary ships with the Windows game on Steam.

Not sure if that's reasonable grounds for their assumption, but is worth considering.

Re:It is for the server..

[evilNomad]

Well, maybe Valve decided that if they were going to port some features for the dedicated server, they might do them all when they were at it.. But no one but Valve will know.. :)

Re:It is for the server..

[SanityInAnarchy]

The Linux Dedicated Server distribution includes all kinds of things that aren't needed -- including Windows DLLs, sound files, etc.

I'd like to see an actual comparison with the current Linux dedicated server before I jump to conclusions.

That said, I'll also be first in line if they ever do release a Linux client.

Re:It is for the server..

[The MAZZTer]

Sound files are needed if your server uses sv_pure, AFAIK. The server needs all the game resources to compare files hashes with the hashes the client sends to be sure they're not replacing files. A common reason to use sv_pure would be to prevent TF2 cheaters from replacing, say, the soft "spy decloak" sound FX with a REALLY LOUD NOISE, which would make it a lot easier to hear any nearby spies.

Re:It is for the server..

[Kent Recal]

The server needs all the game resources to compare files hashes with the hashes the client sends to be sure they're not replacing files.

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.

Re:It is for the server..

[prockcore]

no, because the hacked client can do the same thing. The server hashes a random part of the file, and then tells the client to hash that same part.

Re:It is for the server..

[Kent Recal]

A hacked client could just as well use hacked artwork but at the same time perform the hashes over a copy of the original artwork. It's just another step in the arms-race and imho not a very effective one. Once a hacker has managed to gain control over the hash-function it probably doesn't matter much to him whether he just sends stored hashes or performs partial hashes over an existing set of files...

Re:It is for the server..

[BAILOPAN]

+1, This article is silly. You can find that file in every Valve Linux dedicated server (HL1, various HL2 versions, etc).

Re:It is for the server..

[rtb61]

Valve is most likely looking at the medium to long term market of netbook computers, really huge numbers of low priced FOSS based computers. A very competitive games distribution network, for low priced game sales and those games will have to really efficient and run well on minimal resources.

It makes sense to get the bugs out and smooth out the interface now, so that will be be able to more effectively target multi player gaming on netbooks, hundreds of millions of low cost school netbooks is bound to become a very targeted market.

Re:It is for the server..

[tibman]

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..

How about OS X?

[MobyDisk]

I wonder if this means they will provide OS X support as well?

Re:How about OS X?

[AndGodSed]

Parent being modded funny is probably the funniest response there could be to his question...

Re:How about OS X?

[melstav]

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.

Re:How about OS X?

[nine-times]

Some developers are using CIDER to bring games to OSX, and I'm afraid I don't really see the problem with that. Whether or not it's "native" is somewhat a matter of what you mean by "native", since it's certainly not emulation. Relying on WINE isn't too far different from relying on a set of libraries that happen to not be installed by default.

And when you run things on WINE, they run pretty fast and stable. You don't need to rely on Codeweavers, since they could simply test to make sure their software runs on the default install of WINE. It'd be one option for developers to provide cross-platform compatibility even if their primary development platform is Windows.

Now I agree that, ideally, everyone would do real cross-platform development and make their games completely native on Linux and OSX as well. I'm just saying that if software developers are finding that it requires too much additional resources to do that outright, developing with WINE compatibility in mind might be a good middle-ground.

Re:How about OS X?

[drinkypoo]

I say "under the best conditions" because it's a re-implementation of the Windows APIs. There's all sorts of opportunities for them to rewrite things less efficiently and end up with less stable code.

It's a reimplementation of Windows APIs and you don't see the opportunities to reimplement things more efficiently, and end up with more stable code?

In fact, the real challenge is emulating the many flaws in the Windows APIs, which have also been known to have unnecessary delay loops in the published APIs, yet not in the ones that Microsoft uses...

Hold your horses

[arth1]

Just because the Steam client may run native Linux doesn't mean that games will.
I'd be surprised if the first offerings were more than the few games that will run under wine bundled with wine.
And a game running under wine doesn't become a Linux game. Sorry, no.

Re:Hold your horses

[Zathain Sicarius]

"(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.

Re:Hold your horses

[arth1]

The way I see it, if you play an involved game like most Steam games are, you're no longer multitasking. The game, not the OS, is what you interface with. So why would you want to force it to run using something like wine, when it would be less painful to reboot into Windows and run it natively?

wine is useful when you need to run a native Windows program from within the context of Unix. But it will never provide the full Windows environment, and if you're not going to interface with the OS, why bother what the OS is?

I know there may be people out there who don't have any Windows licenses, but I think those are few and far between. Especially those who can also afford games from Valve. I must have half a dozen unused Windows licenses here, because whenever I buy a computer, I get one, no matter whether I then blow the OS away and install Linux.
wine, ndiswrappers and other stuff that tricks Windows programs into running more-or-less as intended is something I see as a last resort, not first.

Re:Hold your horses

[kcbnac]

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?

Re:Hold your horses

[Anonymous Coward]

So why would you want to force it to run using something like wine, when it would be less painful to reboot into Windows and run it natively?

It's a huge paint in the ass when you have to *reboot your whole system* just to play some game and then *reboot it again* to continue your work.
Not to mention the pain it is to maintain to maintain a system you only want to use for games - 'sorry, just installed the usual security updates, please *reboot your system*'
Well, I think, playing games is more fun if you can just star them and wait few seconds to load everything instead of spending minutes of rebooting and even more of fiddeling around with the two systems.

Re:Hold your horses

[Anonymous Coward]

whoa whoa whoa. Extra OEM licenses != extra licenses. Licenses purchased installed with a computer are limited to use with that computer. Even if you wipe it. If the argument is about being legal with windows, this is not a valid point. Secondly wine runs opengl games, even with steam fairly well, and it wasn't too hard to setup. Lastly and more importantly, games from valve are NOT expensive. In fact there was just a deal for all the games released from valve for 99.95. Yes, that's all the games, cs, cs:s, portal, hl, hl2, hl expansion, etc etc

Re:Hold your horses

[SanityInAnarchy]

Because it's actually more painful to run it in Windows, for some of us. Here, let me count the ways:

Linux has pretty good 64-bit support. The last remaining broken piece was browser plugins -- Java has been ported, and Flash will be soon. Windows 64-bit sucks before Vista, and Vista sucks in so many other ways that 64-bit is hardly a concern.

And yes, Valve games can use 64-bit and multicore. And I do have 4 gigs of RAM, which means XP can only see 3.5 gigs.

I also run Linux for everything other than games. That means, not only is there the irritation of having to reboot -- somewhat mitigated, as I can hibernate one and boot another -- but that I have to maintain Windows, which is much more work for me than maintaining Linux -- on top of which, I still have to maintain Linux. (Example: Ever try to hunt down XP drivers for a made-for-Vista laptop?)

Steam also insists that I install/update games via its client. That's great, if I'm running Windows anyway -- and I'm on fiber, so it's fast. But it means I can't download while on Linux. What's more, I can't play a Steam game I've already got while I wait -- as soon as Steam sees me playing a game, it kills all downloads. I suppose it's to keep me from lagging -- thanks, but it reacts the same way if I'm playing a single-player game.

If there was a Linux client, I'd just leave it running and not care.

And then there's the fact that Steam itself is a good deal more than just a game client, now -- assuming they've finally gotten the Friends feature working, it's also an IM client. That would be nice -- a friend IMs me, inviting me to a game, and rather than rebooting, I just click "yes" in that window -- and he can IM me from the game, he doesn't have to alt+tab to some other client to a Pidgin-friendly service.

Now, granted, I could run games under Wine. I do, for some games -- MMOs, I pretty much demand that they run windowed on Linux, because I absolutely do multitask with those. But with Steam, there's a performance hit (all Valve games are DirectX only, now), there's again 32-bit only (no Win64 support in Wine yet), and none of it is supported, meaning if I have any problems, I'm on my own.

Still, it's not as though there would be no benefit. Even if these end up being winelib'd apps, at least they're supported, and it's a step in the right direction -- next up would likely be an OpenGL port. It also means that some of the non-Valve games on Steam which have native Linux clients would also work in Steam.

Re:Hold your horses

[somenickname]

Just because you aren't multitasking doesn't mean you don't have multiple tasks open. It's not uncommon for me to have 20-30 windows open (spread across multiple desktops) and so rebooting is a particularly painful process for me. My hardware is powerful enough to keep all those tasks open and play a game at the same time. If the only choices I had were "reboot" or "don't play games", I would pick "don't play games".

Re:Hold your horses

[cbrocious]

Many, many engines support OpenGL. id tech 4 (Doom 3, Quake 4, Prey, etc) was pure OpenGL, Unreal's engine is always D3D and OGL, etc. The only big engine that doesn't support OGL is Source; even stock Gamebryo supports it, although many games opt not to ship with it (e.g. Oblivion, Morrowind (back when it was NetImmerse)) since they make internal changes and don't care about maintaining OGL support.

Re:Hold your horses

[cbrocious]

Wine doesn't support x64 code, so the only benefit you can get is having the full address space enabled (because the kernel can properly map memory).

Re:Hold your horses

[FishWithAHammer]

id Software's engines are a very rare exception; Carmack, for some strange reason, likes OpenGL over DirectX. Unreal Engine 3 technically supports OpenGL, but their primary focus is on D3D as is just about everyone else's.

Why? Because D3D is better than OpenGL in the majority of ways, enough that targeting the minute market of Linux is almost certainly not worth the hassle.

And no, don't say "use SDL." SDL sucks, too. If you can seriously look at SDL next to DirectX and say that there's any valid comparison that doesn't involve a belly laugh, you do not belong in this conversation.

Re:Hold your horses

[bucky0]

How, exactly, is D3D "better" than OGL? The language is obtuse (a COM interface versus a simple state machine), amongst other things.

I'm not trolling, just curious about why you would think that.

Re:Hold your horses

[mrchaotica]

Why? Because D3D is better than OpenGL in the majority of ways, enough that targeting the minute market of Linux...

...and Mac OS, and PS3, and Wii...

Re:Hold your horses

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone from the year 2000 called to let you know about this great new technology that was just invented called "BURN-Proof". It means that buffer underruns don't result in unusable discs anymore! WOW!!!

Re:Hold your horses

[marcansoft]

The Wii uses a proprietary graphics library. It's probably closer to OpenGL than DirectX, though, and I bet someone has written a commercial OpenGL wrapper for it, as some people have been working on that in the homebrew world too.

Re:Hold your horses

[jfim]

How, exactly, is D3D "better" than OGL? The language is obtuse (a COM interface versus a simple state machine), amongst other things.

It's not really obtuse, both APIs are functionally equivalent. The biggest difference between both is that D3D is object-oriented whereas OGL is just a C-style series of function calls(ie. the difference is direct3DDevice->Present() vs glSwap()).

Also, D3D does not have an immediate mode, which is why OGL "seems" easier when looking at simple programs(immediate mode allows passing a single vertex by a call to glVertex). However, immediate mode does not reasonably scale, because the overhead of function calls quickly becomes the bottleneck with larger geometries and so you have to move into using vertex arrays(called vertex buffers, in D3D-speak), thus making your program very similar to the D3D one.

As for which one is better, that's debatable. In the 90's, D3D was lagging behind with regards to newer functionality(there was a Carmack rant on how D3D didn't include some functionality and the OGL folks simply did an extension) but I believe the situation is reversed now. D3D does have the advantage of having PIX for free, which is a really nifty 3D debugging app(GarageGames wrote an article about it).

Not much longer...

[spydabyte]

Just a few more years?
If they're still looking to hire, I doubt this would be anytime soon. It is valve we're talking about here.
Let me know when they publicly announce it.

Re:Oh yes!

[Nathrael]

RtCW: Enemy Territory?

Come one, Phoronix? Seriously?

[Loibisch]

Who still believes any of the stuff they're writing?

Those libraries are used by the Linux SERVER, so they can pull updates over Steam. Yes, Steam in Linux...shocking, ain't it? That says absolutely zip about game capability.

Phoronix sees a handful of .so files and weaves a huge story about any Source games are just around the corner for Linux.

There's absolutely _nothing_ noteworthy about this...

wishful thinking

[niteice]

I don't doubt that Valve has investigated the possibility of a native Linux client. However, Phoronix doesn't seem to be looking in the right places. Let's go through what they brought up from the perspective of someone who is familiar with the Source engine:

steamclient_linux.so - this is the ONLY interesting file. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that a majority is stubbed out and this is a remnant of the port of L4D to Steamworks - it uses a more generic library layout to work with any application, not tightly integrated with Source as before. Perhaps the server uses some functions in it to connect to the Steam master servers. That would explain why they only found it to be about half the size of the Windows version.

studiorender_i486.so - Valve calls their 3D model format a "studio model." I'm fairly certain that this file is stubbed out and only the model loader is available - the physics engine needs it to get at mesh data.

vstdlib_i486.so - Valve's standard libraries. Routines and classes used throughout the engine. No surprise, it's been shipping as long as the dedicated server has.

libsteam_api_linux.so - The API into Steam. Again, probably a Steamworks artifact. Again, perhaps part is used by the dedicated server.

engine_i486.so - core engine functionality. Anything that isn't factored out into another library (there are about 45) exists in here. I'm fairly sure that typically, left4dead.exe connects to Steam, then loads this library to make stuff happen. Core client and server code (operation, not logic) is in here.


Unfortunately, I have since removed the demo from my computer (bought the actual game, well worth it) and can't investigate these files any further. I don't think this is 100% indicative of Valve having a Linux client ready, but rather extreme extrapolation on Phoronix's part. I'm completely with them on wanting a client though.

wine already runs steam + Valve games just fine

[mattbee]

i.e. Half-Life 2, Team Fortress, Portal, right here on my Ubuntu laptop. There *is* a native version of Steam for Linux, albeit one without much of a front-end, just for running dedicated servers. So I suspect this is a non-story. Valve would be insane to worry about porting their games to Linux (at least) before they ported to the Mac, so I really think it's unlikely they're considering it. There's no common programming framework between Steam games, other than the copy protection & integration, so every game would be a separate porting job - not going to happen!

However if they could wrap up Steam, wine, Ubuntu together into a neat physical package, they could be in an interesting position to flog PC-based games consoles with a library of download titles, and *that* is the only reason they might be interested in supporting their own games on Linux. With Popcap and other cheap smaller titles making up the majority of their catalogue (even if those are not the most popular overall) and some hardware partner on board, they might have a shot if they could price a console at the low end of things.

Still- while they have an interest in keeping titles out for the XBox 360, taking on a huge platform project to compete with Microsoft would take balls of steel and plenty of money.

No, this is all crap, undoubtedly. But nice to speculate occasionally :)

Re:wine already runs steam + Valve games just fine

[pandrijeczko]

Valve would be insane to worry about porting their games to Linux (at least) before they ported to the Mac

A somewhat obtuse statement from an otherwise interesting comment that deserves a response.

Firstly, to be a Mac user, you have to buy one of a range of specific computers but to be a Linux user, you just need an empty PC or a Windows PC with some spare hard disk space. Therefore, if you're currently a PC gamer in Windows, it's easier to move to (or dual boot) Linux than it is to buy a Mac.

Secondly, I wouldn't argue that in the USA, if Windows is the most used OS, then second place would probably go to OS X on Macs with Linux a fairly close third. However, such is not the case for Europe and, I suspect, much of the rest of the world - Linux is definitely second place to Windows. Therefore, outside the USA, there's probably a bigger potential market for commercial games on Linux than on Macs.

I really am not intending to provoke a "my OS is better than your OS" argument, but as someone who has been in the IT & telecoms industry for 25+ years, I say it like I see it - my friends and workmates all run Windows, about 10% run Linux (usually alongside it) and I know of no-one who either owns a Mac or intends buying one, despite the fact that these are mostly IT literate people with numerous iPods amongst them.

More surprising: "PC Specific Splitscreen Options"

[Doug52392]

Among the libraries included in the L4D demo:
libsteam_api_linux.so
libsteamvalidateuseridtickets_i486.so
libtier0_s_linux.so

I noticed this within the first hour after the demo came out while adjusting the configuration files.

However, I was more surprised with the file:
C:\Program files\Steam\SteamApps\Common\left 4 dead demo\left4dead\cfg\splitscreen_on.cfg:

// PC Specific Splitscreen Performance Options
// Currently these are all pretty much disabled because they muck with per-machine system settings.

//cl_particle_fallback_base 3
//cl_particle_fallback_multiplier 2.0

// Leave flashlight depth texture on in PC splitscreen
r_flashlightdepthtexture 1

//r_shadowrendertotexture 0
//r_shadowfromworldlights 0

//cl_detaildist 450
//cl_detailfade 150

//r_drawmodeldecals 0
//r_decals 512
//r_decalstaticprops 0

//cl_ragdoll_maxcount 0
//sv_ragdoll_maxcount 0
//ragdoll_sleepaftertime 3

I thought "WTF!? Splitscreen on the PC???". Doesn't do much, since it's disabled, but it's worth pointing out.