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Phoronix Confirms GNU/Linux Steam and Source Engine Clients
nukem996 writes "After initially reporting in 2010 that Valve was working on a native GNU/Linux client, one has finally been confirmed. Michael Larabel recently visited Valve's Bellvue, WA based office and has been able to see it himself. Included in the article are screenshots of the client running and speculation of a release."
Valve has yet to officially comment, but you'd hope they wouldn't invite someone up to their offices and send them home to spew lies.
I know this isn't going to be a popular sentiment on /., but a Steam Linux client is going to please the Linux community for all of about 5 minutes. The applause won't even have died down before they're bitching that there aren't enough games, it's not open source, it doesn't look right in their obscure distro of choice, etc.
The Linux community *should* embrace and celebrate this, but my experience has been that a large (or at least largely vocal) part of that community is made up of idealists and professional bitchers who think everything should be open source and free. Introducing a closed source client that charges for games into that group isn't going to please them. Nothing is going to please them.
Okay, now everyone mod me troll for pointing out something you know is true.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
The entire reason I *have* an Ubuntu partition is so that I *can't* play all the modern games I'm used to having. With this and how well WoW runs under Wine, I guess that programming Skynet will have to wait.
Thought this might be handy for those who wonder what else they might be able to get on Linux Steam:
http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_Games
Oh Great Penguin In The Sky, I want to believe.
But this is Phoronix, so I won't actually believe until I'm playing Portal without Wine.
What if their rumored steamBoxStation console is a "PC" running linux?
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
There are a number of users that will be happy to buy from steam if it is available for Linux. I am one of them and here is the description
I have grown used to buying apps for my Androis phone. The reason are:
- It is convenient
- prices are not outrigeous, so I can do impusle buying
Now, I don't use Windows and I don't feel like rebooting into it just for playing. I don't feel like maintaining the Windows OS, so I don't play games except the few Free/free Linux games coming in my distro. But I will purchase and play some of the classic games if they are available in Steam for Linux.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Well, if you bothered to read even the title, you'd see that says Source, which is Valve's game engine. That's a lot of games and mods, not to mention that they are all very good games. There are also a fair number of titles on Steam with Linux versions anyway, and this opens the way for more to happen. You can't expect it to be instant, but this gives devs a reason to release Linux versions, and a way to reach Linux users.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
As much as normally Phronix trumpets nothing, this time it's legit. He visited Valve and saw it, and Gabe has talked about how he, personally, has been working on Linux-related stuff recently in a podcast. We don't know when it'll happen, but Valve are pretty well known for keeping stuff under wraps until they have it close to delivery.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
The Source engine games make up a minscule fraction of the games on Steam. And just because a game uses Source doesn't mean it'll run on Linux OOB. Basically, a steam client will mean they'll get a hugely tiny fraction of the entire library since most of the games on Steam will never have Linux clients.
Regardless of the open-sourceness of Steam, the problem is still the same as it as always been with Linux : the marketshare is way too small for major companies to do Linux port, and most people who use desktop linux have Windows somewhere too.
Apart from Valve and indie games, I highly doubt we will see AAA games for Linux in the next few years.
And then there is the issues of video drivers.
Even if there have been good progress done recently, compatibility and performance are still way below Windows drivers.
Still, it's a good news, and it might be the first step that is needed to start.
Yes. And? No one is ever going to make wine perfect or port every game to Linux. At some point if gaming is going to happen under Linux, someone needs to make a move like this. No, there will not be a massive library to begin with, that doesn't make it wortheless. People might still want to play the games they can, and it makes it easier to release stuff in future. If I want to play Portal 2 on my Linux PC and it's availible, why wouldn't I? There is a point to it, even if it isn't every game. For some people, every game they want might have a Linux version. More likely, some won't, but that doesn't mean it's a no-go.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
It means you are cheering because you'll get a handful of games that have been on Windows for years. Woo....hoo?
How is it legit? The article was nothing but regurgitation of his previous rumors, there wasn't a single quote from Gabe Newell and Valve has not officially confirmed anything. Oh right, he posted an internal screenshot of a game supposedly running on Ubuntu!! OMG CONFIRMED!!!!
Uh... Portal 2 is under a year old. Counter Strike: Global Offensive comes out this year and uses the Source engine. Virtually every game Valve has made is a masterpiece and worth playing no matter the age. Beyond that, PC gaming isn't a niche market, and who cares about people switching to Linux, I just like the idea I can play my games under my normal OS.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Hello troll.
Did you miss the bit about the source engine coming across too? That would mean *all* Valve games, basically.
And there's a suspiciously large couple of games waiting in the wings with people DYING to get their hands on them - Half Life 2 Ep3, DOTA 2, etc. - not to mention there's been major new releases in the last, what, April - Portal 2.
That's hardly a "decade old". Niche market or not, Source engine and Steam on Linux could CREATE its own new gaming market in a matter of days after release. And at worst, we have a shed-load of games come across and a native client to install already-ported indie titles that seem to be VERY popular at the moment (has a large indie bundle taken less than a few million in pure profit recently?).
Just because all the big name publishers ignored Linux gamers and missed the boat for the last ten years doesn't mean that you should join them.
Big business decision (though I still class it as rumour) that I've seen from a tech company in a long-time.
Would you rather Steam-on-Linux or Instagram-on-Facebook in your daily news?
Well, yeah, but that's understating it. I'll also get a platform that gives developers more reason to release for Linux, I get future Valve games (which I care about a lot more than most companies), and I get it for free in a way that's convinient to me. Where is the downside?
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Steam for OS X, a big step forward though it was, hasn't delivered a massive amount of content.
I haven't got numbers to back that up, but often when I hear about a game being released on Steam (usually from a developer / publisher which isn't Valve) that I would like, I open the client and find out it's Windows-only. Which is a shame. Publishers still clearly think that Mac is a niche market. The situation with a Linux client is unlikely to be much better.
That said, having Valve's own stuff available is no bad thing. They have produced plenty of good content.
Valve has been a good steward with Steam, not doing nefarious things like turning off old games to sell new ones, or banning Wine users, or any other evil things they could do, but it's still funny to me to see the /. community all excited about rumors that someone is going to port a DRM platform to Linux.
Valve has yet to officially comment, but you'd hope they wouldn't invite someone up to their offices and send them home to spew lies.
Yeah well. I still say I'll believe it when I have a download link.
On that subject, whatever happened to the super-duper-optimizing compiler that was going to revolutionize everything Linux that Phoronix "confirmed" a while back?
0 1 - just my two bits
You missed the point. This (a major online store and content distribution system adding linux support) has never happened before, and it will open doors. We're already getting more and more games from indies (witness the humble bundles, for example).
Take a look at Mac support on steam. Sure they don't have everything, but they certainly have a lot.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Looks like Phoronix has been /.ed
http://www.phoronix.com.nyud.net/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_linux_dampfnudeln&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com.nyud.net/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_linux_dampfnudeln&num=2
What Linux user is going to pay money to play the small number of games available?
The Steam client is free.
You would only pay per game.
And the client will probably warn you, if you are about to buy a game, which won't run on your platform.
If you find a typo, you may keep it.
The Mac version has only 7% of the games for Windows.
Wow all valve games? So that's like 7? OMG!
But then again it removes another stumbling block for users who might be interested in Linux but want to be able to play game X before they do so, and Valve have a lot of games with strong followings - Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, to name a few.
So again what'll this be?
* Valve's own pretty damn popular Source and GoldSrc games
* A big bunch of indie games already available for Linux (largely thanks to the Humble Bundles)
* Valve's Steam content distribution platform
And that last part is important - it removes another obstacle for other big (more conservative) game developers/publishers, "Is there a distribution channel I can trust?". That's not to say there aren't plenty of other obstacles to overcome, but once the ball starts rolling... It's Valve's combination of their own great titles and a trusted distribution channel that makes this more encouraging than any other large publisher/developer porting a few popular titles over.
Me?
I already own all the Valve games other than the L4D series. The minute they work on linux I will buy them. I would be glad to play the games I already own without wine.
Yeah only because the mean is skewed by people using a purchase for Linux as a donation.
245 Mac titles at the moment http://store.steampowered.com/search#category1=998&os=mac&advanced=0&sort_order=ASC&page=1
Why would you buy them? As you said, you already own them.
As far as I understand it, it is just another platform you can access your Steam profile from. Any game that runs on that platform and you own, would already be there. Am I missing something here?
If you find a typo, you may keep it.
> It means you are cheering because you'll get a handful of games that have been on Windows for years. Woo....hoo?
Sounds a lot like the Mac version of Steam.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's a small fraction now. But once it starts working on Windows, Mac, and Linux, a lot more developers might take a look at it. Plus, Valve's development of Dota 2 means that the tools to make an RTS will be in the engine, in addition to the FPS support it already has. That might make it attractive to quite a few developers who don't have their own engine.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
When they added mac support they did not charge extra. Any games you already owned for Windows were just also available for Mac. I doubt they will do anything different.
Having a central starting point will be helpful. People have an obvious place to look for new stuff.
A lot of stuff gets neglected for lack of exposure. That's true now and it was true back in the days of Loki. The whole centralized app store approach takes a lot of burden off of the developers to make sure that people know about the product.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Which is still a lot. 331 games another poster claimed. One valve Source game ported to linux would be big news, 30 would be huge, over 300 would be a miracle.
The following are just the ones that cost money and are directly from Valve.
This is already 14 games. Adding in the free stuff like Lost Coast and modds will greatly increase this list, but even 7 Vavle games on linux would be big news.
Half Life
Counter Strike
Blue Shift
Opposing Force
Half Life 2
Half Life 2: Deathmatch
Half Life 2: Episode 1
Half Life 2: Episode 2
Left For Dead
Left For Dead 2
Portal
Portal 2
Team Fortress
Team Fortress 2
Transgaming's product is garbage. They fell so far behind Wine that they discontinued their Linux product (Cedega) 3 years ago. At the moment, they don't even have a Linux product anymore, it's gone into maintainance as "GameTree Linux". Since Wine switched to LGPL 10 years ago (in reaction to Transgaming and their refusal to send back patches), Cedega (then called WineX) their product has fallen further, and further behind, now to the point where it's less compatible than normal Wine.
If you want a commercial Windows compatibility product, look at Codeweavers. It's based on vanilla Wine, they backport their fixes, and they test for compatibility on their builds.
I meant I would buy the L4D games that I do not currently own.
I have a few computers at home running a variety of operating systems, but the two I use most frequently both run Windows 7. One is my work PC. I need to run Windows on that one because there are a few applications I need for work that are Windows only. The other is my gaming machine. I play a couple of Source mods on it,and I use Windows because it's much easier than trying to run the games on Linux.
If Valve would release Steam on Linux, and make it easy and straightforward to install Source mods on Linux, I will happily switch to Linux on my gaming machine. I'd even put up with Ubuntu if that were the distro they targeted. It would save me having to use a Windows license just to do gaming.
Perhaps Steam/Source on Linux wouldn't appeal to hardcore gamers who buy the latest AAA title every couple of months, but, for me, it's excellent.
Games like CoD, Mass Effect, the Blizzard games are more popular and will have no Linux versions. Even if all The people who play Valve games switched that wouldn't even be 1% of all PC users. It would at best be a tiny blip not the mass exodus the loony Linux people think it'll be.
http://www.sevendaycooldown.com/site/episode001/ That's an interview with Gabe Newell where he specifically states he is currently working on Linux. The Phoronix article talks about him going to see Valve working on it, and Valve are hiring Linux developers. That's pretty strong confirmation.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
It's an Elite-like: I develop it natively on Linux, although it runs on Windows also. However, the project is pretty close to dying on the vine for lack of any discernible interest. It's just a personal project done with no budget (at all), so wouldn't compete with major studios in the graphics department, but I think it's at least semi-credible on that front for a one-man indie game. (If curious, see Part1 Part2 Part3, though be prepared for amateurish presentation. I'm genuinely curious, since I thought there'd be some in the Linux community who'd like such a game).
It's a bit sad, but I suspect the project would have had far more interest if I *had* chosen to DRM it and sell it on Steam, but I'm about as anti-DRM as they come, even for a project I've put a year of my life into. I'll give up the whole thing before I'll allow DRM anywhere near it, even if that means it cannot succeed.
Who ever said it would cause mass exodus? Stop putting words in people's mouths then arguing against it. This is good news for me because I use Linux, and I want to play my games under Linux. That's it.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
I've said for years and years and years, the main reason I don't use a Linux box as my main is because I can't play any games without messing with emulators or dual boot or some such, and quite frankly, I've never want to deal with it.
However, if this goes over well, and developers/publishers start actually using it? I'll probably finally switch over to some form of Linux.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I've been running Steam under CrossOver's WINE for a couple of years now, and it's been pretty good. A few games refuse to play nice (Live!, anyone?), but those that do have excellent performance. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when a few layers of wrappers are removed.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
Yeah, a "niche market". It isn't like Steam regularly has ~4 million users on it at any given time. By comparison. Xbox Live has peaked (peaked) at 3 million (Steam regularly breaks 4.5 and has peaked at over 5). Granted, that isn't a completely fair comparison, since a lot of steam users are likely to stay logged in 24 hours a day, but the fact that Skyrim had 350,000+ concurrent players near launch indicates that no, it isn't a "niche" market at all, by any means.
Oh and Valve currently has 2 games in playable beta status (one has 50,000 concurrent players regularly) and just released a game last year.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
What exactly is it about Valve releasing Linux software that makes you think you will travel backwards in time to the point where Linux on the desktop became vastly superior to Windows?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
There is a lot to do, and not enough people doing it, all while new versions of Windows come out every x years. I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that it's not going to happen. What is more likely is just that the engines and toolkits people use become cross platform to the point wine isn't needed. (Hopefully).
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Wow all valve games? So that's like 7? OMG!
I'll take 7 good-to-awesome games over 4000 shitty ones any day of the week.
Quality, comrade, not quantity (lol, tity...).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
... pretty much anybody gaming on Linux is already probably resigned to closed source binaries: their graphics drivers if nothing else(and presumably most of the games that they've coaxed into working under WINE(maybe there are a few OSS games with such strong Windows ties that WINE is easier than a port; but I'm having a hard time thinking of any)
This. If crazyjj was right, then where was all the bitching when iD was releasing their games on Linux years ago, when an even greater percentage of Linux users were doing so for ideological reasons. If there is any bitching about Steam it will be about the DRM, and that already happens without a Linux port.
Even if all The people who play Valve games switched that wouldn't even be 1% of all PC users.
PC users or PC gamers?
If you're talking about all PC users then possibly, sure. But largely thanks to Steam and its ilk, PC gaming has been argued to be growing again.
If you're talking about PC gamers then you must be pretty mistaken, particularly with Valve running Steam today, Valve's own games are a lot larger than that in the PC gaming market.
And the other point? Well quite possibly - I'd think EA and Activision are quite conservative - but then again they can just sit back and see how well Valve does on Linux, and if it does well they'll have a trusted distribution channel via which to dip toes themselves.
In any case having now noticed your username/nick I'm not going to continue replying to your comments, as it seems you've only registered the account to troll.
It's not so much "closed source app", it's more along the lines of "app that tries to spew files all over my file system without a reliable uninstall technique, coupled with the fact that it won't play nicely with the libraries I already have installed, it has to install it's own copies". I understand the libraries thing to an extent, and I am willing to forgive that, but for god's sake, make the linux port obey the FHS at least.
Isn't linux used to power a large portion of the steam servers?
Yes, but OpenGL developers working on the Source engine wouldn't be much use there.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Oh boo hoo ya big whiner. Just because it's not perfected to your standards the first day you think they shouldn't do it? You are teh dumb.
It's an awesome first step that opens the door to a lot of future games being made for Linux once the studios get slapped in the head with data proving that there actually are Linux users who will buy games.
I think this is all part of Valve releasing their own console in next few years. Yes it runs Linux.
And the client will probably warn you, if you are about to buy a game, which won't run on your platform.
That's what it does on Mac... assuming you can even see the title on a Mac. The website shows all platforms and lists what platforms each game runs on, but IIRC the Mac native client simply doesn't show the titles that don't run on Mac.
They would be on the OSX side of valve.
Yes. However, running a server instance is the /least/ interesting thing a video game client does.
> Why would you buy them?
Windows avoidance.
Believe it or not, some people just don't like Microsoft's products. It's not some sort of "ideological" thing. They just want to use SOMETHING ELSE.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Those Bundles have a set asking price. I just pay the asking price. The fact that it is "charity" doesn't enter into it for me unless I am trying to get myself into the top 10 for awhile.
I suspect there's just more Linux users willing to pay the price being asked.
Most people are cheap bastards with Windows users in general being the biggest "freetards".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I hope a side effect of this would be added case-sensitive FS support. Running OS X with case sensitivity turned on is a hurdle for Steam.
Could someone explain why this is a big deal?
This wont allow Linux to magically play direct x games.
It wont magically make opengl attractive for game publishers.
Finally it will not fix the 3D video issues in card drivers.
I find it sort of puts the horse before the cart.
Comments?
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I wonder if Valve can include Wine integration; allow the Linux client to download the Windows-only games and launch them through Wine.
I'm fairly sure some of the "Mac compatible" games use WINE, so I don't see why not.
Next up, audio.
Please help me in getting both sound and in-game VoIP running in the Linux-native ETQW. I have spent hours and hours on this and had it working once, 3 years ago.
I've messed with Pulse Audio, ALSA, OSS-emulation, Arts, Esound and a couple of others all to no avail. I can get sound fine, but VoIP either doesn't work or causes a segfault.
The fact that all those different audio subsystems exist at all is the issue.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Valve has yet to officially comment, but you'd hope they wouldn't invite someone up to their offices and send them home to spew lies.
Why not? A certain political party does that with Fox News every single day. OK, usually they just send out the memo with the day's lies, er... "talking points" on it, but that's the routine, and a successful one it's been.
Screw you guys, I'm excited.
If Valve puts Steam on Linux, along with all/most of their Source games...I vow to finally, and fully, ditch Windows. Games are the only reason I have windows installed at all. Wine/PlayOnLinux/Crossover is good, but it's not that good. Once more games come to Linux, I predict more geeks will move to all Linux systems, and from there, drive commoner adoption of Linux.
There, I said it, year of the Linux desktop.
There is a significant number of games on Steam that have an official Linux version. Obviously that's only a fraction of the total, but it's a lot more than just the Source-games. Having all these games available through a single interface and through a single payment-processor might be enough to reach a critical mass.
Whatever way you look at it, the days of Wintel as the only platform that matters are over. It will be the most important platform for years to come, but it will end at some point. Any company that is tightly coupled to Windows should at least consider a future without it. Having a Linux-port may be a huge advantage in the future. As any company can hire a linux-hacker, the number of OS-developers working on Linux far outweighs the other platforms combined (especially if you count Android as Linux). Even if the OS of the future is not Linux-as-we-know-it, chances are that it will be heavily influenced by the current crop of Linux-developers.
When Steam was ported to the Mac the (absolute) number of mac-users was probably lower than the current Linux-userbase. Besides, Linux is what the more, ehm, fanatical users are using. Mac OS/ iOS users on the other hand tend to be more casual about gaming. Having the extreme gamers on you side could be a great advantage.
Personally I think Valve cannot afford not to do this, even if it turns out te be failure. Desura has been offering their product on Linux for month. If Valve doesn't step up they will loose the Linux market to Desura before the fight even started. If Desura becomes a hit on Linux it might challenge Steam on other platforms.
The entire demonstration seems to be too good to be true. I think it's FUD to keep Linux-users away from Desura. If they can keep up this sherade for a few month Desura will go out of bussiness.
Some further remarks. We know that Valve employs a number of Linux programmers for the server-part of the games. It has also been suggested that the Steam-backend runs on Linux. We also know that Left4dead has contained Linux-bits right from the start. It might be the case that one of the backend-programmers continued the Linux port as a hobby, just like Doom was ported to Linux by a single guy with some free time.
I generally like Valve and I really hope that they are serious, but a few years of waiting has made me a bit sceptical.
The rest of the comment was about one of the two major problems I have with Steam, and I happen to know more than a little about software development, so I'm going to speak up about that one point: The ability to collect runtime information is both very helpful for debugging and very invasive to the host system. Give the owner of the system the ability to enable it only if & when it is needed. Problem solved. Insisting on having it running at all times makes it spyware, which is rather telling about the publisher's intentions.
Hell, if nothing else, just do what Canonical suggests third party devs do and just install your binaries/libraries to /opt, put an icon in /usr/share/icons and put a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications. Problem solved. It ain't that hard, people.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
if you target for 32/64 bit and pack your libs in the package you should be fine for anything reasonably current.
(not counting things like "MLPnix" which requires libs to be in a very certain format or something else stupid or some specialty distro from 6 years ago)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
All I have to say to Valve is... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QfSzgV1q5g&list=FLvBRX_MN60k-n_Sd8IOuNsQ&index=8&feature=plpp_video
Kudos to Michael Larabel (sic?) of phoronix for not only delivering this news well before anyone else, but also getting it right (even if the dates were off).
Hopefully I get into the beta program...
Mass exodus? I just want to play Portal 2 and TF2 without having to install an OS that costs an additional $100.
I'd even put up with Ubuntu if that were the distro they targeted.
Agreed, I'd put up with whatever distro is necessary, especially because I wouldn't have to deal with it except when gaming. "Reboot into gaming distro" beats the hell out of "reboot into Windows."
Yes, exactly! I'll get to play a bunch of games that I couldn't before because I had made other decisions that are more important to me than which games I get to play. Is that not enough to be excited about? I hear some of their titles are really good, too.
Phoronix never confirms anything. Phoronix makes shit up, or possibly, at best, speculates.
You should probably read the article. Michael Larabel went to Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington and spoke to Gabe Newell among others. It isn't a question of confirmation. In this instance you're essentially claiming that either Michael Larabel is lying, or Gabe Newell and others at Valve are lying, or both. Do you have evidence of that or are you, at best, speculating?
I am speculating, admittedly. Just as I'm speculating when I suggest that Uncyclopedia, Fred Phelps or Bagdad Bob might not be telling the truth. There comes a point when trust in a source is so deteriorated that nothing they say can be taken at face value.
Phoronix reached this level several years ago.
I'm not claiming that Michael Larabel is lying. I'm claiming that it's just about as likely that Michael Larabel is lying as that he isn't. And when it comes to news, that's pretty poor odds.
May we live long and die out
I have to agree with you that Audio can be a tricky issue, and it is a potential barrier if you set your system up yourself. However, let's compare likewise systems. Windows boxen come configured with the correct drivers, etc.. You paid someone to do so when you bought the system. So pay someone qualified to set up your Linux system. You'll be glad you did.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Valve need to be able to back this up with ID Software/Epic games on the linux version. If the Linux native quake 1/2/3/4, Doom 1/2/3, Wolfenstein/RTCW games are available on steam, along with UT2k3/UT2k4/UT99 that would be a much better incentive for people to join the store. Source engine games are awesome. But as a Mac gamer I was very disappointed to see that half the games that have native ports, aren't available on the store for mac. I know Aspyr were trying to launch their own terrible competing service. I hope the Linux Steam system can dodge those issues since most linux ports of games are done in-house, or by Ryan "Icculus" Gordon. Also, it'd be nice to see some of the DOSBox game releases on Steam appear on linux. It's not that hard to setup dosbox for Linux, and all those titles run fine. Ultimately Steam on Linux can only be a good thing, I hope that it will finally goad Blizzard into action on its Linux offerings.
Portal 1&2 aren't FPSes at all.
For starters they doesn't even have weapons to shoot with for the "S" part of FPS.
And not really much adversaries to shoot at (beside a few turrets and suveillance cameras scathered accross the came)
They would be best described as First Person Puzzle or Action/Puzzle games. Lumping them into the FPS category just because they use first person perspective, would be like lumping classical point'n'clic games into RTS category, just because they also use a 2D mouse interface.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Except that HL2, Portal 1&2 and several other games waiting to be ported to Linux have all been cirically acclaimed by several rather trusted sources.
It's one thing when one single person thinks that Atari's ET is the best game ever, it's another when dozens of magazines, even more dozens of online reviewers, and countless blogs all acclaim the quality of the Portal serie (it means either that a lot of people share this opnion and you're likely to like them too, or that Valve is rather good at paying astroturfers and corrupt reviewers).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
recent revrions of pulseaudio (0.9 and 1.x), as featured in modern distros are rather good.
you need to have an ALSA configuration setting up a pulseaudio target as the default target for all ALSA based applications - but most modern distro will do that for you.
alternatively just use a soundcard with hardware mixing (for exemple EMU10k based soundblasters: Live!, Audigy 1 & 2. X-Fi's hardware mixing not supported as of yet)
also, whenever possible, please use the opensourced version of the game engine instead of the original binary. so use ioquake3 and the like (which are using modern technologies such as OpenAL and ALSA) instead of the original ETQW binary (running on the outdated OSS).
As Source is being ported *now*, it will probably use modern uptodate APIs like SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL, and thus work fine in most modern distros.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
We're speaking about plain fucking games here.
Not some complex application calling 37 different external libraries, of which 27 need to be the exact version as the software was compiled on, because of incompatible ABIs between versions.
(That happens a lot, for exemple, with complex scientific software. They tend to be compiled and tested only against RedHat, so one has to limit the choice of distros only to Red Hat, Fedora, Cent OS, Scitentific Linux, etc.)
But games. They need OpenGL, OpenAL, a few other basic standard libraries (SDL, glibc). Maybe OpenCL for hardware accelerated physics. And that's it. The first two and the optionnal last are industry standards, the other 2 are ubiquitous. If correctly coded to standards a game should work almost everywhere. A game doesn't even need toplay nicely with the OS GUI, as most of the time it's run fullscreen.
The rest of the complexity is *inside* the game binary. Like middleware for physics, media decoding and the likes. And game developper tend to link those statically to their project and/or package it together with the game.
Even Skype has more dependencies (needs Qt).
Well, it would be nice to save some space and use the system wide libraries for some functionnality (like decoding JPEG), but up until now, commercial games tend to package their own copies. At least it could be done on the Steam level (have steam require JPeg version 6), and to take care of having security updated version of these.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, then you disagree with me and a lot of other people. Everyone has different tastes, but I loved those games, and I can't really see how anyone could not love Portal and Portal 2.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Defeating the point of linux that ... you can do it all yourself.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
Who said that was the "point" of Linux?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Its the implied point. "You have the source code, if something doesnt work then you have no obstacles to fixing it yourself" and other such RMSish statements.
Not saying you should have to do it all. Just saying that the fact you "CAN" do it yourself is a significant part of the reason Linux was created and grew in the first place.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
I guess someone forgot to tell that to a whole bunch of people!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun