Valve Source Engine + Steam officially coming to Mac OS X

[Oddbio]

My apologies if this has already been posted. I did some searching and found nothing about this recent announcement from valve on this forum.

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There has been a lot of speculation that the Source Engine (and steam too of course) would be coming to mac and Linux.

* There was a job posting on valves website looking for software engineer to port windows titles to Linux.
* Some Linux .so files were starting to show up in updates.
* and most compelling evidence: The game "Postal III" was announced to be released for Linux, even though it was using the Source engine. Therefore the entire source engine would have to support linux before that could happen.

However, there has been an official announcement from valve that the source engine and steam will be coming to Mac OS X. They haven't made any mention of Linux unfortunately.
Also, over on the Team Fortress 2 website they clarify a few things. Obviously the source engine being ported does mean that all source engine games go with it.
They also state that current owners of the windows version of these games will NOT have to pay a cent to download the Mac versions.

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So now that the official business is over.. I guess it's time for yet more Linux speculations.

I still think the fact that Postal III is coming to Linux is a clear sign that eventually it will all fall to Linux just like Mac.
Also, a post was made on the Phoronix forums and linked to in one of their articles saying that the issue over porting to linux is mostly political and that apparently all the work is already done (which I would expect, since porting it to mac is pretty much the same as porting to Linux..)


But at any rate, this begs the question...
What will this mean for gamers who currently use WINE to play source games??
Is there some other Mac to Linux compatibility layer that will increase performance due to the fact that the Mac version will be using OpenGL?

Or perhaps someone else has found information on whether or not windows users will be able to switch between DirectX and OpenGL as we used to do with the older GoldSrc engine (HL 1 engine) ??

[tomfin]

I'm also very interested in this topic.

I think we will indeed be speculating on this for some time; while I envisage the port to OSX confirmed to be coming within the next month should prove interesting for linux users, it would be premature to assume this means linux will immediately receive an identical tier of client support as a result.

I've a feeling that we'll see the OSX client rolled out and some time after that there's a possibilty that the client will function on linux, whether coming directly from Valve or through industrious efforts of the linux community.

For me, the most exciting aspect of this announcement was the confirmation of true OpenGL support in Source engine games. There are a wealth of game clients and mods that rely upon the Source engine and the port away from DirectX and into OpenGL seemed like the major barrier to entry for true support for these titles on linux - at least without costly (in terms of computing horsepower) DirectX emulation techniques like Wine, Cedega and Cider. It certainly sets a hopeful precedent for other game developers to follow.

It'll also be interesting to see how other publishers with products available on Steam handle the announcement; Valve have confirmed that owners of the Windows versions of Source engine games such as the Half-Life series, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead now automatically own the Mac counterparts and are free to play on their platform of choice. Several other publishers have both Windows and Mac clients available; for example, the indie delight World Of Goo has a Windows, Linux and Mac client, and Electronic Arts have both Windows and Mac versions of Battlefield 2142 available.

With Battlefield 2142 confirmed to be coming to Steam - 3.ly/2142steam - it'll be most interesting to observe the upcoming release to see if EA and other publishers follow the same path as Valve, allowing users to play their purchased games on the platform of their choice.

A Mac/Linux mainstream gaming Renaissance would certainly be welcome, and well past due.

Cheers,

Tom