Slashdot Mirror
Portal Now Available On Linux
alancronin writes "Valve have released Portal for Linux through the Steam platform. If you have a copy of the Windows version you will automatically have a copy of it for Linux in your account. There are also rumors of Portal 2 coming soon."
Linux users now can do cake jokes.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The thing I found weird about this, is I've been running Portal in Wine for ages, and it seems to run better than it does under Windows!
Since Phoronix claimed originally it was both just to clear it up only Portal 1 is out for Linux, there are no hints about Portal 2 despite this article stating it and linking to a source for Portal 2 (the source of that info is an idiot). Daily linux gaming news can be found on www.gamingonlinux.com by the way :) where we actually check facts properly ;)
In British English company names are considered collective nouns, and given that Timothy is British there does not appear to be any error here. For once.
Shhh, don't say this too loud, you might hurt some Windows' users' feelings.
So you believe proper English speakers should speak in cockney slang? I don't care what the common, profane speech might dictate; I only care what is correct.
It's not slang, it's standard English. And the name of the language is a clue as to who gets to say what's what.
You can do whatever you like with the American fork of the language though. Feel free. So long as you don't claim it's genuine English.
"Released" is a bit strong a term; the port is still marked "beta."
You mean I can now play a six year old game on Linux?
No, you could play it in Linux six years ago through Wine (just like, say, Half-Life 2, Left For Dead and L4D2). Now you can play it native, if you prefer that option.
And yet if the game looks the same and plays the same, then what were those functions even being used for in the first place?
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Well, if I can not differ the feature complete version and the "bare minimum approximation" by eye, then I think of it as of complete version. Especially if it runs faster. What if I do not have money to upgrade or just do not want to do it? Is there an option in official DX to enable such bare minimum approximation and make system requirements less demanding?
Did not try Portal in wine so my opinion is based on the virtually same "runs faster" situation with Audiosurf.
Left4dead 2 (beta) is also in there. That's a new game.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Valve should consider Portal and Portal 2 along with a few other AAA titles to give away with SteamBox. That would give gamers an incentive for giving it a shot.
And yet if the game looks the same and plays the same, then what were those functions even being used for in the first place?
They were the delay loops Microsoft put in to ensure the Xbox ran faster on slower hardware.
Less sarcastically, it's hard to not produce a feature-complete Direct3D now because most of the work is done with shaders. To emulate it, you have to take the DirectX shaders and convert them to OpenGL shaders, and everything should look the same. This is probably why Wine's implementation of new Direct3D versions seems to run more games than the older versions with lots of fixed-function APIs.
Unfortunately nobody cares about your very own delusional personal definition of "correct". You can define "horses" to mean "banana" all you want, but If you want to communicate with the rest of the world, you have to communicate using words that your audience understands and understands to have the same meaning too.
Alternatively, you can of course go back to your dark and cold basement and hug your computer.
I do not believe you are reading between the lines.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
It runs better under Linux, i.e. at a higher framerate. Sorry for not clarifying that.
...there does not appear to be any error here. For once.
The night is young.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Thanks :) Going by the other replies, it seems like I already have...
Excellent news - more and more reasons to stay in Ubuntu and less and less reasons to boot to Win7. Hats off to the devs that have ported this. Does this mean that we can expect HL2 etc to follow shortly, given it's the same engine?
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS
Portal being ported is a sign of bigger things to come and a general change in how Linux is viewed. Some people prefer to see the forest for the tree just so they can crap in everyone elses cornflakes. You just have to ignore them.
I'm going to be a crybaby and point out OpenGL won't play my Portal copy on Steam with my crappy Intel GMA 950 graphics in Ubuntu 12.04. Mod me down. Using the worst in computer hardware since 1997.
Looks the same, plays the same, but a little lag when PackageKit ran. Interesting that GNOME Shell notifications appear over the game. Can't wait for Portal 2 to be released so I can finally try two-player (I only have one machine that has a Windows install capable of running it).
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
And his statement was ... WTF kind of computer do you have that can't run Portal at your monitor refresh rate? Faster than your monitor refresh rate is dumb for Portal. If you're getting faster than refresh rate it probably means its not doing vsync in which case, it doesn't look the same.
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Great of Valve to release Steam for linux and to port their games - but bloody surprising all the Steam engine, Valve made games weren't ALL read at the actual time of launch of the product. I'm sure it's not a 5 minute task to port their engine - but once they did so, one would've thought the other products would be, somewhat trivial.
Good work but not a flying start for what some speculate may be Valves long term future.
Let me know when there's a DRM free version; preferably FOSS.
Valve are considered a team of people, so they go in the same bracket as 'they have'. Also, English has no umbrella regulating body, it simply follows general consensus. Occasionally, people with OCD feel that they are doing the language a service by pointing out the real or imagined mistakes of others loudly and publicly while insulting the intelligence of their target with vulgar language. The rest of us who care notice anyway but do not feel the need to be a total prick about it. What you are going around doing is the literary equivalent of "AHAHAHA LOOK this fucking douchebag doesn't know how to tie shoelaces!". I hope you feel proud of your valiant effort to preserve the English language exactly as you found it. If you could just please re-introduce the u when you spell colour, and use ise instead of ize, that would be lovely.
This was a few years ago now, and was an AMD Athlon 64, so I was getting less than my screen refresh rate under Windows XP. Not all of us run gaming hardware!
It's news because if Portal is here now then Portal 2 is probably just a hop, skip, and jump away (even though there is no Portal 2 news yet.) You act like a slashdot headline is a big thing. It isn't. It's just what nerds are talking about, maybe.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because in Soviet Russia, everything made in China!
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Played Portal on Ubuntu last night - crashed on the tutorial and I needed to reboot. Maybe it was a one time thing. Left 4 Dead 2 was also released and it runs amazing. Just wish Guild Wars 2 would be released on GNU/Linux.
In an ideal world, code is 100% portable, and not a single line of code ever needs to be changed when porting. The reality of software development, however, and especially game development in my experience, is that software deadlines don't generally give the programmers the luxury of testing for every single platform. Producers expectations are nothing more than "make it work", and "make it work on time", without any regard for what might really be under the hood. Writing code that is portable and extensible is just not a luxury that some game programmers are given in the first place. And so when the time comes to even consider a port, the task is quite commonly either infeasible or else a whole lot of time is going to put sunk into it. Even on so-called "portable" platforms like Unity, because a codebase may not be actively developed on all of the platforms simultaneously, machine-dependencies can still creep in... and often in no small number, as programmers are simply compelled to just make do whatever they have to just to get it to work on the platform being tested.
And this blind charging (because that's all a smaller game studios ever seems to have the time to do) turns the effort of porting something that is supposed to be platform independent into one long grievous headache that requires a huge amount of developer time.
And so is it worth it for Linux, accounting for perhaps only 2% of the total desktop computing marketplace?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have, and I still do. If you think I'm lying, try it yourself; anonymous coward.
I do not believe you're old enough to remember LokiGames. We've been through this whole song and dance before.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Didn't know about that, looked up the history there. I now see your point.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory