“Penguins with a penny,” or Valve talk about their plans for Linux

The last few months, more and more rumors have begun to appear that Valve continue to invite leading Linux developers to their ranks. Today Valve opened their new blog called “Valve Linux”, and before you translate the first post of this blog:

Steamed penguins *

* Approx. translator: Steam - steam, penguins - Linux (pun).

Steamed penguins? Is this a recipe for some exotic dish from the South Pole? Or maybe one of those weird videos on YouTube like the one where the penguins along with the Swedish Bikini Team frolic in the sauna?
')
In fact, this is the first entry in the blog “Valve Linux”, in which you will receive the latest information from Valve about our successes in developing for Linux. Avoid rumors and various hypotheses that are now so actively breeding on the Web. Together, now you can just go here - to a blog in which people interested in Linux and developing open source games can get all the latest news on Valve's achievements in this area. First of all, we want to tell you about the development team (and a little of its history) and give you a small idea of ​​what we are doing at the moment.

Big always starts small

Gabe was interested in the ability to port Steam and games on the Source engine on Linux for a long time. Even then, when the company was already actively using Linux for game servers on Source and servicing several internal servers of the company (64-bit servers on Ubuntu) for various projects. In 2011, after the successful application of these technologies and the appearance of corridor conversations on this topic, we decided to take a new step and created a new team. At that time, the team consisted of only a few people whose main task was to study the possibility of porting the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 to Ubuntu.

Why Ubuntu? There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it is very important to start development and carry out various experiments with only one distribution kit: this will reduce the time for various tests and make it easier to return to the necessary steps. Secondly, Ubuntu is a very popular Linux distribution and is recognized by the gaming and development communities. But this does not mean that we will support only this distribution. Based on the success of our work with Ubuntu, in the future we will support other distributions as well.

After successfully porting L4D2 to Ubuntu, Valve's interest in Linux increased, in fact, as the team itself and the list of its projects increased. Currently all our efforts are focused on the following projects:

• Getting a full-featured Steam client for Linux;
• Optimize L4D2 on high FPS and using OpenGL;
• Porting other Valve games.

Current projects

The goal of the Steam porting project is to get a Steam client for Ubuntu 12.04 with a full list of regular client features. We have done a lot of work this year, and now we have a fully working Steam client running on Ubuntu and having all the basic functions. We also pay attention to small functions, and we are good at it. In the near future, we plan to launch a closed beta test aimed at testing automatic client updates and equipment compatibility.

Since Steam is not really needed without games, we also port the game “Left 4 Dead 2” to Ubuntu. With its help, we test those Steam functions related to games, and test the L4D2 gameplay on Ubuntu. Over the past few months we have achieved a lot in different areas, and now L4D2 runs without problems on Ubuntu 12.04. We are working hard to improve performance and have already done a lot (about this in our next post). Our goal: to achieve L4D2 performance like on Windows.

We will write regularly about these (and other) projects. Since this is a new experience for the team, we would be happy to hear your opinion about this blog, so please contact us . We also encourage you to send your comments and ideas for new entries. We want this blog to become the center of the game development community, the heart of the discussion of current and future efforts in this overly important creative activity.

In the end, isn't this the whole point of the “open source” projects, when cooperation and teamwork leads to amazing results?