Valve + Pandora

[es87]

There has been lots of rumors in the last year of Valve porting their source engine to other processors and OS's. This is supported by the orange box being on the PS3 (uses OpenGL 2.0 ES, same as Pandora) and 360. Supposedly, they're going to port Steam and their source engine to Linux and other CPU types. If this did happen, would source games work moderately well on the Pandora? Any one else hear this rumor?

 

[.Gogeta§§J4BR.]

I'd gladly pay for Steam games available for the Pandora.
How sweat would it be to play Half-Life on the Pandora? of course I mean Counter-Strike!!!
we should really start a mass email / petition (I doubt petition-online's seriousness)

 

[bigtruck]

Yeah, I think we should start with trying to get GoldSrc (HL1 engine) on the Pandora first, or for that matter clients for any of their games on at least x86 Linux. I've heard the rumors about them porting Source engine to Linux, but personally I'm rather skeptical. I would love them even more than I already do if they did, though.

As for the PS3 version of Orange Box, that was done by EA; the chance of getting any help from them is approximately zero. From what I heard the PS3 port wasn't very good either.

 

[quadomatic]

Source Engine, regardless of the form, is still not open source.

It would be interesting if Valve decided to port the engine to OpenGL ES 2.0 by themselves and port the games over to the Pandora, though incredibly unlikely.

 

[ish420]

even if it were ported to Linux, I'd assume it be x86 specific. A lot of those games use DX so even a Linux port would have me wondering how that could work.

 

[enigmacipher]

valve did port the engine to opengl es 2.0, and I also heard a lot about valve wanting to bring the platform to linux. Who knows, maybe one day the Pandora will become important enough for Valve to even consider it.

That said, HL2 would probably not run all that great on the Pandora. It runs on an eeepc 701 okay, but the official requirements say 1.2 GHz, DX7, and 256 MB of RAM.

 

[dockthepod]

PS3 doesn't do opengl ES 2.0... it's 1.1 plus some extensions. Nobody uses that anyhow. There's another API lower level api that everyone uses.

 

[es87]

PS3 doesn't do opengl ES 2.0... it's 1.1 plus some extensions. Nobody uses that anyhow. There's another API lower level api that everyone uses.

The PS3 is OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant, and thats what the port used. You might be right that its rarely used though.

 

[phrosty]

panda's market is too small for them to bother with a full port, unfortunately

you can only pray that there happens to be a dev there who has a pandora, and has enough free time to get the engine working (and enough time to lobby their managers to get it public!).

 

[jchord]

I know this is old news but check out the 4th bullet under "Responsibilities" Senior Software Engineer job at Valve

They would have to do a port to x86 Linux first. Then maybe just maybe someone might recompile it and it might just be released for The Pandora

 

[OrR]

panda's market is too small for them to bother with a full port, unfortunately

Yes, but maybe pocket Linux isn't much longer. With Android, Openmoko, Nokia tablets, Pandora, GP2X/Wiz we've got a lot of ARM/Linux machines and they are rapidly expanding. It might be a dream at this point but maybe in 2 or 3 years it will be a realistic possibility. What is needed is easy cross platform development for all of the handheld Linux versions and devices.

 

[tazg]

panda's market is too small

pandora's market doesn't matter, linux's and ARM's does... which looks like it could grow a lot soon thanks to the "netbook" fad.

 

[sdedalus83]

While that might influence developers who have traditionally been willing to do multiple platforms, Valve is certainly not one of them.
Source is probably the most DirectX dependent engine on the market right now, so I can't see it moving to X86 linux or OSX, let alone another architecture, Xbox 360 notwithstanding.

 

[Mattz]

Is there any GoldSrc Engine recodes going on? If there is then we have hope of playing Half life 1, but I doubt Valve would do a port of Source to ARM.

 

[tazg]

While that might influence developers who have traditionally been willing to do multiple platforms, Valve is certainly not one of them.

the job ad that this rumor is based on (someone posted it in this thread) is a very obvious and explicit indication that valve is not only willing to, but intends to do precisely this.

Source is probably the most DirectX dependent engine on the market right now
without the source code I don't see how anyone can make a conclusion like this. Just because the games don't give you an opengl mode doesn't mean it was designed to be inherently dependant on DX and complicated to port; it just means they haven't bothered to do it yet.

 

[BeefJerky]

Yep, that ad seems like a pretty clear intention - at least as an exploration. A few years ago, I would have laughed at the idea of buying software without a hard copy but the ease of Steam downloads has been too much of a draw. Whether they'll do something like Half-Life, I can't know but the potential is exciting.

Half-Life on a Pandora or any other handheld would make me a very happy man. Maybe some day...

 

[Svartalf]

Source is probably the most DirectX dependent engine on the market right now, so I can't see it moving to X86 linux or OSX, let alone another architecture, Xbox 360 notwithstanding.

Excuse me...I guess I missed that memo about Sony porting DirectX over to PS3... (Otherwise, your supposition is dead wrong about Source being the most DirectX dependent engine on the market...)

 

[ShyGuy]

Technically speaking EA was the company responsible for bringing HL2 to PS3. If they developed the OpenGL code, ValvE may not even have access to it.

 

[Ravnos]

Even if they do have access to it, the general consensus seems to be that the PS3 version was not a good port. They might not want to use that code.

 

[cloud858rk]

Valve is/was looking for Linux devs, but I doubt they'd port there games to ARM. Currently, they only have PC and Xbox 360 devs in-house, and their totally employee count is about 150, so porting to ARM probably isn't a high priority.