Steam-powered Blender

http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-August/041483.html?august

by conductor • 13 years ago

209 85 13 years ago

lists.blender.org

ngoldbaum4• 13 years ago

copy/pasted for readability:

Hi everyone, I work for Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/). We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam (www.steampowered.com<http://www.steampowered.com>) one of the places where you can download Blender. The long-term goal would be to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games with Blender and share these mods with other gamers. So I was wondering if there are any Blender users on this list who are interested in PC games and could see themselves working on an integration between Blender and PC games that offer official modding support such as DOTA 2.

Long story: Valve is a company that is built on modding. The original Half-Life was built on a modified version of the Quake engine. All our major games since then started out as mods which we found cool, hired the people who built them and released them as major game titles. This is true for Counter-Strike, the original Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and DOTA 2 (Portal was not technically a mod but a student project - but you see the pattern). Similarly, one of the most successful features of our Steam platform is the Steam Workshop (http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/), which is an interface for users to share, discover and install mods for their games. Essentially, you can publish your mod there and other gamers can bring your mod into their games with a single mouse click. This is something that we think would be a cool feature for Blender to tap into. Like modeling a sword in Blender, pushing a button and having it available to all users of Skyrim. But we bet there are more creative ideas out there than this one. What we are currently looking at is offering a completely vanilla version of Blender as a free download on Steam that is completely the same as that offered on other websites. We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop. If you think you might be interested in being part of that, we'd be happy to hear from you! Best, Jan-Peter

kbar13• 13 years ago

yeah... OP formatting is jank as hell.

Thanks.

mschuster912• 13 years ago

I wonder why Mailman doesn't ship a better GUI by default :/

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

OK, I'm not the only person what wondered why this didn't wordwrap.

rossy• 13 years ago

I opened up the dev console and added white-space: pre-wrap; I guess they assume emails to be hard wrapped.

wmil• 13 years ago

It makes sense if they post a lot of code.

dchest• 13 years ago

I clicked "View Source" and read it. (It automatically wraps text in Chrome; in Firefox you have to click View > Wrap Long Lines).

bvttf• 13 years ago

Hands up who else read the post before coming to the comments, saw this and cursed themselves.

foolfoolz• 13 years ago

I even stopped, "Wait a second, this has nothing to do with blenders powered by steam", realized the context, and still continued on scrolling back and forth.

zooka23• 13 years ago

I stopped halfway and asked myself if this was 2013?

slacka• 13 years ago

After about 2 lines, I gave up and copy/pasted the text into an editor with word-wrap. Funny thing is I have this exact same problem of horizontal scrolling when reading HN comments on my iPhone. It's also the only reason for me to use a app to view this site.

m0shen• 13 years ago

These are pretty handy:

http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ is nice too, but doesn't properly wrap <pre> lines.

BurritoAlPastor• 13 years ago

You know, with a link title like that, I was really hoping to see a food processor powered by a steam engine.

mikeash• 13 years ago

Agreed. It would be a great followup to Top Gear's V8-powered blender and their occasional obsession with steam trains.

mschuster912• 13 years ago

Me too, but then I looked at the URL :D

joyeuse6701• 13 years ago

Third, I'd like to see this. Or a steam powered coffee grinder, who's with me?!

j2h6mW• 13 years ago

Yes! And if you could somehow re-route the steam from the steam-powered coffee grinder to an adjoining moka pot... automatic steam-powered coffee-grinder-brewer?

zooka23• 13 years ago

I'm all for it, now I just need to find that free steam source

tobych• 13 years ago

Me too. Thought it sounded cool.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

Same. I was expecting something along the lines of the pulse jet powered tea kettle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fDM9Eb16Do

speeder• 13 years ago

Now you made me miss my time to sleep because of all such awesome jet powered things.

(but can someone explain to me the jet powered kettle???)

solistice• 13 years ago

That's HN for you. You're never quite sure whether it's programming related or not.

40 Days without Booze - Alcohol Abstinence or Node.js Framework?

Steam powered Blender - 3d Modeling Software or Steampunk kitchen tool?

A new perspective on Coffee and Tea: “Building” Coffee Match - Again, Beverages or Web Frameworks?

Someone should write a site akin to http://www.crackshackormansion.com/ or http://steakhouseorgaybar.com/ regarding HN post titles.

unwind• 13 years ago

My submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6204638) had the title "Valve interested in getting Blender on Steam" which used a powerful technique of "more words, less terseness" to attempt to maximize clarity. :)

I should perhaps have added "3D" somewhere to make it more clear, but at least there are words to make it sound software-related.

Too bad the submission sank.

conductor• 13 years ago

My original title was "Valve is planning to use Blender as a game modding tool in Steam", it was changed by a mod/admin.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

It seems strange that steam would want to put blender in steam. Wouldn't they just work on integrating with blender if they wanted blender?

I suppose the strategy is to get the devs currently working on blender to look closer at making blender more compatable with the formats DOTA 2 is using, and putting a little more focus on the UX for that.

Then again, steam is basically a content distribution system, and windows doesn't have one of those (or at least doesn't have one that anyone wants to use. I'M SORRY http://chocolatey.org/ I LOVE YOU, DON'T BE MAD)

karlshea• 13 years ago

From the follow-up posts on the list I take it Blender is already popular with the mod community and they are trying to make Blender easier to install and get going to make a mod.

teamonkey• 13 years ago

Steam already sells several pieces of game-related software, such as Cakewalk and GameMaker. A 3D modeling package fits right in.

Blender is pretty much the only choice of 3D package for Valve's portfolio, being multi-platform, stable and costing less than $3000.

wickedlogic• 13 years ago

Is an interesting proposal, some of the early day blender games + the blender browser plugin really did show the potential of having the browser be the delivery system for games... some day, and with webgl, someday sooner!

I'd really love to see this, but only if it comes with a character narrated walk through of the blender ui... it would do a lot for the future blender userbase.

brokenparser4• 13 years ago

I read this is as "Hey, can everyone do our work for us? That'd be great."

madsushi• 13 years ago

Except that you can sell the items you make for cash, and a lot of people make thousands of dollars making hats for Valve games.

endianswap• 13 years ago

Yup, over 10 million dollars paid out for TF2 items as of June apparently: http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=10843

mh-• 13 years ago

Really? It felt more like a genuine attempt to gauge interest, and possibility recruit for, a project they're considering.

brokenparser4• 13 years ago

I quote:

    We'd hope that this will get enough of our users
    exposed to and interested in Blender so they will
    be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would
    talk to Steam's backend services

Recruiting you say? Certainly so, they appear to be taking volunteers.

reedlaw3• 13 years ago

Although I'm happy to hear this news, it highlights the importance of Blender's choice of GPL as its license. If it weren't for the GPL, Valve would be free to modify Blender and then sell it without contributing anything back to Blender. Blender is an amazing app that I've enjoyed using for many years. It's definitely in my top 10 ten list of best open source projects. Hopefully the increased exposure through Steam will only help the Blender Foundation continue to provide incredible free software.

Dylan168074• 13 years ago

I don't understand what your GPL comment has to do with this situation at all. Nobody is even talking about modifying blender in the first place, let alone improving it in ways that could be contributed back, let alone would they have any reason not to contribute back.

This is just asking the blender community what they think about some distribution and upload scripts.

TheZenPsycho5• 13 years ago

"We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop."

doesn't sound like a modification to you?

reedlaw3• 13 years ago

At this point there is no talk of modification, but if Blender became a large part of Valve's modification ecosystem there would surely be some back-and-forth source modification going on.

forrestthewoods2• 13 years ago

That's a strange conclusion to reach. The GPL license is actually a major problem with Blender. Importing and exporting content from artist tools is a huge headache. The Autodesk FBX file format and SDK have largely solved those issues. It's a phenominal interchange format and most professional tools support it out of the box. Just drag and drop. It's wonderful.

Blender does not and will not have official FBX support because of the GPL. That's unfortunate and actively harms users. Providing support for user generated content is a lot of work. Trying to support Blender is extremely painful and adds to that pile of work.

I'd argue that one of the single biggest issues with Blender right now is it's GPL license.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Ton/Autodesk_FBX_EULA

Dylan168074• 13 years ago

Why can't they make the user download it?

And possibly adjust how the linking works to avoid issues.

reedlaw3• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say in this case that the problem lies with Blender's choice of the GPL, but rather with Autodesk's FBX license. The FBX license is much more restrictive and onerous than the GPL. Whether GPL is freer than BSD-style licenses or not is debatable, but it certainly respects the user's freedom far more than Autodesk's "Evaluation License" with "Permitted Number equal to one".

buovjaga• 13 years ago

http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/08/fbx-binary-file-fo...

Blender’s next release (2.69) will support binary FBX file reading as well.

belorn• 13 years ago

Someone please correct me, but isn't the FBX SDK a proprietary licensed software?

If blender want to redistribute Autodesk software, they would need a license. The FBX SDK looks to be under a restrictive, individual, non-transferable and non-shareable license which also expires after 30 days. That would make any redistributing of said Autodesk software a crime (copyright infringement).

The only way blender could legally give users access to the proprietary FBX SDK, is to provide a download mechanism where users themselves download and agrees to the license, and then have their software being disabled after 30 days.

So I must ask, what does this have to do with GPL? It would still be equally impossible under BSD, MIT, or add-your-own-license-here license.

ris• 13 years ago

"The Autodesk FBX file format and SDK have largely solved those issues. It's a phenominal interchange format and most professional tools support it out of the box. Just drag and drop. It's wonderful."

Really? To me it looks like what Autodesk have managed to do is convince loads of people make their software depend on Autodesk's proprietary binary blob, which is a genius move on their part.

(bet you've never seen your wonderful "just drag and drop" work on anything non-x86)

zooka23• 13 years ago

Are you describing copyright? ("Valve would be free to modify Blender and then sell it without contributing anything back to Blender.")

kodr• 13 years ago

Why do you assume that?

The SDL developer works at Valve, and he just released 2.0. I don't see why they would do such a move on Blender...

deafbybeheading• 13 years ago

As a big fan of the GPL, ...I'm skeptical. I don't think Valve would benefit from keeping any potential modifications (or even plugins) secret, given that these would be far removed from its bread-and-butter.

A friend once suggested that outside of licensing pressure, maintainership is a huge driving force behind open-source contributions: you find something that does almost what you need, then you make the changes you require, and if you get these accepted upstream, they're maintained for you for free, pretty much forever. In many situations, that's far more important than any IP you're trying to conceal.

FooBarWidget• 13 years ago

Because it's far easier for a manager to say "no" than to say "yes". By not releasing code, he's running less risk than by releasing code. There might be a chance that he missed something and violated copyright somewhere, accidentally leaked some company secret, or accidentally gave competitors an advantage. Saying "no" is the easier choice.

coderhs• 13 years ago

WOW, it would be awesome if it becomes a reality :)

thomasfoster96• 13 years ago

I clicked on it thinking that blender technology might have come into the 20th Century...

frakkingcylons• 13 years ago

Great news. I'm almost surprised this hasn't occurred sooner. Blender is used all the time in the item and mapmaking community.

Rovanion• 13 years ago

How is it used for making maps? For models that are imported to Hammer?

johnchristopher• 13 years ago

Wait, what ?

What happened to the tools developed by Valve for HL2 and the integration with Lightwave and their facial animation tool ?

Those were awesome and already proved their usefulness.

How does it fit with Hammer and the fact that... well... modding is never going to be what it was in the 90's again ? *

* I am looking at all those modders that got folie des grandeurs and turned into studio with 7 years dev. plan.

dirkk0• 13 years ago

I am not sure if I understand this right - what I understand is, that they try to attract Blender users (which is a good thing (tm) ). But are they referring to developers that integrate towards a certain game? What kind of integration? You fire up Blender and have an exporter? Or artists contributing to mods? Or are they looking for ideas in general? And where would I post them?

przemoc• 13 years ago

I hate the papermail web front-end...

I'm not sure about papermail, i.e. whether it supports "format=flowed" or not. Perhaps the mail lacked it anyway.

Use gmane for your own sake and sanity: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/40386

j_s• 13 years ago

The Unity game engine calls their equivalent to this the Unity Asset Store (http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/07/19/funding-indie-games-asse...) which was discussed previously here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500426 ("Unity Asset Store: $3000 revenue in 5 days from a spline drawing tool").

ergest• 13 years ago

It's be cool to build an actual steam-powered blender, but the article title is misleading (in a funny way)

Steam-powered Blender

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