Valve Continues Recruiting Top Linux Talent 167
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.'"
Re:Valve (Score:2, Insightful)
Steam is a pile of !@#$% whether its on Linux or Windows. What Valve needs to do is get busy on L4D3.
Seriously, Linux as a high-end game platform is the worst idea I've ever heard. What are people going to dual boot their game boxes to support all of their games? Do you realize how hard it is keeping a game box stable as it is? Now we are having to screw around with keeping it stable on Linux too?
This is a huge waste of time, and suggests how no adults are running the show over at Valve.
Are you the guy I always see at the truck-stop diner double fisting coffee with a cigarette in his mouth?
Re:Interesting times ahead potentially.. (Score:5, Insightful)
>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
better linux graphics drivers? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm interested to see if this means that these newly hired valve devs will be put to improving the now lackluster Linux graphics drivers. In addition, with pressure or cooperation from valve, nvidia or and may also be more likely to improve on their open source / Linux drivers as well. Either way, this is probably gonna be a win win for the Linux / Linux gaming community.
You'd Be Surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Weird requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Interesting times ahead potentially.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now I feel stupid.
Re:Vale Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Vale Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Vale Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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.