Valve Looking to Port Games to Linux? 129
Martin Bozic writes "Valve is apparently looking for senior engineers to port games to Linux. They have an ad up on the official site looking for a Senior Software Engineer with experience in 'systems engineering designing and developing communications software and hardware solutions including resolving problems surrounding real-time and non real time PC- based systems using C++ and network programming algorithms and their interaction with physical devices.' One of the lines under the job description is the simple statement: 'Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.'" No reason to get excited about this before they make an official announcement; while this may eventually mean Half-Life 2 running under Linux, they may just want penguin-based folks to play Peggle.
Sure, why not? (Score:1, Funny)
I wonder if this means Steam under Linux?
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Adobe CS3 wouldn't go amiss either, but I doubt we'll see that happening any time soon.
quick, somebody call Icculus (Score:2, Insightful)
Porting games to the OLPC (Score:1, Flamebait)
It's a much better use of Ryan's precious time to work on porting games to the open source OLPC platform [laptop.org] which will bring new educational games to millions of kids, instead of working on closed source software like Valve which will only bring old violent games to a few thousand hard core Linux fanatics.
-Don
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Personal observation: You're the most famous person who's ever replied to one of my posts!
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If they do port HL2... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Marketer#2: Hey, I've got it! Mention Linux!
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Re:If they do port HL2... (Score:4, Informative)
Urban Terror.... (Score:2)
Nice move. (Score:4, Funny)
It could be server software (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably right (Score:3, Insightful)
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I keep seeing this comment floated here, I don't see any evidence presented though.
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I've done it.
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As always, reality will be what reality is regardless of our assumptions.
strike
AMD opened up ATI drivers, so this makes sense (Score:1)
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People boast about better drives all the time and as a Linux user I want to see better drivers as well. I also want to see the games. Back in 1998 / 1999 I went to Electr
Peggle? (Score:1, Informative)
Maybe it'll work with wine?
Counter-Strike: Source runs under Wine now... (Score:1)
Or Servers (Score:2)
Drop DX and use open GL (Score:1)
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Best news all day (Score:1)
Re:IF, just, IF (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years ago, I spoke with someone from one company that makes astronomy-based software who said that they decided not to release their software in the early days of Linux because of the demand at the time from Linux extremists to release the source code. Please don't scare Steam into the same kind of retraction by suggesting or insisting that they release their code as well. You can be almost guaranteed that Steam would be a binary release, and there's nothing wrong with that.
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We ran into exactly this as well. We had binaries for both Windows and Linux and a significant portion (read: 75%+) of the queries about the Linux software included questions about getting the source code for it as well. More than a few indicated that
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That seem fair enough to me, you can even get the source code for Windows now adays.
If they want the source, charge them for it and slap on a big NDA etc...
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That can be taken a few ways, but it all boils down to (at most) an annoyance.
First, it's only natural that only the Linux (potential) users of your product would insist on source or nothing. Nobody who feels that way would use Windows.
Second, anyone who feels that way won't use your product if it's Windows only either, so releasing a Linux binary doesn't hurt sales at all.
Third, a simple FAQ saying "the source is not available and never will be" would deflect a lot of the futile queries.
Finally, it
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Re:IF, just, IF (Score:5, Insightful)
You are coaxing a timid animal out of its hole only to start screaming at it when it pokes its head out, forcing it to run back into its hole out of fright. Knock it off, damn it!
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Re:IF, just, IF (Score:4, Insightful)
Um... he didn't "demand" that. He just pointed out that some people value 'software freedom' highly, and that value may (for such people) outweigh the utility of closed software, no matter how many hours were spent coding it. The fact that someone doesn't share your tastes or priorities is not prima facie evidence that they are wrong. De gustibus and all that.
Sure, Linux has 'free-software purists' among its users. How could it possibly be otherwise? If they were using Windows or Macs, they would not, ipso facto, be free-software purists.
You seem to be implying that any free-software purism among any Linux users will scare off companies. Perhaps that's even true (though I doubt it, and I'll need more than a couple of anecdotes to convince me of that) but I have to ask why companies are that timid? Don't they know that there are also plenty of pragmatic, 'impure' Linux users, too?
Re:IF, just, IF (Score:5, Interesting)
The very vocal purists seem to paint the picture of the entire community. You also have companies like MS ensuring them that it is worthless to bother with them. After walking into a site on several occasions to find an unpatched windows 2000 server that was also a file server and router that was owned by a lot of different people, I decided to recommend pulling it out, replacing it with a linux box as a firewall/router and then after rebuilding it once again, keep it behind the firewall.
A notes on this, the owners had a rocket scientist for a son in his mid 20's who set this up and maintained the server, I was only called to get them up and going again on several occasions. I know that windows servers, can run on the Internet without getting infected with something or completely pawned. That isn't the point, the point is that no one qualified to make it happen was around the server until after the fact.
Anyways, the normal admin/maintainer started calling me a linux zealot because I mentioned using the *nix boxen as a firewall to protect the windows devices. As if that was a bad thing?. They had an old computer that could have been easily used. He convinced the owners (mom and dad) to put a Dlink wrt54 in as a firewall instead and about cried when I told him it ran linux as the device's base OS. Now, he had to get the idea that linux was bad somehow. He was also studying for his MCSA at the time. He was dead set against linux for some reason and ended up pointing to some comments from the vocal purists to support his beliefs.
I think the MCS* training warned him about linux and he became convinced enough to end up being an MS fanboy. But it wasn't hard for him to show outrageous comments on message boards that appeared with no context in a vein attempt to prove his point. I still laugh when I get a call asking if X behavior is normal. I guess some people take the term using the right tool for the job to a whole new meaning.
I can only imagine that companies looking to support linux have came across the exact same stuff. They have MS on one hand saying this is bad, your computer will blow up and date your wife in front of you, and at the same time, purist will be letting them know that want everything or nothing at all. The pragmatic, 'impure' Linux users don't even get recognized.
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"There is no cause so noble it will not attract some kooks." - Larry Niven
You're kind of reinforcing my point there. Quoting irrational message board comments is not an argument. I defy you to name a platform that doesn't have its irrational fanboys [penny-arcade.com]. The guy you're talking about had a negat
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Maybe we should get more of the impure users to voice their opinions and support. But the issues are clouded way before we can rationally look at why it is being said. A lcd monitor works by displaying several colors
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The pragmatic, 'impure' Linux users don't seem to be as vocal. They don't seem to flood message boards with statements of "thats ok, I don't need the source, thanks for supporting my platform anyways.
I'd have to say that I'm far more 'impure' than pure when it comes to Linux software. I completely agree with the "thats ok, I don't need the source, thanks for supporting my platform anyways." mentality. It's when that support stops that I'd like the source code. I keep a Linux-2.4-based partition on my system to play a few games that Loki released. Games I paid for. It would be nice to dump that partition and recompile those games to work with current software. If a company wants to offer closed-source s
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I think the MCS* training warned him about linux and he became convinced enough to end up being an MS fanboy.
I just wanted to comment as someone who holds some MC* certifications, that if the MCS* training warned him about linux, it was probably due to his trainers and not anything Microsoft put into the training program (said programs mostly ignore the existence of Linux and behave as if Microsoft software were alone in the universe).
And btw I work for a Microsoft Gold Partner and I haven't seen such behaviour, we all like the way using MS software makes things easier (yeah we know and worry about the lock-in
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I don't really know what they are doing in the last few years. It could have been the instructors pushing that lin
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And if you break the meaning of "prerequisite" he is in fact "requiring" source code to be released because of his wonderfully euphemistic "software freedom". (I didn't realize that it was enslaved somewhere.) How did you possibly miss that HUGE
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Oh, come on. Software freedom, as used by the purists, does require access to the source code. Now, whether you value that (or how much you value that) is a separate question. So far as I can see, you appear to be the one waving the huge brush around, where a simple statement somehow manages to proclaim everything that's ever been said by any
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Who are we to make such demands? You may as well ask: "Who are you to demand that you be granted freedom of speech?" or "Who are you to demand that companies don't treat you as a badly?" or whatever.
As citizens of free countries, we are all very much allowed to make loud demands for freedom from whomever we wish. It doesn't mean that the entities in question have to care about o
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I hardly think Valve is a timid animal, and dealing with the demands of its existing customers is almost certainly more difficult. Anyway, the dedicated servers already run on Linux, so it's not like they're never touched it before.
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--ryan.
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All mainline distros now ship with kernels which support TPM and 99% of the machines likely to run their games have it onboard. From there on they can implement an authentication scheme based on PKI and machine keys (or user keys signed by the machine one).
In fact it is way easier than on Windows XP where you have to "hide" parts of your auth. On linux you can leave the entire thing in the open, supply source, publish the algorithm and it will still be unbreakable due to the under
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Encryption will give you the copy protection function of it which is essential to use it for secure distribution. Copies shipped to one account will not be useable by other accounts. This can be done under linux in a fashion which is very hard to break.
The other function of Steam and similar frameworks AFAIK is to be software police and make sure play
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My point was that none of that work is needed on other platforms.
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Don't look at distributions as one version of windows. It isn't. It is more akin to each revision of windows. There have been compatibility problem in windows when going between 3.1x to 95, 95 to 98, 98 to 98se, 98 to ME, windows 2000 and XP. and even more so in between.
Why do you think there is a product life cycle and forced suppo
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You can act like it isn't that way all you want. People have had to get patches, do workarounds and all sort of stuff to get programs to work when upgrading and such. And just because the installer cd will install on both windows 98 and XP doesn't mean there aren't two seperate inst
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Re:IF, just, IF (Score:5, Funny)
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Did you show him the view source button on your browser?
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I'm also very interested to hear how
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So there may be a certain liability just from having a Steam client that doesn't allow you as much security through obscurity.
Yeah, I know, bad idea and all that. But I'm just positing a possibly worry.
On the other hand, if this is just to get dedicated Linux servers for the new Team Fortress, they may not care too much about an uncrackable Steam client.
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"See you should release your game on the Xbox 360 because you could also release it for PC, maximizing profitability while minimizing development costs!"
of course this is from the bizzaro world line of reasoning (where things that make sense prevail)
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Re:Seems unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, how could you even type this without your fingers breaking themselves in disgust before you could finish?
Valve will follow the road that leads to them making more money. That means watching the market and adapting as it shifts. With so much new support for Linux lately (Ubuntu, Dell, HP, ATI/AMD) it would be hard to ignore Linux as a gaming platform. That doesn't mean they WILL decide to write cross-platform games, just that they would be fools to ignore it without reason.
Linux gaming market is far smaller than most think (Score:3, Insightful)
Game developers are not ignoring Linux as a potential retail platform, they are merely doing the math and seeing that it is not justified. The major problem is that Linux gamers generally dual boot or emulate, therefore they are already customers buying the Win32 version of the game. A Linux version of the game would merely replace a Win32 sale with a Linux sale, there is no new mo
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At this point, I have no plans to update my gaming rig. This is the first time I've ever been able to say that, and it surprises me greatly.
As for Linux ports... It's a lot easier to plan to be cross-platform in the beginning than port it, even using Cider.
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I agree that cross platform development can help, however it makes far more sense to target Mac than Linux. Adding a third platform, Linux, would not improve things much over two, Win32 and Mac. Even when
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Is it really the third platform, or the fifth? I hear that the PS3 and XBox360 are pretty big gaming platforms. When you
Re:Linux gaming market is far smaller than most th (Score:2)
You do realize that Valve is the *only* major game engine vendor that still doesn't provide a native Linux port, right?
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You do realize that Valve is the *only* major game engine vendor that still doesn't provide a native Linux port, right?
Engine developers are very different from game developers. The option of doing Linux is a useful marketing bullet item. Having the option to target Linux if and when it becomes financially justifiable is nice. However offering such an option does n
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Sure, that doesn't change the fact that Valve *is* an engine developer and that Half Life is just as much
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No kidding. Valve even went so far as to port the engine used for the original Half-Life from OpenGL to Direct3D. And then, when they made the Source engine, they dropped the OpenGL part entirely. Now they've apparently not only had a 180-degree change in heart, but such a big one that they're (maybe) willing to face the cost of porting Source* back to OpenGL? I don't believe it. I mean, it'd be great -- don't get me wrong -- but I don't believe it.
(*Yes, the job description could just be talking about Peg
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Valve's roots are in Mac, Not Micorosoft (Score:2, Informative)
Valve's founders started as Macintosh developers who ported their products to Windows. Microsoft eventually bought them.
That said, I agree with others, this job is most likely to port new game code to Linux for use in game servers only.
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You sure you're not confusing Valve with Bungie?
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Sorry, that is exactly what I am doing. Duh!
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That's Bungie (the Halo company), not Valve (the Half-Life company).
--ryan.
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Maintain existing servers, create new ones (Score:3, Interesting)
They are hiring someone to port new game code to create servers for future games and/or maintain the existing servers for old games. They are merely continuing what they have already been doing, they just need another person.
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