Gabe Newell and others at Valve are doing a reddit ‘Ask me anything’ and I have compiled a list of some good stuff to read. This took a while to gather, so I hope you find it interesting.
You can see my own personal questions here, which at time of writing have not been answered.
Update: And it's over, my questions didn't get answered.
These first few are from this post.
What is the status of Half Life 3/Half Life 2 Episode 3?
Is Valve still working on any fully-fledged single player games?
An unidentified anonymous source at Valve has said that Half Life 3 has been cancelled. Is that source legitimate?
Any chance of a new IP that takes place in the half-life/portal universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to be explored there. Thanks! (source)
Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming years? If so, what? (source)
If you could go back in time, what would you change about Steam?(source)
This question is related to the above and has a pretty good answer:
Does Valve have any plans on making customer support better? And did you ever think of making it into live support?(source)
Gabe also said they are considering putting in an option to allow Steam users to disable event pop-ups (source).
Gabe, what is TF2 in Valve's eyes? Do you plan to improve the state of the game in 2017? Will there be more focus on the game by Valve? (source)
When asked about Counter-Strike Global Offensive: (source)
When asked about what led Valve towards open standards: (source)
That’s all for now, if I missed anything vitally important I will add it in later. It's possible another editor may add it in for me while I catch some zzz.
Apologies in advance for errors, as it's nearly midnight now for me and I need to sleep sometime. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
You can see my own personal questions here, which at time of writing have not been answered.
Update: And it's over, my questions didn't get answered.
These first few are from this post.
What is the status of Half Life 3/Half Life 2 Episode 3?
GabeThe number 3 must not be said.
Is Valve still working on any fully-fledged single player games?
GabeYes
An unidentified anonymous source at Valve has said that Half Life 3 has been cancelled. Is that source legitimate?
GabeI personally believe all unidentified anonymous sources on the Internet.
Any chance of a new IP that takes place in the half-life/portal universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to be explored there. Thanks! (source)
GabeYep.
Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming years? If so, what? (source)
GabeWe are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.
If you could go back in time, what would you change about Steam?(source)
GabeBiggest issue has been how we structured support.
This question is related to the above and has a pretty good answer:
Does Valve have any plans on making customer support better? And did you ever think of making it into live support?(source)
GabeYes! We are continuing to work on improving support.
Since the last AMA, we've introduced refunds on Steam, we've grown our Support staff by roughly 5x, and we've shipped a new help site and ticketing system that makes it easier to get help. We've also greatly reduced response times on most types of support tickets and we think we've improved the quality of responses.
We definitely don't think we're done though. We still need to further improve response times and we are continually working to improve the quality of our responses. We're also working on adding more support staff in regions around the world to offer better native language support and improve response times in various regions.
Gabe also said they are considering putting in an option to allow Steam users to disable event pop-ups (source).
Gabe, what is TF2 in Valve's eyes? Do you plan to improve the state of the game in 2017? Will there be more focus on the game by Valve? (source)
DRiller_ValveTF2 has millions of unique players per month, and the team is staffed by a group of people that love and play the game. We're committed to supporting and growing TF2 with new features, content, and player experiences.
We're currently working on our next major update, which features a new campaign, the Pyro class pack, matchmaking improvements/features, and lots of game balancing improvements.
When asked about Counter-Strike Global Offensive: (source)
ido_valveAs far as a roadmap is concerned, our priorities for 2017 are to replace the UI with Panorama, to make CS:GO available in more territories where a lot of Counter-Strike fans don't have easy access to it (like China), and anti-cheat. Of course, we're also planning on continuing to ship bug fixes and new features throughout the year, as in the past.
We plan to continue updating every week or two. As for Operations, there's no set schedule. We weigh that work relative to other work we could choose to focus on and other recent work seemed better for the product. For example, at the end of 2016 we chose to focus on shipping Inferno, improving spatial audio via HRTF, joinable public lobbies, and some long-term work that hasn't shipped yet.
We haven't considered community managers because in general we prefer to communicate by shipping game updates. We try to avoid disrupting conversations happening in the community, which is why we tend to be quiet a lot of the time. But we do weigh in when we have useful information to help those conversations along.
When asked about what led Valve towards open standards: (source)
Programmer_JoeOpen standards are what got the PC to where it is, and we think they'll continue to be important going forward. It's a big part of why we pushed Vulkan along. That's why we're working with Khronos on the VR standard.
That’s all for now, if I missed anything vitally important I will add it in later. It's possible another editor may add it in for me while I catch some zzz.
Apologies in advance for errors, as it's nearly midnight now for me and I need to sleep sometime. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: RussianNeuroMancerQuoting: sarmadValve is now also over-relying on Windows and have an alternative that they are not brave enough to push full-speedRight now Linux gaming not in the state that can be accepted by general audience. Many papercuts need to be fixed first (like Steam Runtime issues, Mesa-specific games issues, and get-this-damn-Optimus-tearfree issues, etc.) Maybe a little bit later, when new Steam Beta with Steam Runtime fixes will be pushed to stable channel, stable Ubuntu get Xorg Server 1.19 and Mesa with many game-specific fixes? Yep, I wish that happen ^_^
This is a super important point that a lot of the Linux community is completely ignoring. Other gamers are not interested in dropping to the command line and searching dozens of forum posts to get a game working. We need widespread Wayland adoption and we need a smooth Vulkan experience. Nvidia dominates Windows as well as Linux to a lesser degree in the steam surveys and their driver situation needs to get worked out for Wayland. AMD's open driver is still a work in progress and HDMI audio is a major pain point still.
He did post a lengthy response about SUPPORT and that really highlights the current state of Linux gaming. Some people have already purchased real steam machines and they aren't grizzled Linux veterans so they are really disappointed with their gaming experience. Valve has to deal with this and it costs them money. I know a couple people that recently joined their support staff and they are getting PAID.
3 Likes, Who?
Maybe you should ask Pierre-Loup or another Valve Developer who is directly involved with the Linux cabal. IIRC, Gabe always tell people that there is more than one employee at VALVe to ask questions to :)
Quoting: gurvI'm a bit worried by Valve's current mindset tbh, they seem to be caught up in the VR craze (which I think it's painfully obvious that it has no future in gaming due to price, cumbersome, nausea, isolation from friends/family, you name it).I wouldn't say that if I were you. That's a rather bold statement to make; and a lot of statements like this one don't hold up to the future. Let's wait and see :)
6 Likes, Who?
Quoting: GeopirateThis is a super important point that a lot of the Linux community is completely ignoring. Other gamers are not interested in dropping to the command line and searching dozens of forum posts to get a game working. We need widespread Wayland adoption and we need a smooth Vulkan experience. Nvidia dominates Windows as well as Linux to a lesser degree in the steam surveys and their driver situation needs to get worked out for Wayland. AMD's open driver is still a work in progress and HDMI audio is a major pain point still.
He did post a lengthy response about SUPPORT and that really highlights the current state of Linux gaming. Some people have already purchased real steam machines and they aren't grizzled Linux veterans so they are really disappointed with their gaming experience. Valve has to deal with this and it costs them money. I know a couple people that recently joined their support staff and they are getting PAID.
I totally agree with this.
I tried Wayland in Fedora 25 and it has still many issues, but it is faster and more stable than X, but I didn't make it work with proprietary Nvidia driver. I will try it again in future.
The previous AMD graphic card I had never worked on Linux with proprietary driver, maybe it was too old at the time. But this was a year or so back, so the situation can be better now. But I appreciate that AMD is contributing to open source driver (I wish that Nvidia would do the same).
Also the Vulkan is the step in the right way and I hope, that even Microsoft will make use of it. So you don't need to create two version of games, one for DX and one for Vulkan.
Last thing I want to add, is that the new games should be created as 64 bit application. Most of the games didn't even run in some filesystems (like XFS), because they were crashing on bigger partitions with 64 bit addressing.
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buenaventura Jan 18, 2017
I'm happy TF2 is getting some love, it's been kinda rough lately!
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: Zlopez...
but I didn't make it work with proprietary Nvidia driver.
You can't in the current state. NVidias Wayland support ist based upon EGLStreams, while window manager developers don't want to implement it. As long as NVidia and the Window Manager developers can't agree on a technical standard, we won't see any wayland support in what-so-ever desktop/window manager.
And that's a statement of Gnome and KDE devs. No idea about Unity / Mir / Ubuntu crap has plans to implement EGLStreams though.
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The main problem with Valve is they are too slow in everything.
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: ArkonaThe main problem with Valve is they are too slow in everything.
A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to :D
5 Likes, Who?
Quoting: M@yeulCQuoting: ArkonaThe main problem with Valve is they are too slow in everything.
A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to :D
3 Likes, Who?
Quoting: GabeBiggest issue has been how we structured support.
Oh, they have support? And it is structured?
Quoting: GuestThere are 15,000 comments in that thread, Gaben only answered 43 questions.
Yep, sounds about right. 15k tickets, 43 solved. Call it a day.
3 Likes, Who?
GoLBuzzkill Jan 19, 2017
No message is also a message.
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