In a move that makes the long rumoured Steam Box look a lot more likely, Valve has started advertising for industrial designers.
The ad - spotted by The Verge yesterday - could just be about finding someone to join an existing team and model prototypes for gravity gun-shaped controllers, but the wording suggests that there are much bigger plans afoot than that.
As if to reinforce all the recent talk that there may be another way for PC gaming, open source steering group Khronos has announced the latest update to OpenGL. Release 4.3 brings the cross platform API more or less up to parity with Direct X 11.1 in terms of what it can and can't do for 3D games, and improves the ability of developers to port code from mobile and browser games to a native client.
The announcement was made yesterday at the graphics industry event SIGGRAPH, and marks 20 years of OpenGL development. At the same time, Khronos also announced updates to its API for browser based 3D games, WebGL, its mobile phone spec OpenGL ES and its GPGPU instruction set, OpenCL.
There’s an update to Valve’s Linux blog today with some performance figures for Left4Dead 2, which will be the first game released with Steam for Linux when it arrives hopefully later this year. Apparently work is coming along on the project in leaps and bounds, with the Linux version of the game actually running faster than under Windows.
A new official blog called Valve Linux has popped up, put together by an 11-strong team of developers on a mission to "strengthen the gaming scene on Linux, both for players and developers. This includes Linux ports of Steam and Valve games, as well as partner games. We are also investigating open source initiatives that could benefit the community and game developers."
The team was set up last year, and have been experimenting with porting Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 over to popular Linux operating system, Ubuntu. "We’re just starting development and working with a single distribution is critical when you are experimenting, as we are. It reduces the variability of the testing space and makes early iteration easier and faster," say Valve.
Valve has confirmed that an official port of the Steam client is on its way to Linux, and will have a native version of Left4Dead to accompany its release. Gabe & Co have shown off working prototypes of both to top Linux blog Phoronix, and say that there are plans afoot to bring other titles to the platform too.
Oh happy day. As someone who resents leaving the safety of his Ubuntu desktop every time I want to play a game or do some benchmarking, today's headline from Phoronix.com is frankly the news I've been waiting for for years.
Valve has been recruiting for at least one Linux specialist to help port Windows games with this job ad since January. But it looks like they're getting very serious, and keen to push on with the project. Phoronix' Michael Larabel has received an email from Gabe himself asking for help head hunting.
