[mdlug] Steam on Linux

[Ingles, Raymond]

Over the weekend I got accepted into the "Steam For Linux" Beta.

Those of you who are not in any way gamers probably can skip the rest of this. Valve Software is a company that's made a lot of very successful games - most notably Half-Life and its sequels, and Portal and its sequel. They *also* created their own 'app store' for PC games, called 'Steam'.

Steam is DRM, but it's DRM done pretty close to right. You can install a game on as many machines as you like, more or less. The only restriction is that you can only run it on one machine at a time. You can also take a machine 'offline', and play the games you have installed, if you're going to be away from the internet for a while (up to month, I gather).

I installed it on my Xubuntu 12.04 system, and once I updated my Nvidia graphics drivers to the latest experimental version, everything seemed to work as expected. A few games that I had on Steam with Linux versions came right over (some Introversion titles and other stuff from a Linux "Humble Bundle"). A beta version of one of Valve's games, "Team Fortress 2", seemed to work fine, and very smoothly.

Valve's game engine, "Source", underlies a lot of their games (and thus many of the most popular games, like Half-Life and Portal). When Valve came out with Steam support for the Mac, people who already had PC versions of those games got Mac versions at no extra charge. I rather anticipate that the same thing will apply when the official version of Steam comes out for Linux.

I'm looking forward to booting into Windows a lot less for gaming purposes.

You can read more about all this here: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

I like quotes like this: "After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL. Interestingly, in the process of working with hardware vendors we also sped up the OpenGL implementation on Windows. Left 4 Dead 2 is now running at 303.4 FPS with that configuration."

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Raymond Ingles, Software Developer, Compuware APM Business Unit      T +1 (313) 227-2317  raymond.ingles at compuware.com

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