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Valve Continues Recruiting Top Linux Talent
An anonymous reader writes "Valve Software, in their Linux Steam / Source Engine effort, plus the rumored Steam Box, is continuing to hire top Linux developers. So far they have poached the lead developers of the DarkPlaces open-source engine used by Nexuiz/Xonotic, the founder of Battle for Wesnoth, and just yesterday they hired Sam latinga, creator of Simple DirectMedia Layer. According to Michael Larabel, they are still trying to hire more Linux kernel developers, driver experts, and other 'extremely talented Linux developers.'"
First party (Valve) games are a given since they all support OpenGL to work on the Mac.
It's up to the game developer to support Linux however.
See, I just enjoy Steam for the community. The games are really secondary to what is a top notch social network and built in chat program.
I repeat what I said before in another post:
Not only that but if you think on it, Valve can actually create a dedicated gaming platform using Linux (with dedicated hardware or not). Steam on Linux might just be the entry point for it.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2896153&cid=40218485
This increasing interest of Valve on hiring Linux based platform developers seems to be going in that way.. : )
See, I just enjoy Steam for the community. The games are really secondary to what is a top notch social network and built in chat program.
+1 Insane?
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo may be in for an interesting landscape in 2013.
It's reasonable to assume Valve isn't doing this for the Linux desktop (though they may be doing things in such a way that Linux desktop is covered 'for free'), but likely related to the other rumors of a Steam branded game console.
If Steam gives a console-equivalent experience in a manner similar to their PC platform, it's likely to be as capable as Sony and MS platforms but a lot more approachable. The 'big studios' are likely to be very enthusiastic about it. So the 'AAA' games will likely hit a Valve platform and probably with a bit more aggressive pricing (at first) compared to Sony and MS.
On the low end, Ouya may stir things up significantly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Given that it seems all Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony will be going with AMD for their next-gen graphics hardware, nVidia will likely be the one to supply graphics hardware for the Steam box (as their Linux drivers are by far the most mature).
They are buying knowledge specifically experience not just skills. They are employing people who know far more about linux development than their current staff do.
Employing windows or whatever devs will delay them from having productive staff and will increase the chance they take the wrong approach to the problem. Only the genius windows devs will avoid thinking the windows way is the standard or best way to do something in linux.
But... this landscape is actually a fractal. If you zoom in a bit you can see whole new landscapes open in front of you. Someone who mostly programs in C# on windows system may not be entirely comfortable with writing a socket server on a UNIX machine. The various UNIX graphics libraries might be confusing and annoying to that person as well. As you start to learn the differences for things like socket handling on BSD style systems (And HPUX ugh,) you start to realize that platform experience does matter. Maybe not so much for your average application development, but if you're trying to squeeze something out of the hardware, it kind of does. A while back I wanted to write a segv stack dumper for C on an AIX system. The interrupt handler installation was pretty standard, but the stack dump code was VERY AIX specific.
Likewise on the language side of things, sure you can pick up the basics of Perl or C or any other (reasonable) language pretty quickly, but mastery of any specific language is something that could easily take an entire career. There's always something more to master. Maybe you want to force loop unwinding with funky switch tricks, maybe you want use C++ templates to set up matrix math at compile time. Maybe at some point you realize how unmaintainable doing that sort of thing actually is and decide not to do it anymore. The more you delve into any one area, the more you will find to learn. Things that looked good at one level might be completely different at the next.
The vast majority of programming projects out there really don't need this level of mastery, of course. Which brings you back to the top of the fractal. If you're the kind of person who can recognize the patterns, you can get by reasonably well on any platform in any language. But for any specific task, someone with more experience on that platform or with that language will almost always write more efficient code.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Poaching is the act of taking another persons livestock. The use of the word in this context means the author considers people the equivalent of livestock to the corporate ranchers.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I did my Google Summer of Code project under Sam. He's a great guy, and he basically wrote SDL from nothing. Hell, as far as I'm aware, he's possibly the only living person who understands its autotools-based build system ;-).
He won't just be able to port games. If the rumors are true and Valve is building their own full-scale gaming platform (a Valve console, say), then putting Sam Lantinga with the Source engine for starters will be a great start to their platform's API.
A MUCH smarter move would be to back some of that giant Valve money truck over to the ReactOS guys. Lets face it folks DirectX won years ago because the kronos group cared more about CAD than they did 3D gaming, but if Valve can get a stable Dx11 running on Linux then they can just do an end run around MSFT, and the ReactOS idea is a good one.
Imagine a gaming Linux that was "clicky clicky" simple when it came to things like drivers without being beholden to MSFT and their retarded dreams of being Apple? Hell if MSFT would have given XP X64 the support they should have most folks would have probably been happy to stay on XP, as RAM limits was the thing that pushed many over and now that they are gonna try to ram a stupid appstore down everyone's throat having an OS that'll run DirectX that valve can control would be a smart move.
Like it or not folks OpenGL just isn't as good as DirectX, its too hacky with all the extensions and its just not been given the love like it had in the late 90s when it looked like it had a shot at the title. if you were to suggest getting rid of kronos and focusing on gaming again? I'd be ALL for it, but it looks like OpenGL is gonna be for the CAD guys more than the gamers. If you really want decent gaming support you'r either gonna have to get both GPU manufacturers to focus a hell of a lot more on OpenGL or you're gonna need DirectX support, simple as that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I don't think they'd port to linux just cause 'it's a good thing' to quote John Carmack on his motives for having linux versions of past games. Sadly, even id doesn't do that anymore.
John played his part admirably, both in providing the open community with several lovely, pragmatic examples of high performance 3D engine design and in preventing Microsoft from killing off OpenGL as a gaming platform. I think that's enough. We ought to be able to take it from here.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Lets face it folks DirectX won years ago because the kronos group cared more about CAD than they did 3D gaming
Let's face it, you're a trolling FUDster. In case you haven't noticed, OpenGL rules the world at the moment, except for exactly one segment that Microsoft runs as a walled garden (an $8 billion vanity project) and the PC gaming segment from which Microsoft failed to completely evict OpenGL, not for want of trying or lack of expenditure. Every other platform is OpenGL, and those platforms are growing far faster than Microsoft's DirectX segment.
On top of that, DirectX has gone back to being the crappy API. Sure, it was first to move on some necessary improvements to the 3D rendering pipeline and for a time it held a technical lead over OpenGL in some ways. But that is history. OpenGL 4+ is to DirectX as... an Arabian stallion is to a Camel? Sure, Microsoft's Camel can race, but it still smells like a camel.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Since GP has conveyed his enjoyment of the Steam community, I think the more apt way of wording the same message is "lol u mad?"
Well, the linux market share isn't yet growing
Actually, it is. Slowly but surely. Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest obstacle to Linux adoption for younger people is exactly gaming. I know quite a few peopl whose systems are dual-boot between linux and windows specifically for this: they use Linux most of the time, and then switch to Windows to play.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
I bet Valve will help with the 3rd party developer support, perhaps a cross-platform answer to DirectX.
Do you mean OpenGL? i think some one has already written it
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
For years you heard the "people wont like linux because they cant go down the store and buy software for it"... As the appstore proves, people actually do love the convenience of the repository model... Now if only all those linux based netbooks had come with a proper distro, a usable repository and a graphical interface to it, instead of the gimped distros they had.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Let's face it, there are three things keeping Microsoft's OS in business: the Office ecosystem, games and people who spent their whole lives learning one way of doing thing, and don't want to change. Everything else not only can be done better by someone else, but is being done better by someone else.
With every new OS release, Microsoft themselves screw the people who fear change. Office is still the cash cow, but between LibreOffice and the Googlighting Stranger, their desktop suite is only a few years ahead. I can't comment on Sharepoint and Exchange, so I'll concede they probably play a major role in many businesses, and that many of those same businesses have no interest in Windows 8 Metro. Finally, there's games. Games, and DirectX games, was the reason to buy Windows. Hell, it's the reason I run it. But, in the heavily politicized corporate environment of Microsoft, games have a problem, and that problem is spelled XBOX. So we get abominations like MS GameZone, Games For Windows Live and Games for Windows Marketplace, or whatever they're calling it now. The Xbox people can't have windows cannibalize their games. This is how Microsoft lost to Linux in the HTPC battle: an Xbox belongs in the living room, not a Windows Box. Things have gotten so bad, the other players in the industry have their own Microsoft-Free group to promote gaming.
So Valve brings on board a developer with demonstrated skills in making cross-platform gaming tools. If they were able to produce a set of tools that allowed games to be developed and easily ported between the various full flavors of Linux, Mac, PC and Android, worked on Chrome OS, and connected to the largest online game delivery platform in business, well, wouldn't that be cool?
Don't worry, they'll probably do something less ambitious and more profitable.
Respectfully (or perhaps not) you lack the slightest clue about anything to do with 3D graphics and it shows. This $50 Radeon running OpenGL 4 under Catalyst says you are talking out of your butt. A quick trip to Google makes nonsense of your FUD. Facts are a bitch for a guy like you, aren't they?
OpenGL ES - do you even know what it is? OK, that was rhetorical, obviously again you don't have a clue. Allow me. OpenGL ES is OpenGL with the legacy fixed function pipeline stuff stripped away. Begin/End is gone (use drawarrays). Feedback is gone (do your own transforms). All kinds of crap is gone. But all the drawarrays, vertex buffer objects, frame buffer objects, shaders ... all that stuff that maps well to 3D hardware is still there. Plus some added functionality like fixed point numbers that was later added to OGL 4. In other words, OpenGL ES is no toy, sorry to rain on your one troll parade.
As for Kronos, the bitching from hotheads died down long ago when it was demonstrated how to advance the library specs properly without losing compatibility. Nobody except Microsoft retreads whines about that any more. Coming down the pipe pretty soon is the new stateless API. DirectX is already chasing OpenGL taillights, and with the stateless API in place DirectX will be completely lost in the dust. Meanwhile, OpenGL has already evolved into a great API for games and CAD at the same time, just as Microsoft hoped it never would be.
Time to pull your hairy foot out of your mouth, or maybe you love the taste of toe jam.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.