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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.'"
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.
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?
>Oh lovely modded as flamebait
That's because you made a sweeping generalization about "linux people" that was meant to paint us all in a bad light.
It's flamebait. Deal with it.
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BMO
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.
Sadly more likely the studios other than Valve (EA and Activision, cough cough) will expect, nay DEMAND that the SteamBox be as high or higher than the assrape prices they charge on consoles and will thus screw the whole deal.
Lets face it folks, they sell PC games cheaper because they know the PC gamer can always pirate if they get too damned greedy for too long. Valve has shown with their Steam Sales the way you catch more flies is with honey and the other publishers look at the giant money truck valve gets every Steam sale and want a piece of the pie.
That is the exact opposite of a console, where thanks to being "DRM...in a box" they know Joe Average isn't gonna be able to pirate squat without breaking out a soldering iron and developing some skills, so they can keep the price jacked up longer. it won't matter to the game houses that it is basically a PC, so are the other consoles but the second you put it in a living room they start rubbing their hands together and figuring to the cent how much they can squeeze.
So while i personally would love the hell out of it if Valve pulls it off, as long as they don't abandon us PC Steam users of course, i'd wait until we saw what the other major publishers do. Having Valve games on a SteamBox is all well and good, but if ALL you get is Valve games its not gonna go anywhere.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.