Showing headlines posted by SteamForLinux

The year started with an exciting and technically sophisticated title - Oil Rush. Unigine, a Russian software company behind the game, has been a big supporter of the Linux platform for a long time now. With Oil Rush the company has published the first game based on its own cross-platform engine. Originally, the company was specialized in complex 3D benchmark software. Maybe the most comprehensive Unigine's benchmark is Heaven - a beautiful and very demanding graphics benchmark that supports OpenGL 4.0.

Humble Indie Bundle 7 has been released, just in time for Christmas, with 5 new games for Linux. Following a great tradition, all of the games in the bundle support Linux. However, something new for Humble Indie Bundle this time, is the inclusion of a movie about indie game developers and the development of indie games in general.

Today Valve Software has announced the forthcoming opening of the Steam Linux Beta for everyone next week. This announcement was made on a closed mailing list.

Today, the software company CodeWeavers has released a new version of the Windows emulation software CrossOver for Linux and Mac OS X. The new version is based on Wine 1.5.15 and now has a better integration with the desktop systems Unity and Gnome 3 and has a better support for transparent windows with an activated compositing manager. Also the list of officially supported applications has been extended with new applications.

Recently Ryan C. Gordon gave an interesting interview to the gaming blog cheerfulghost.com. In this interview he addressed the newsworthy topics such as the latest developments in the Linux gaming world, Steam for Linux and Ryan's experience designing a universal binary format for Linux FatELF. For those who does not know him: Ryan 'Icculus' Gordon is one of the most famous game porters for Linux who has ported, among other things, countless games from the Humble Indie Bundle series, Prey, Unreal Tournament, and many many more to Linux.

While the public beta of the Steam Linux client is about to start very soon, the list of Steam games for Linux is uninterruptedly growing. Apart of the long-known games for Linux, such as World of Goo or Darwinia, new very successful titles like Serious Sam 3 or Killing Floor have been marked as Linux compatible in the Steam's game database recently.

Ubuntu Developer Center monthly publishes a list of the most downloaded commercial and free applications from the Ubuntu Software Center. In August, to no surprise, the majority of the applications in the list were games.

Humble Indie Bundle 6 has just been presented with 6 exciting titles. All the games are making their Linux debut and can either be downloaded directly from http://www.humblebundle.com and also can be redeemed in the Ubuntu Software Center or on Steam.

While Steam Linux Client is still being in development, there is an excellent digital game distribution service Desura available for the Linux gamers. Desura has been released for Linux one year ago and has even been open-sourced this year.

Last week, the first games for Linux have been published on Steam Greenlight. The number of games is daily growing with an incredible speed. Greenlight allows the Community to vote on games for the inclusion in the Steam game list.

Yesterday the public beta of Steam Big Picture Mode was started. With the optimization for using with TV and with a sophisticated control system, Steam and thus the PC platform enters to compete with game consoles. Of course, all games out of the Steam library can be used in the Big Picture Mode and it is still possible to use mouse and keyboard controllers. Have not we been waiting for a PC-console for years? Now it's here:

The Linux team at Valve is looking for beta testers for the Linux version of Steam. A comment about it was discovered on the Valve's Linux Blog, according to which everyone wishing to participate in the beta program should express interest in a comment on the Valve's Linux Blog or in an e-mail written to valvelinuxteam@valvesoftware.com. Here is the text of the Valve's comment:

The publisher of the video games for Linux LGP (Linux Game Publishing) has begun to release games in the Ubuntu Software Center and on Desura. While Sacred Gold was selected for releasing first, the company intends to release further titles in the Ubuntu Software Center and on Desura in the near future.

CodeWeavers, the company behind CrossOver and Wine, has released CrossOver 11.2.1. CrossOver Linux not only allows to run games such as Diablo III and Left 4 Dead, but it also supports running of other Windows applications like Microsoft Office 2010. CrossOver is currently the easiest way to install Steam and the games from the Steam catalog on Linux.

As we have previously announced, the sale of Humble Bundle for Android is running for almost 2 weeks now. Recently there have been added another 4 highlights to the first 5 games in the bundle:

Gabe Newell has talked in an interview to the website GameTrailers.com about the scheduled release of Steam for TV (known as "STEAM'S BIG PICTURE" mode) and Steam for Linux. He has confirmed that the BETA versions of both products are going to be released "fairly quickly."

Recently, the new edition of the Humble Bundle for Android was released. While the new game compilation contains mainly the games for the Android platform, there are also Linux, Mac OS X and Windows versions of the games included. As usual it's “pay what you want”. Furthermore all the games can be redeemed in the Ubuntu Software Center and on Steam.

At this year's annual SIGGRAPH conference Valve has talked about OpenGL on Linux. In this talk the company reported on the progress of porting games to Linux and showcased the very successful porting of Left 4 Dead 2 on Ubuntu to the conference participants.

Last week the co-founder and lead developer of the game studio id Software talked about Linux games during the keynote at the QuakeCon conference. While id Software supported Linux in the past, today John Carmack judges the Linux game market not profitable enough and simply does not see any potential in it for his company.

In the recent post on the Valve's Linux Blog, the Linux team of the company, as promised, has reported about the performance optimizations they have done for the coming Linux products. In fact they already achieved a big progress getting Left 4 Dead 2 running faster on Ubuntu than on Windows 7 after performing a series of optimizations in the last time.