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:Vale Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
First party (Valve) games are a given since they all support OpenGL to work on the Mac.
It's up to the game developer to support Linux however.
Re:Vale Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
I repeat what I said before in another post:
Not only that but if you think on it, Valve can actually create a dedicated gaming platform using Linux (with dedicated hardware or not). Steam on Linux might just be the entry point for it.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2896153&cid=40218485 [slashdot.org]
This increasing interest of Valve on hiring Linux based platform developers seems to be going in that way.. : )
Interesting times ahead potentially.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo may be in for an interesting landscape in 2013.
It's reasonable to assume Valve isn't doing this for the Linux desktop (though they may be doing things in such a way that Linux desktop is covered 'for free'), but likely related to the other rumors of a Steam branded game console.
If Steam gives a console-equivalent experience in a manner similar to their PC platform, it's likely to be as capable as Sony and MS platforms but a lot more approachable. The 'big studios' are likely to be very enthusiastic about it. So the 'AAA' games will likely hit a Valve platform and probably with a bit more aggressive pricing (at first) compared to Sony and MS.
On the low end, Ouya may stir things up significantly.
This might keep NVIDIA in the console business (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Weird requirement (Score:3, Interesting)
While SDL overall is a great library, Sam is undoubtedly talented, and I thank him for releasing a great library, in many ways, I would not want him in charge of many things. I used to be a heavy SDL user so I am extremely grateful, but I have to say after moving on to SFML, Ogre, and other open source libs (as well as professionally working with everything from UDK to custom in-house engines and low-level libs), I want to stab SDL in the face. I can't really blame him too much since C is C, but sometimes that lib makes me cry.
Sam seems like a guy with some good ideas or who might be great for grunt work, but SDL is a horrid library in terms of design. Retrospect is nice of course...wish he would redo the lib from scratch. SDL has caused a lot of people some serious pain over the years, but conversely brought us leaps and bounds over what was freely available before. SDL is anything but a showcase of great design, although one could argue that it "just works." Such is the case with a lot of of software open or closed source in general. I just hope he has learned from his mistakes. Your comment about the build system is very revealing - if only one person understands it, this is not to be commended.
I can tell you one of the major barriers to entry I've faced in both the games and business software industry with open source is the horrid and neglected APIs, and in the case of C and C++ especially, the ridiculous build systems (bjam and boost, SDL and autotools, and so on). Hopefully he can learn from Valve and likewise they can learn from him. Wish him the best, but please don't let him design any more APIs without a sane human being editing and challenging his assumptions.
Re:Vale Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Vale Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Platform? More like MS's core business (Score:5, Interesting)
With every new OS release, Microsoft themselves screw the people who fear change. Office is still the cash cow, but between LibreOffice and the Googlighting Stranger, their desktop suite is only a few years ahead. I can't comment on Sharepoint and Exchange, so I'll concede they probably play a major role in many businesses, and that many of those same businesses have no interest in Windows 8 Metro. Finally, there's games. Games, and DirectX games, was the reason to buy Windows. Hell, it's the reason I run it. But, in the heavily politicized corporate environment of Microsoft, games have a problem, and that problem is spelled XBOX. So we get abominations like MS GameZone, Games For Windows Live and Games for Windows Marketplace, or whatever they're calling it now. The Xbox people can't have windows cannibalize their games. This is how Microsoft lost to Linux in the HTPC battle: an Xbox belongs in the living room, not a Windows Box. Things have gotten so bad, the other players in the industry have their own Microsoft-Free [pcgamingalliance.org] group to promote gaming.
So Valve brings on board a developer with demonstrated skills in making cross-platform gaming tools. If they were able to produce a set of tools that allowed games to be developed and easily ported between the various full flavors of Linux, Mac, PC and Android, worked on Chrome OS, and connected to the largest online game delivery platform in business, well, wouldn't that be cool?
Don't worry, they'll probably do something less ambitious and more profitable.
Re:Vale Linux (Score:0, Interesting)
You're delusional. Linux has nothing to do on a modern workstation. It's a development / hacker platform, period.
The UX for KDE and Gnome are appalling. They simply don't have the money, don't have the time and patience to put the consumer/customer first and certainly don't have the incentive to write software that keeps an extremely high level of quality.
Linux is going nowhere on the conventional desktop. Valve must be hiring these guys for something else. For example, a Linux based game console where Linux is as prominent as Darwin is for Mac OS X.
Re:Vale Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Respectfully (or perhaps not) you lack the slightest clue about anything to do with 3D graphics and it shows. This $50 Radeon running OpenGL 4 under Catalyst says you are talking out of your butt. A quick trip to Google makes nonsense of your FUD. Facts are a bitch for a guy like you, aren't they?
OpenGL ES - do you even know what it is? OK, that was rhetorical, obviously again you don't have a clue. Allow me. OpenGL ES is OpenGL with the legacy fixed function pipeline stuff stripped away. Begin/End is gone (use drawarrays). Feedback is gone (do your own transforms). All kinds of crap is gone. But all the drawarrays, vertex buffer objects, frame buffer objects, shaders ... all that stuff that maps well to 3D hardware is still there. Plus some added functionality like fixed point numbers that was later added to OGL 4. In other words, OpenGL ES is no toy, sorry to rain on your one troll parade.
As for Kronos, the bitching from hotheads died down long ago when it was demonstrated how to advance the library specs properly without losing compatibility. Nobody except Microsoft retreads whines about that any more. Coming down the pipe pretty soon is the new stateless API. DirectX is already chasing OpenGL taillights, and with the stateless API in place DirectX will be completely lost in the dust. Meanwhile, OpenGL has already evolved into a great API for games and CAD at the same time, just as Microsoft hoped it never would be.
Time to pull your hairy foot out of your mouth, or maybe you love the taste of toe jam.
Re:Platform? More like MS's core business (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's face it, there are three things keeping Microsoft's OS in business: the Office ecosystem, games and 'IT' qualifications that teach people how to use Office and nothing else.
FTFY