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[Muchi Muchi Pink]

You can do code completion in VIM ( a plain text editor ).

Including syntax highlighting for almost every language out there.

 

[xenist]

Question though. Do modern PCs let alone modern OSs need to be shoved aside to be 0% given how powerful and RAM plentiful our machines are?

I think no.

Why not? There can never be too much power. A system giving developers leeway to brute force some problems instead of programming around them certainly wouldn't hurt. Speaking as someone only tangentially knowledgable with deep OS voodoo, a super minimized OS in gaming mode would leave much more power available for emulation, which is a super intensive process. Better emulation would mean less need for games to be native on Linux in order to run well.

 

[AzureSkies]

So, how are AMD's Linux drivers? :|

The less said about the ATI linux drivers, the better.

 

[Wiktor]

THat's nice and all, but realistically a small dev will never be afford to make a game that "goes nuts and pushes a modern PC GPU"

 

[angular graphics]

This sort of tech talk excites me much more than keyboards that can be magnetically attached to touchscreen pad devices. Aw yeah, forget C++, let's see those one second compile times baby.

Details: http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2013/01/run-time-binary-reload-detailed.html

 

[Number45]

The gi.biz article about the Piston Steam box credits this guy with being the creator of FXAA and TXAA - dude clearly knows his stuff!

 

[dragonelite]

So, how are AMD's Linux drivers? :|

Ooh god come on AMD drivers arent even that good on windows.
You expect them to give a fuck about linux drivers.

 

[shinobi602]

I've never used Linux, but how would this thing work?

They want to take over the living room space, so I hook it up to my TV and...what? Steam automatically boots at startup and I start downloading games?

 

[Number45]

I've never used Linux, but how would this thing work?

They want to take over the living room space, so I hook it up to my TV and...what? Steam automatically boots at startup and I start downloading games?

Pretty much, yeah. You'll get Steam big picture mode when it starts and you can take it from there.

 

[Jinko]

I don't even know why steam needs a box, they could just write the operating system to work and boot directly on start up for all existing PC's, much like it works now but without all the windows bloat behind it.

Or is this going to be an option as well ?

 

[Number45]

I don't think that's beyond possibility given Gabe's comments in some interviews either. He's stated they'll probably allow you to install Windows to the Steam box as well.

 

[angular graphics]

The gi.biz article about the Piston Steam box credits this guy with being the creator of FXAA and TXAA - dude clearly knows his stuff!

Dude. Who he is, I made sure to be the very first line of the OP of this very thread. You don't need gi.biz for that!

 

[Durante]

THat's nice and all, but realistically a small dev will never be afford to make a game that "goes nuts and pushes a modern PC GPU"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

2 employees?

 

[Littlegator]

That's the most surprising element here... I'm fine with people preferring performant languages and minimalist tools, but why would you not want to use a debugger ?

There's tons of people who refuse to code differently than they learned. Everyone on my team at my internship this summer refused to use anything other than gedit, and only debugged with cout.

I understand wanting to use emacs/vim, the toolchain, and gdb rather than Visual Studio or Eclipse, but some people are just stubborn.

 

[JaggedSac]

The guy is already making a Linux game which can already be distributed by Steam. How does the Steambox change this and why would he have to specifically build for it?

 

[dragonelite]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

2 employees?

Dont know man only seen tech demo.
The tech was impressive.
But now you need all that extra stuff like a Art tool chain/pipeline.

 

[kinggroin]

Games. They have to be there.


Where they go, I follow.

 

[Number45]

Dude. Who he is, I made sure to be the very first line of the OP of this very thread. You don't need gi.biz for that!

So it is! I read the rest of it, I promise.

 

[angular graphics]

sup GAF, time to bump this..

Spoiler

Lottes works at Epic nowadays. Therefore I presume the plans of making his own Linux PC game are dead.

 

[No Love]

sup GAF, time to bump this..

Spoiler

Lottes works at Epic nowadays. Therefore I presume the plans of making his own Linux PC game are dead.

He does? That's sad. Epic just isn't the same dev from the Unreal days. Lottes is probably there as an Unreal engine developer, yeah?

 

[Number45]

Having a vocal advocate of the platform inside of one of the biggest developers around can't be a bad thing for SteamOS.

 

[astraycat]

-The core often is in pure C for most games. C++ is mainly relegated to your game objects like Player and Enemy types as C++ is a significant overhead given the additional lookup time necessary for accessing member functions.
-Plain text editor is far more common for development than what you think. Modify vimrc and you can have it compile, run tests, and run the program at save. Regex support is much better in vim than almost any IDE I've worked with so real easy to find and replace even on complex patterns.

There's no additional overhead for looking up member functions. Virtual functions, sure. But member functions are just sugar.

 

[LCGeek]

His first two points need to be repeated to some in the steam os thread. I/O latency is a legitimate issue MS without doing some serious work to windows will not be fixing it any time soon. The 2nd point can't be stated enough. I'm sick of the bloat windows runs and that runs randomly and this point is also not mentioning what 3rd parties eventually do to an OS. Would love to enjoy pc gaming without worrying about what my virus program, windows update, search indexer and other crap that runs at the worse times will do to me in fps or racing game especially when it matters. Disabling some of these services is not worth the hassle.

 

[syko de4d]

better performance and less latency, sounds like the perfect OS for VR devices like Oculus Rift.

 

[Exuro]

sup GAF, time to bump this..

Spoiler

Lottes works at Epic nowadays. Therefore I presume the plans of making his own Linux PC game are dead.

He did make a post about SteamOS though so it sounds like he's excited at least.

 

[foxbeldin]

I remember this blog. That's the guy who had to close his PS4/Durango leaked specs analysis blogpost because of all the hate he was getting. (I'll let you guess who was unhappy).
On a side note, he's a genious.

 

[Grayman]

I'm not supporting MacOSX, but I'm planning on supporting a bootable "Steam Stick" USB2/USB3 thumb drive Linux image which runs Steam and can enable MacOSX users to run the game on their hardware.

I haven't encountered one of these yet but it has seemed like something very obvious since live cds and later steam for linux.

 

[2MF]

That's the most surprising element here... I'm fine with people preferring performant languages and minimalist tools, but why would you not want to use a debugger ?

I rarely use a debugger on my own code. It can be useful when dealing with code you've never seen before though.

For familiar code a few printfs or similar are usually much faster than stepping through code.

 

[NoPiece]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

2 employees?

Or how about Miasmata?

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/6/3735358/miasmata-ionfx-game-profile

 

[amstradcpc]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

2 employees?

I think he now works for Epic.

 

[AdmiralPain]

I think we can pretty much take for granted that the SteamOS will have total support from all indie devs. If the AAA space follows suit then Valve will be on a road to success.

 

[angular graphics]

I think we can pretty much take for granted that the SteamOS will have total support from all indie devs. If the AAA space follows suit then Valve will be on a road to success.

Yes, even today, every time there's a new Humble Bundle a lot of the included indie games make their linux debut with it, so I'd say for sure we'll eventually see the majority of indie devs supporting Linux/SteamOS day 1 of the release of their games.

 

[Chumpion]

Anybody coding in C and getting good results is competent enough to learn a new paradigm. Guy needs to get out of his comfort zone - there are languages out there with 5-10 times the productivity of C.

 

[childplease]

(2.) Nothing running in the background, game gets the full machine.

Is that coding to the metal console folks seem to rave about ?

 

[2MF]

Anybody coding in C and getting good results is competent enough to learn a new paradigm. Guy needs to get out of his comfort zone - there are languages out there with 5-10 times the productivity of C.

No one gets 5-10 times more productive by changing languages (even if you assume those other languages will get you a final product with the same characteristics).

Don't be fooled by code size comparisons - time spent writing code is much lower than time spent thinking about solutions, testing stuff etc...

 

[angular graphics]

Is that coding to the metal console folks seem to rave about ?

No. Technically you can go to the metal but have 8572398579203 processes running stealing your resources.

 

[DieH@rd]

Here is his latest Blog post about SteamOS
http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2013/09/steamos.html

 

[2MF]

No. Technically you can go to the metal but have 8572398579203 processes running stealing your resources.

That stuff is so overrated. It's very rare for other processes to take away significant resources, provided the computer is free of viruses and the like.

Coding to the metal is also very misunderstood - there's always the OS and drivers between you and the hardware.

 

[Chumpion]

No one gets 5-10 times more productive by changing languages (even if you assume those other languages will get you a final product with the same characteristics).

Don't be fooled by code size comparisons - time spent writing code is much lower than time spent thinking about solutions, testing stuff etc...

The same advice goes for you. Get out of your comfort zone. You can still evolve.

 

[angular graphics]

That stuff is so overrated. It's very rare for other processes to take away significant resources, provided the computer is free of viruses and the like.

Coding to the metal is also very misunderstood - there's always the OS and drivers between you and the hardware.

I don't disagree that it is overrated how it is used on gaf, but I don't agree with the notion it can never make a noticeable difference.

 

[2MF]

The same advice goes for you. Get out of your comfort zone. You can still evolve.

I get out of my comfort zone all the time, that's what happens when you work in the software industry. In the past few years I have used C, C++, some DSP Assembly, Python, Perl, C#, SQL, shell scripting...

So many assumptions

I don't disagree that it is overrated how it is used on gaf, but I don't agree with the notion it can never make a noticeable difference.

I run CPU intensive stuff all the time on my PCs and I rarely see processes stealing significant CPU from them. This is even less likely to happen on Steam OS which is made with gaming in mind.

 

[Bailers]

Honest question here, is the OS really the issue when the hardware is hundreds or thousand of dollars?

 

[Chumpion]

I get out of my comfort zone all the time, that's what happens when you work in the software industry. In the past few years I have used C, C++, some DSP Assembly, Python, Perl, C#, SQL, shell scripting...

Those are slave languages for industry work horses; a prison for your mind. You need to try a modern language like Haskell.

 

[2MF]

Those are slave languages for industry work horses; a prison for your mind. You need to try a modern language like Haskell.

I have used several functional languages, they don't make you 5-10 times more productive either, no matter what the language fanatics say.

 

[Cornbread78]

The techie talk up in here is making my head spin....


Carry on smart fellas.... I will read from afar..