Steam Linux expands

[WizardStan]

Half Life 2, Portal, and apparently Left4Dead are available on Steam for Linux. They are beta, so if you go searching they won't show up, but if you already own them they will appear in your list of games. Full praise for these ports, they were masterfully done, as was Team Fortress 2 before them. (Except maybe L4D since I don't own that and therefore can't try it, but I'll assume it's good)

 

[monstercameron]

I forgot CSS was son addictive, spent a 5hrs at a time playing Cs_office and De_dust2, in the end in had to uninstall it to save myself...a slave to my own whim.

 

[ekianjo]

Being playing hl2 on my linux box. And i can confirm the port is awesome

 

[TrashyMG]

Glad to see my HL2 save game working too.. I was afraid I would have to start over..

 

[ThinkPad]

I forgot CSS was son addictive, spent a 5hrs at a time playing Cs_office and De_dust2, in the end in had to uninstall it to save myself...a slave to my own whim.

They must rename the whole game from Counter Strike to Dust 2     :lol:

I am on CS:GO frenzy right now  ...playing CS since beta 6.1

For me windows is still the best OS for gaming on x86 system,  I hope this things will be different one day.

 

[monstercameron]

I forgot CSS was son addictive, spent a 5hrs at a time playing Cs_office and De_dust2, in the end in had to uninstall it to save myself...a slave to my own whim.

They must rename the whole game from Counter Strike to Dust 2     :lol:

I am on CS:GO frenzy right now  ...playing CS since beta 6.1

For me windows is still the best OS for gaming on x86 system,  I hope this things will be different one day.

sooner than you think...

 

[skeezix]

I'm still (*Shame*) playing these under wine; wine is pretty darned good these days.. wine bottle -> steam -> portal 2 ftw

How do the native ports rate I wonder .. higher framerate I'd hope, than running through the wine adaptor layers, and I bet audio will work nicer. But anyone have empirical evidence?

jeff

 

[monstercameron]

I'm still (*Shame*) playing these under wine; wine is pretty darned good these days.. wine bottle -> steam -> portal 2 ftw

How do the native ports rate I wonder .. higher framerate I'd hope, than running through the wine adaptor layers, and I bet audio will work nicer. But anyone have empirical evidence?

jeff

valve did make a big deal when they were testing l4d2, saying that opengl was a few % faster than dx...and not forcing through a compat layer might gain a few fps...

 

[TrashyMG]

I'm still (*Shame*) playing these under wine; wine is pretty darned good these days.. wine bottle -> steam -> portal 2 ftw

How do the native ports rate I wonder .. higher framerate I'd hope, than running through the wine adaptor layers, and I bet audio will work nicer. But anyone have empirical evidence?

jeff

I have an AMD GPU, which has far less support than NVIDIA and the Source games run very well. I've had some issues with speed on Serious Sam 3, but that seems to be the only game and I think that was due to the poor AMD drivers.

 

[ekianjo]

I'll have to test with Left4dead 1 or 2 since I used to play them on Wine as well, but with HL2 full HD, full details, the framerate is flawless so far. Very impressive and it makes HL2 look pretty good for such an old game. 

 

[WizardStan]

Is it just me, or does HL2 look better than I remember? Like there are actually a lot of major improvements on reflections and textures. Not sure if that's just wishful thinking, something specific to the Linux port, or updates that occurred long ago and I just haven't played it in a while.

 

[PokeParadox]

Does anyone else get random crashes on X64 based machines? Ad yes I think it looks a bit nicer.

 

[TrashyMG]

I have an AMD quad core Phenom II, I'm running 64bit Fedora 18 and haven't noticed any crashed on any of the Valve games.

 

[WizardStan]

No crashing so far for me, either. Intel i5 quad core.

 

[skeezix]

Is it just me, or does HL2 look better than I remember? Like there are actually a lot of major improvements on reflections and textures. Not sure if that's just wishful thinking, something specific to the Linux port, or updates that occurred long ago and I just haven't played it in a while.

With HL3 still unknown, your brain is convincing you this it it?

They have done a lot of improvements, but fundamentally its still a low poly count; I fire it up once in awhile and still great (I'll never forget many of the scenes, like under the bridge etc).. it still plays well .. but doesn't look as sharp. So if they improved the poly count, that'd suggest they really worked on it. Textures aren't as hard to update... did they do them? Did you play before they added HDR etc?

jeff

 

[ekianjo]

Is it just me, or does HL2 look better than I remember? Like there are actually a lot of major improvements on reflections and textures. Not sure if that's just wishful thinking, something specific to the Linux port, or updates that occurred long ago and I just haven't played it in a while.

Could be the latest updates to the source engine?

 

[WizardStan]

Did you play before they added HDR etc?

Episode 2 came out in 2007 (ffff...), and as near as I can tell HDR maps were fully added to HL2 in 2009, so I'm going to guess that I have not played with HDR as I think the last time I played through was when Episode 2 was released. I guess there's been a lot of fancy additions to the engine in the last 5 years.Looking at my profile, I have absolutely no time "on record", so I haven't played it since they added that feature. There are also achievables now, those didn't exist the last time I played.

 

[TrashyMG]

Speaking of steam for linux stuff..

X3 series was just added and I may give it a whirl:
http://www.linuxgames.com/archives/18873

 

[fahrstuhl]

I have Left 4 Dead 2 running on my core i3 laptop pretty nicely, better than I remember it under Windows on the same machine. Can't objectively compare though, there's no space on my SSD for a gaming-only OS xP

 

[TrashyMG]

Just to grave dig this.. but another big title coming. 

Borderlands 2, plus the Pre-sequel coming to Linux: http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/borderlands-2-also-looks-like-its-coming-to-linux.4235
 

Since it runs off the Unreal Engine 3, I believe it's a real port not just some kind of wine implementation. 

Also I already see a menu item for Borderland 2 in my Linux Steam client, doesn't quite install properly yet though.. I'm running a beta version of the steam client though.