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Valve Announces Linux-Based SteamOS
Today Valve Software announced SteamOS, a Linux-based gaming operating system designed for, as Valve puts it, "living room machines." They say, "In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we're now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases." One major feature they're touting is the ability to use the SteamOS machine to stream video games from other Windows and Mac computers in the house to your TV. They mention media streaming as well, but without much detail. "With SteamOS, 'openness' means that the hardware industry can iterate in the living room at a much faster pace than they've been able to. Content creators can connect directly to their customers. Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love. SteamOS will continue to evolve, but will remain an environment designed to foster these kinds of innovation."
But does it run Windows?
Odds are they don't make your games... so no.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want.
Thus turning the console into - dun dun dunnnnnn - a desktop?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You know, when I think back on my first Linux install way back in 1993 or so with Slackware, who would have thought that Linus's project would end up on hundreds of millions of servers, smartphones, tablets, game systems, embedded hardware and the like. I find the whole thing rather breathtaking. Linux really is one of the great successes of the computer age.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They do allow you to stream it from your main PC, which sounds like an interim step to get over the "no games for the linuxes" problem. Cautiously optimistic.
I don't know about SteamOS, but if they ever do GabeOs brand cereals, I'm never eating anything else.
Odds are they don't make your games... so no.
Actually, they are already compatible or at least playable via the home streaming feature. "In-home Streaming
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!"
How good that experience will be remains to be seen :)
It sounds like they are sticking with a GNU userland with the talk of 'Openness'
The real question I have is what will SteamOS will be forked from. Originally Steam for Linux went live on Ubuntu. Ubuntu would seem a poor candidate to fork an OS from primarily because Nvidia basically told Ubuntu we aren't supporting Mir which would make SteamOS dead end when Mir started.
If they forked from Debian I wouldn't be so worried. Or they could have forked from Fedora, CentOS, who knows. Honestly I'm just happy to see Valve pushing for AAA game development on Linux.
Read TFA:
"Hundreds of great games are already running natively on SteamOS. Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014. Access the full Steam catalog of over nearly 3000 games and desktop software titles via in-home streaming."
"You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!"
Well, they claim that you can stream games from a Windows or Mac system, so yes, sort of. Also new ports should probably appear.
This has the potential to end Windows as the dominant gaming platform; maybe even as a gaming platform in general. Once that happens, one of the biggest obstacles to mass desktop Linux adoption will be gone. Excellent.......
Now comes the question, How well will XBMC integrate with this? If they both behave well together it's going to make for a damn good HTPC setup. Any word on if this is a completely own-rolled Linux Distro, or is it, as I suspect, an Ubuntu/Debian derivative due to their previous interactions?
"Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three."
I'm assuming Wednesday is the Steambox announcement. You guys *really* need something with with a "3" in it for a launch. I don't think "Half-Life: Source" is gonna cut it.
2014: The Year of Linux on the Living Room!
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Does this make Linux qualify for Steampunk? :)
This is amazing technology. All we need now is some graphics drivers and it could be a working console.
No sig today...
Sounds pretty interesting, I would install it to see how it runs and see how the environment is.
You can't enforce DRM effectively until you lock down the device completely. So, of course Steam wants to control the OS. SteamOS sounds exactly like Microsoft's strategy of embracing, extending, and then extinguishing open standards.
So, yes, SteamOS will bring the Linux kernel to the masses, but as to the actual *benefits* of Linux -- transparency and freedom -- Valve is going to kill those.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
What's to stop them integrating Wine into the appropriate game packages and certifying them to run on Linux? That way, not everything would need a re-write. They'd be able to port a significant library right from the start, Valve would be able to verify compatibility and it'd all be pre-configured out of the box.
The original page on steam has two more icons to light up and a new countdown ending 2 days hence. Apparently there are two more announcements to go.
Silence is a state of mime.
I suppose the streaming from your PC to the Steambox would be through your local network. Is the bandwidth of a network connection sufficient for a full HD video stream? Would there need to be some lossy compression to allow streaming at a good frame rate?
ITs a working console in the same way PS4 is going to be with Vita TV. You have one heavy lifter in the house and a bunch of small streamer boxes to get it on TVs around your house.
Good-bye
Short answer: no.
Long answer: they've already made most (but not all) of their own Steam games compatible. They have no such control over the rest of the games on Steam but they aim to encourage as many other devs as possible to do the same.
So all of the older windows game work as. There are some open source ones that will need a lot of work to have them run on mac or Linux.
Now open mac os that run no non apple hardware can be even better.
Sounds like that's what they're going for- an "open" OS that can be used for any gaming device. It's a neat idea, but...
It will fail spectacularly. There is no money to be made on console hardware. Who is going to bother building a SteamOS device besides Valve? No one, because Valve is going to be making all the money.
Valve would've been smarter to go all-out, and just build a new proprietary console, but one that is supremely developer and consume friendly. Maybe that is what they are doing, but they are doing it too slowly. If the mythical SteamBox isn't at least as powerful as an Xbox One, and released within the next year, it's doomed, too.
That's not playing your games on the Linux based SteamOS, that's running the equivalent of VNC server and client between Windows and Linux. I can do that to my phone as well, but I wont claim to be playing GTA on my phone.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Nothing to stop them, but it would be a MAJOR pain for them to maintain WINE compatibility with third party software.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Having SteamOS for running a dedicated SteamBox in the living room is great but I wonder what the implications of SteamOS are for running Steam on other linux distros. I have a capable workstation at my desk and I really don't want to have to replace my current distro just to get the additional benefits of SteamOS. Will this cripple the momentum of Steam development for other distros?
Looks like Gabe is doing to PCs & set-top boxes what Google did with the phone. A customized Linux distro is a good start, but still much info missing.. does it integrate some gaming engine (maybe Source?) How much API support for hardware and software that aids in writing games? Is it even a gaming OS or is it just some content provider wrapper around Linux?
- I stole your sig.
Linux is the future of gaming because Valve created their own version of Linux.
BTW, its not living room ready if I have to set up a big PC shoebox with liquid cooling to play the same content I get on a console.
Still waiting for the actual SteamBox, but apparently I now have to give Valve suggestions on who to design it.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Whatever improvements they make will hopefully be sent as patches and pull requests to the open source projects they're likley building upon...I don't want to run a commercially run distro, or at least one that's more restrictive like Ubuntu, etc....
I run Arch for a reason.
What on earth are you talking about. All they would need to do is expose it as a public dynamic library.
That of course doesn't make it a good idea –they would have an absolute nightmare with compatibility, and it would be counter productive to getting devs to actually ship software for their system.
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> This is amazing technology. All we need now is some graphics drivers and it could be a working console.
You mean the drivers they are already focusing on for the desktop version of Steam on Linux? These are the same drivers that allow you to play BluRays on a machine that can barely load Windows.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How good that experience will be remains to be seen
Well, it is a practical way to overcome the relative dearth of Linux games on Steam. But it probably won't endear this device to the hardcore Linux crowd, who were no doubt hoping for the Steambox to be a boon for Linux games (especially in light of a lot of recent pro-Linux talk by Valve).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Unless im misunderstanding something this allow me to watch my games being played..not actually playing them on the Steam OS? Why not just stream directly from the PC to TV? I dont even see the point to that ides rather play the games not watch someone else play.
Jack of all trades,master of none
There is no semantic difference. You will be able to play your games using whatever inputs and outputs are plugged into your SteamOS system.
I've been wanting to stop dual booting for nearly two decades. The purists complain that locking you out of the OS (DRM) components is vehemently prohibited in the spirit of Open Source and basically creates the very problem OSS was designed to get away from.
On the other hand, software companies complain they need to lock you out in order to combat piracy and protect their digital assets. Without doing so, they have no way to protect their revenue stream.
I have never found a good solution to this problem. It's been a good 20 years, and nobody else has either so those of us who straddle the fence between purity and utility still dual boot.
I do not like the idea of SteamOS. I would really like the entire computer industry to be based on open formats, source and standards but that is a crack dream that will never happen. Something needs to give. Maybe this is it. I prefer to believe I trust Valve more than anyone else with something like this.
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Wine LGPL but the stuff that winetrick use and download to make some games work sure ain't that why those dll are not packaged with Wine.
How about the ones that perform better than Windows? http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
Eve Online shipped a Wine wrapper for their Mac and Linux "ports" back in the day. They just shipped a compiled Wine (with the LGPL license and source) and a script that called Wine calling Eve Online's client.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is unclear now: is it just a GNU/Linux distro (like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc.), or a vastly different OS that happens to use the Linux kernel (like Android and Sailfish)?
Circumcision is child abuse.
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Are you confusing EA with a company that doesn't reissue the same boring games year after year?
This could have a lot of ripple effects.
1) Improved Wine support.
2) Better cross platform libraries/tools.
3) Linux distro optimized for gaming.
The interesting thing to consider is that Valve doesn't need to turn a profit right away. It's a private company and Gabe is looking at the long game here. He sees his reliance on Windows as a weakness and he intends to change that.
I'm guessing you can do this with non-Steam games, so long as you've launched them through Steam. It sounds like just typical streaming technology, I doubt it requires Steamworks or anything. That said, there are plenty of "AAA titles" available that aren't under the "EA umbrella." Rather, many of the supposed-AAA games from EA lately have been quite the opposite -- more "C" or "D" grade, if you ask me.
Now Linux users can experience all the heartache and frustration that goes with Steam! Mysteriously vanishing content, random lock-outs, and a customer service strategy apparently developed by EA. I can't wait! [/snark]
On some levels, Steam is a wonderful idea, quick access to varied content, a centrally located distribution/launch point, and exposure to odder and more esoteric media are all benefits of Steam. Except when something goes wrong, which based on my experience is a fairly regular occurrence. That game you've owned for years that suddenly won't launch because Steam gets stuck in verification mode? Send them an email, and you'll probably hear back in about a month or so, and then with a request for more information.
If SteamOS creates better or more enthusiastic support from hardware manufactures for Linux, that is a net win for everyone.
Streaming is going to come with massive overhead and latency. The only reason I would want to stream is if the back-end was MUCH more powerful than the terminal. Otherwise the overhead isn't worth it. If I had a personal supercomputing cluster maybe....
Nah, that was 2011 or so. Right now i count 6 linux installations in my living room: two android phones, one tablet, this laptop, the tv and the pvr. Only one of those installations exist because i personally am a geek.
More like 2014: The year of Linux on everything but the desktop!
Indie games are often DRM free.
"Iterate in the living room"... I love marketing-speak.
Come to think of it, if I remember correctly, "iterate in the living room" is something my wife and I used to do before our daughter was born.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, Half-Life 3. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Only broad generalities are being stated on the promotional page, but are they trying to fuse the best of both PC and console worlds? (and then some?) My overly optimistic side interprets it as something like this:
For the user, you have both the reliability of it "just working" (like a console, standard hardware) and absolutely no limitations on customization (e.g. run your own linux applications, install a different linux distro, run the OS on different hardware altogether, change the hardware, run an indie game that is not on Steam but still conforms to the standard hardware, do that thing you've always wanted to do with your PS3/360 but couldn't because they're greedy fucking assholes and/or are afraid of getting sued). And just as important for console users, you also have simplicity beyond "just getting things to work": a standard UI tailored to gaming (where everyone is connected, voice chat, a marketplace, "cloud", etc etc).
For developers, you have consistency (meaning no more custom tailoring your game to tons of different hardware configurations, controllers, etc etc, and also the ability to milk the most out of the hardware), a partially community-run marketplace owned by people that aren't assholes (and the ability to, if necessary, operate outside of it while remaining on the same platform), flexibility (nothing stopping you from adding in Oculus Rift support or whatever else), and an OS specifically optimized for gaming.
That's quite optimistic though. But if this is what they're going for--or at least something close to it--it could change everything (and upset a lot of established interests). And supposing this ideal were to come about and SteamOS gains traction, this could put a lot of power in the hands of a single company. The temptation to be greedy could be too great--especially as management inevitably changes. In other words, I'm hoping they'll proactive about putting in safeguards against their future selves, because my optimistic side (which, I must say, is usually wrong) says this could be big.
I was looking forward to the Valve box, but all this talk of linux has put me off. The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm. A valve flavor of linux is more of the same.
Intels new NUC coming out in a month or two is an appleTV sized PC with an i5 proc and onboard intel graphics capable of running all valve's source games in HD. Yeah!!! No rebuying anything, it'll work on the network nice, great web access / music choices. This thing is gonna be awesome.
I think the idea is to get the game manufacturers to maintain WINE compatibility of their games. Some of the more adventurous may even recompile and link with WINE directly.
why not? Chances are your home network is sitting there doing nothing. If you load it up with a game stream... so what!
It does mean you can have a teeny tiny 'games console' in front of your TV that basically acts as a input device with a tv-out port. Just enough power to stream video and sound to the TV, and possibly add enough video processing to stream movies too when they port XBMC to it!
It also means you can game from the comfort of your bed, while your PC 'suppercomputer' whines and whirrs away as loud as it likes in the basement.
That's pretty much going to be my litmus test before considering one. Currently using a myth backend with XBMC for frontends . . . if I could use a SteamOS machine as a frontend for watching recordings, and it has other HTPC capabilities similar to XBMC (I hate the myth frontend for anything except watching TV) then it could be a serious contender to replace my XBMC boxes.
I predicted the shift to Linux gaming six years ago
http://gamerslastwill.com/2007/12/12/the-next-big-thing/
Of course, at that time, I didn't get the digital distribution right because we had such limited bandwidth with little prospect for upgrades.
toot toot.
They're using their grammar skills there.
No more console exclusives, no need to buy three consoles anymore! No need for Windows, OS X or Linux! So long Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Apple!
Yeah, that's not going to happen. I do hope, however, that it will help lower the number of Windows-only titles in the future. As a Nintendo gamer and OS X user, I'm tired of seeing Microsoft-only and Sony-only titles.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Well, it is a practical way to overcome the relative dearth of Linux games on Steam. But it probably won't endear this device to the hardcore Linux crowd, who were no doubt hoping for the Steambox to be a boon for Linux games (especially in light of a lot of recent pro-Linux talk by Valve).
http://store.steampowered.com/browse/linux/
With the help of the Indie Bundle and Steam's increasingly large library of games on Linux, it's been over a year since I bought a game that doesn't have a Linux native version, and I'm buying a fairly large number of games.
I have exactly 1 game I still play that actually requires Windows to play, and this would allow me to play that on a Linux system as well, as it's a Steam title.
I can do that to my phone as well, but I wont claim to be playing GTA on my phone.
Why not? Because when you do, you are. You just need the adverbs "natively" and "remotely" to help comprehension.
<Nitpicky Joe> Actually, no you're not. You're playing GTA with your phone, not on your phone. That's like saying you're playing GTAV on your XBox controller. In this case, your phone is the controller and display only. All processing (the with vs on portion of this argument) is still done by the computer, thus you are playing GTA on your computer with your phone. </Nitpicky Joe>
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Um, no. It has been in living rooms for over a decade. TiVo runs linux. Now get off my lawn!
Because nothing at all broke from NT 3.5 to NT 4, and nothing broke from NT 4 to W2K, ad nauseum.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You basically acknowledge that how well it works is what matters. Steam isn't saying "This is a totally unprecedented thing we've done with the in home streaming." They're not claiming novelty.
How big is your house?
The delay over 1GB copper from office/closet to living room can't be that much.
How many AAA titles aren't available through steam? It seems like only the newest AAA titles from EA are exclusive to origin, though I'm sure EA is wanting to remove them all if they haven't already.
Furthermore, if steamboxes really take off, allowing Origin to run on them might be the best option for EA, if Steam allows it or is forced to allow it. Making their own version of steambox seems ludicrous given the quality of origin so far. So much so that I expect even the executives at EA would realize that would be a bad idea. Giving up on the PC market altogether seems comparably stupid. Giving up origin and going back to steam would be a defeat.
IMO Origin is the best thing that ever happened to Steam: now I won't accidentally buy a game to discover I had been fooled by the ads and it was EA shovelware. Now if only the other "pile our own DRM on top of Steam's DRM" jerks would also leave!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So then would Nitpicky Joe also say that I'm not really watching Netflix on my phone, I'm watching it with my phone? After all, all data processing happens on their servers, my phone is just displaying what they send me. ;)
While you are technically correct (which as everyone knows, is the best kind of correct), it is perfectly fine to say I am watching Netflix on my phone, or I am playing $NintendoGame on my Wii U tablet (which is a much better example than the Xbox controller example).
With anything under EA's umbrella not available on Steam anymore - since they have their own Origin - the number of [EA] titles available will be significantly limited.
Isn't it great when the undesirables weed themselves out for you?
The Ouya has a horrible touch pad; it's terrible. Great idea, but terrible implementation. And the new Nexus 7 has an absolutely horrendous touch screen (I think the company is something like Elan) so it better not be any of that crap. I'm still waiting and hoping for a controller with a good solid touch pad that works. Spend the extra money and pick one of those old school Japanese companies, they know how to do it. If the controller sucks, I don't care how good the other hardware is, it'll still be a bad experience.
Good luck running the 25 foot HDMI cable from the room with the PC to the room with the TV, as adolf pointed out.
But won't it, eventually? It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Few native Linux games because of a virtually non-existent install-base, a virtually non-existent isntall base because there are few native Linux games.
This could be an end-run around that. If the streaming works well enough, it could help get a lot of SteamOS boxes in the wild, which builds the install base, making it a more attractive target for native development.
"How the fsck do I start notepad on this crappy excuse for a GUI?"
There's more than one way to solve that: "Go to classicshell.net and click Download Now. That'll give you your old Start menu back."
Companies like Gaikai and OnLive are doing acceptably low-latency streaming over the public internet on dinky home broadband connections. Are you sure that they can't do something relatively low-latency using GPU encoding over a gigabit ethernet home network?
Valve has talked about there being multiple tiers of steambox, with the lowest one being basically a thin client, for the streaming. In that case, yeah, your gaming desktop is going to be much more powerful than your terminal. And since most modern GPUs have dedicated hardware for video encoding, it's not going to cause much of a performance impact either.
Very little games actually use DirectX-specific extensions (primarily because DirectX is not inter-compatible with platforms such as the PlayStation or Mac and these days a lot slower than GL).
But DirectX is more inter-compatible with Xbox family platforms. This is supposed to make Windows/Xbox 360 dual platform releases easier, and in fact, Xbox Live Indie Games on the Xbox 360 was pretty much the only way for small companies to get games on a console during the seventh generation.
Except OnLive didn't use VNC, and the techniques used when targeting lossy 10 megabit internet connections is rather different than when targeting low-loss 1000 megabit home networks...
The WiiU, for all its flaws, uses miracast over 802.11n for the tablet thingy, with imperceptible latency (low enough to be perceptually instant, I think under 20ms is the accepted threshold for that, at least for VR). There's no reason that Valve shouldn't be able to accomplish latencies low enough to work for twitch gaming using wired gigabit ethernet.
A modern console isn't that far removed from a PC shoebox with liquid cooling.
Hardware-wise, this is correct. Marketing-wise, the difference is that "a PC shoebox with liquid cooling" ships with a mouse and keyboard but no gamepad. This means PC game developers are less likely to spend time==money on even the most basic gamepad support in PC games or on porting games in gamepad-heavy genres to the PC.
Also, many third party games are built on Valve's game engine, which is Linux compatible.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Your home router probably run Linux too.
the source code [...] doesn't come with the meshes, textures, maps, audio, and scripts to actually run the game
Making the engine itself but not the art assets available in source form accomplishes that.
A lot of "assets" include scripts for NPCs and set pieces and the like. Are those code or art? And besides, how would one discourage mass unauthorized copying and sharing of the assets if said assets are accessible to a piece of free software running on a computer that the user controls?
You can study it, modify it, and fix bugs that crop up.
Is the fact that the player can't see around concealment a "bug"? In online multiplayer, making other players' concealment ineffective would give a player an unfair advantage.
Or, perhaps it'll do the exact opposite, since 'nix and SteamOS users can just stream the Windows version...
Probably does. It's not in my living room tho :)
I dont get it. What are they talking about? Has Linux ever been rock solid? Upgrade your kernel, and things breaks apart. That is hardly rock solid to me.
Actually the kernel is really, really good. My experience is that when there is a problem with Linux-based OS, it's without exception in some userspace component.
As a sidenote, does Linux have anything that is reminiscent to Windows Resource Protection, i.e. a mechanism which detects tampered system files and recovers them automatically?
When it releases, i'll post the link here for you : )
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
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That only works for the single viewing use case.
Plus it requires an ugly tradeoff both in terms of quality and usability.
For anything you touch more than once, local storage easily trumps "streaming".
Some people even have bandwidth caps to consider.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Okay, now what's the TEMPORAL difference?
Probably enough to make any game needing real-time interaction to fail spectacularly.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
> If a system can barely load Windows, its probably not suitable for games anyway.
Yes. Because any Linux PC is going to be restricted to an outdated CPU.
The original FUD talking point was that Linux doesn't have suitable device drivers. What Linux can do with ION kit quite handily destroys that idea.
So does Valve's own comments on the matter.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Nah, that was 2011 or so. Right now i count 6 linux installations in my living room: two android phones, one tablet, this laptop, the tv and the pvr. Only one of those installations exist because i personally am a geek.
I know there is a Linux kernel in Android, but there isn't really a Linux OS or GNU/Linux distribution if you want. You can just as well say that Android is Java. Probably similar for the PVR. When people for well over a decade predicted that this is the year of Linux on the desktop, it was clearly implied that we were talking about the full GNU/Linux distribution, as a compatible platform alternative to Windows. That an embedded Linux kernel only is used in devices isn't really fulfilling that prediction.
Close; it was actually Cedega (a commercial and somewhat closed fork of Wine that focused on game support; these days Wine is better than Cedega at most games) on Linux and Cider (Cedega for Apple) on OS X. The Cider port is still active (and I think it's actually a port, i.e. they recompiled the game client through Cider rather than using Cider as a translation layer the way Wine/Cedega are usually used) but the official advice for running Eve on Linux these days is "just install it in Wine." They found there weren't enough Linux players to make it worthwhile to provide commercial support, but there's plenty of unofficial support and the game runs well.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
http://s14.directupload.net/images/130921/m6gqcywx.gif
Can someone reproduce this?
They wouldn't using generic WINE. They would package wine into the install for the specific game. GOG already does this using DOSBOX and ScummVM. There is no reason that the same kind of packaging couldn't be done with Wine to run on Linux instead of DosBox to run on Windows.
Playing the Steam game I want to play on my PC requires a PC.
Playing the Steam game I want to plan on my SteamOS box requires a SteamOS box, and a PC.
Seems like a real difference.
Actually, I was more concerned about the delay in various compression and encapsulation stages.
My computer can already do video-out to my TV. No need for a SteamOS box.
Until they get a lot of mainstream games on it, instead of a bunch of indies, they are kind of a useless middleman.
Most home networks are wireless these days. Wireless networks are the modern equivalent of the old ethernet collision domains, with nasty unpredictable spikes of latency. For twitchy games (like most FPS), this sounds like a very bad idea. I predict many domestic dramas when little sister fires up Youtube or Skype, or the neighbor pops a meal in the old poorly shielded microwave.
Think of it more as a HTPC that can basically play networked games instead of just streaming media content. You can throw a lower powered HTPC type setup in your living room and play games on it while sitting in comfort on your couch while your higher powered ( read - generally noisier ) gaming rig in the other room does the heavy lifting.
Then again, it may well be that you don't want to go super low powered on the HTPC box since the way they are talking at least some newer games are targeting the Linux based steamOS natively.
All in all, I will definitely be watching the release. It should at the very least be interesting to see what they ship back upstream, not to mention how big name game support will affect the adoption of Linux. Another area of interest is how they will support the OS; how quickly will new hardware be supported, how quickly will cards be deprecated ( looking at ATI / AMD who as of right now like to drop support much much quicker than NVidia ).
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
A lot of the "Linux games" currently offered on Steam actually are just Windows binaries packaged together with a "private" Wine/Cedega/Crossover version. And the added layer of complexity does sometimes cause trouble, too.
Not really - which AAA titles has EA release in the last years?
Are they going to share their patches to stuff like the open source radeon driver, the open source nvidia driver, and mesa to upstream?
They might just say 'we will give you all the source for our linux distribution, except the steam client(obviously), the streaming client, and any in house made performance enhancements.'
If you have a multi-core PC with a modern GPU you basically have a super-computing cluster from a decade ago.
While it may well flop, this seems like a very credible challenge to Microsoft's dominance in gaming. Given a very specific subset of hardware like a steam box will represent, linux can run flawlessly and offer great performance. Valve can throw together tremendous functionality very cheaply by bundling existing applications like XBMC or VLC, not to mention WINE. As with linux in general, many of WINE's configuration problems and glitches go away when you start thinking about a very specific subset of hardware.
The question is, how does Microsoft respond to it? Do they start looking to pursue intellectual property claims against WINE, or against Valve for using it? (or is this the very reason that Valve is pushing for native ports of games?) What else can Microsoft to to put the brakes on Valve?
Insert comment here ...
Streaming games to the Nvidia Shield sure seems perfectly capable without any noticeable temporal interference.
Thirty four characters live here.
I'm pretty sure that my 8 core i7 counts as an 8 node cluster.
It certainly does for this meme.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
So? In my workplace dozens of people run stuff on their screens that is really being handled by a cluster and displayed where they are sitting via X. It's the end results that matter. If it needs a client server way to get that end result and they are not hiding it then I see nothing wrong with it.
Fair enough, but ping your local network and see how much difference you get over one hundred metres or whatever. Is one fifth of a millisecond plus a little bit of overhead for polling inputs really going to matter? Obviously not.
Sorry to point out something so obviously stupid, but you probably should try to think before posting because the newbies will take you at your word instead of thinking themselves.
Most recent graphics hardware even at the bottom end has decent mpeg4 decoding so that's a pretty safe bet no matter what the CPU is in the thing.
Bandwidth can be assumed to be 100Mb/s or better so that's not a big deal, and dedicated hardware at both ends capable of handling fast video encoding can be assumed at both ends as well if the MS Windows machine has a video card less than around six years old. Older than that and you can get the deed done with mpeg2 decoding in hardware.
It's a solved problem for local networks where bandwidth is plentiful. Less than 1Mb/s it's a bit harder but that's not the environment.
You can compensate for the latency spikes somewhat by using a protocol without delivery guarantees and simply ignoring any packets that don't arrive quickly enough. You'd need to use an error-tolerant video stream, though. Perhaps some error correction, if you've got throughput to spare.
Of course, the solution to this could be as simple as Valve saying "streaming does not work over wireless".
9ms over 20 feet of Cat5e from my laptop to the router to the other computer 3 feet away physically but connected by another 20 foot length of Cat5e.
So not bad. Certainly usable for most things, excepting the most twitch-festy FPS games and fighting games which are seriously timing/frame dependent.
But then we have the issue of input/output lag on the TV itself, at least older ones. Most newer ones now days have something to enable a lower-latency gaming mode. My TV has no lag on the VGA connection.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This may be a solution to the catch-22 of needing players to entice devs to make Linux games, but needing games to entice players to Linux. Hopefully, it'll work.
I'm getting 0.2ms to a server on a different subnet via two switches and a gateway with multiple network cards. If your relatively short connection is 45 times slower than that something is very wrong, maybe a damaged cable.
That would indeed protect the system files, but I think that just mounting the root read-only is a bit crude solution and not necessarily what we want.
Not one comment voted 3+ has spotted the potentially hideous ramifications of this.
All new PC games will be console ports, because you'll be playing them on your TV screen over the SteamOS streaming feature. That means console UIs.
I hope to fuck they include a toggle for a PC monitor UI.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
You've still given up
Says who?
We were talking about launching programs. I don't need pipes for that. I know what I can do in a shell, I do it all the time, every day. But I don't need a shell to launch a program, and Alfred is actually faster and has better completion than bash.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What's going to be important is the encoding and decoding process at either end - they could have more of an impact than the network delay if done badly. Also if people use wifi I expect they may see much less consistent performance.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
The fact that you can plug a Knoppix thumbdrive into almost any system and get booted to a working GUI with sound shows that Linux hardware support is not only good, it's amazingly good.
Use Windows To Go (assuming you have an Enterprise license) and try getting anywhere near the hardware compatibility you get from Linux LiveCDs.
A lot of people think Linux has relatively more installation problems because it might have some install quirk on their hardware. Windows has quirks too - they've just been worked around by a 3rd party before and built into their recovery disk/partition. God knows I spent way too long getting reference drivers for wifi chipsets and printers back when my kids wanted Vista.
well in reality, I invented the left hand-only gaming keyboard. in 1999. If only I'd patented it.
Though my original idea still hasn't been brought to market, companies like nostromo, logitech, and razer have come pretty close.
I've been playing games for 31 years.
other ideas I've gotten wrong:
The advent of home linux servers for media
that we'd still being using disc for distribution in 2013.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Maybe in 2002 but I suggest you take a look at what is built into video cards now - it's not just 3D acceleration but encoding and decoding of video as well right up to full on h264 even at the cheap embedded side of town. Wireless is probably going to be at least in the order of 10Mb/s in most places if that's the connection used so the amount of compression is not going to have to be much anyway.
How about the fist bump to exchange data on smart watches?
Since all vendors are veering towards standardized PC hardware that you would find in the PS4 and XBOX ONE, you're going to eventually see vendors make their controllers and peripherals with a standard like USB or the hinted at wireless USB. They will work on PC, XB1 and PS4.
They will come to see that it's going to be prestigious to sell the most controllers. And others will join in the market like Mad Catz and Logitech.
Apple will still be proprietary on their home entertainment hub. Android will become cross-platform for games on SteamOS. There might be an android application to stream games from your PC running steam. Game servers will become platform agnostic. Eventually publishers will want to claim all their players can compete with those on another platform. And finally, buying a rockstar game on XB1 or PS4 will grant you a Steam key as publishers finally realize you don't want to buy the white album again.
I could be wrong.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Don't see any difference between this and just about any other Internet or mail-order companies.
"Allow 28 days for delivery", ffs, let alone when there's a complaint. Just spent SIX MONTHS waiting for my own car insurance company to acknowledge a single letter of dispute, and I was sending them registered post and threatening court action and STILL they couldn't even be bothered to say "We got your letter. We're looking into this." And, no, they don't have a phone number where anyone on the other end can even BEGIN to deal with things like this.
A company in the US that sells digital video games in the THOUSANDS so gets every technical support problem known to man for things that aren't even their code? I can live with a slow response.
And return policy? It's digital content - I've yet to see any decent policy on such things.
But if you don't like Steam, stay away from it. Less customers like yourself is less hassle for them to deal with. Personally, I've been there since day one and have IMMENSE customer service requirements for the companies that I deign to deal with. But Steam win on the very first item - try your best to ensure that I never need it. Haven't once had to contact them for anything, because I read up and knew what I was buying before I even put a credit card number anywhere near it.
I don't know about you, but my mid-size tower would look a little funny hanging on the wall next to my flat screen. Sure, I could buy a 30' hdmi cable, but I've yet to find a decent wireless keyboard and mouse that works from more than 15' away and doesn't cost $100.
Have you played a modern game, recently? They are all designed around gamepads.
Is this true of consoles, or is it also true of PCs? You mention "gamepads", plural, so other than Street Fighter IV, which popular PC games allow use of multiple gamepads?
Crunchbang works fine with out the commandline.
If you live in a block of flats and several other residents each use their own wifi networks you will not get 10Mb/s
SURELY NOT!!!!!