Portal 2 Beta for Linux officially released

http://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1585569369676516320

by neur0mancer • 12 years ago

216 67 12 years ago

steamcommunity.com

lvs• 12 years ago

The Enrichment Center is required to remind you that you will be baked, and then there will be cake.

winslow• 12 years ago

Ohhh goodie I love cake

sk5t• 12 years ago

Rest assured that there is absolutely no chance of a dangerous equipment malfunction prior to your victory candescence.

recentdarkness• 12 years ago

The cake is a lie!

simias2• 12 years ago

Memes and popular quotes as the top comments. I had to double check the page's URL to make sure I really was on HN.

ansimionescu• 12 years ago

Oh, man, I love seeing the typical uptight HNer in action. ONLY SERIOUS BUSINESS HERE, GUISE, PLEASE. cries and hides

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Misread that as Postal 2 beta (with an "s"), even though Postal 2 for Linux on Steam has been around for a while now. RWS is planning a big update this year, too.

This is good, too, though. I might consider checking it out, though I'm hardly a gamer.

xfalcox• 12 years ago

It's a really good game, that deserves it cult status. Go ahead, but try to play the first one before if you can.

kenrikm• 12 years ago

Yes play the first one.. there's some really yummy cake at the end!

sandyarmstrong2• 12 years ago

Portal is quite low-stress. It's a really fun puzzle solving game set in a great environment.

hcarvalhoalves• 12 years ago

I'm not sure Portal qualifies as low-stress.

ciferkey• 12 years ago

Oddly enough I did the exact opposite when they released Postal 2 for Linux.

2mur• 12 years ago

Awesome. I already played through on xbox, but I've been buying/playing the linux ports of the valve games as they come out to support them.

Berrywt• 12 years ago

Got it working on my arch linux laptop with Intel HD 4000 it is super smooth.

This is great news.

Ellipsis753• 12 years ago

Awesome. I've already played through it on my Gentoo computer using wine but will enjoy playing through it again and doing the online co-op missions when this version is out of beta. It's a great game, very worth playing if you haven't already.

mpnordland• 12 years ago

Best news I got all day. Downloading now. It worked pretty good in wine (atop Arch) for a while, then developed keyboard issues. Hoping to say goodbye to those.

voltagex_2• 12 years ago

Oh jeez. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/issues/21

TazeTSchnitzel4• 12 years ago

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/commit/e1490adc43bd...

bliti• 12 years ago

I don't get what's the issue. People use github to host things other than code and no one doesn't seem to complain. Why not let them use it to track issues and whatever else? Github != open source. It is an important hub of the open source community, but is not the basis for it. Could you explain (facts, please) more about your take on this? I might be missing something.

voltagex_2• 12 years ago

What do you hope to achieve with this?

baby• 12 years ago

So there are github whiteknights.

The ridiculous thing here is that they're thinking that they're "protecting" github when github doesn't need at all. Valve is doing free publicity for github by doing that and as I said there, an issue tracker is taking negligible resource from the servers.

throwawayaway112• 12 years ago

OP (from github) here.

I apologize. I didn't understand Github welcomed this sort of use. Common cases of hosting other people's infrastructure (e.g. Sourceforge, freedesktop.org, Atlassian, ...):

    * Charity (free) for open source
    * Pay-for-use commercial users

I haven't seen a lot of companies volunteering to host other profitable companies' infrastructure before. So, I posted that with my knee-jerk reaction to the situation.

That being said, I take issue with your assessment of the situation and the criticism. I object to the designation "whiteknight" — I believe I am actually acting quite selfishly. It is in my best interest for Github to continue to be in business as long as possible, to keep hosting open source software for my projects and projects I consume.

The net gains/costs of Github hosting Valve's issue tracker are pure speculation without an insider's view, and I can't pretend to have that. I'm guessing you don't either? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your claim is drawn out of thin air.

gizmo6862• 12 years ago

It's not like github promotes creating issue only repositories. Actually, it is exactly like that. https://help.github.com/articles/issues-only-access-permissi...

alexeyza• 12 years ago

Great news, now just waiting for a Humble Bundle deal with Portal in it.

ekianjo4• 12 years ago

I don't think Humble Bundle ever did any deal with Valve titles.

mden• 12 years ago

It would be pretty weird if they did considering they have their own platform and bundles.

archagon4• 12 years ago

Curious: how is performance compared to the OSX port? All the Source games I've tried run horribly on OSX compared to Windows on the same machine. Strangely, they play just fine through a Parallels Windows VM running inside OSX, so it can't be the OSX graphics driver's fault. What's going on over there?

rjzzleep• 12 years ago

i'm guessing you're talking about a discrete graphics card right?

i can't really give you an answer on this, but if i had to guess i'd say it works better on anything but radeon cards(but then again are radeon cards supported on macs nowadays?)

also, not exactly the same, but still interesting measurements.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu130...

valve worked closely with nvidia and intel to improve the performance and compliance of the drivers. check this out for example http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

TazeTSchnitzel4• 12 years ago

I believe OS X has graphics drivers provided by Apple, not by the hardware vendors, so that likely has something to do with it.

archagon4• 12 years ago

Yes — but as I said, running the game in a Parallels Windows VM results in 2x better performance than running the same game natively. The same OSX graphics driver is used in both cases, except the VM has to do extra work! How does that make any sense?

M4v3R• 12 years ago

It wasn't the case for me. Portal 2 worked fine on my Air with Intel HD 4000 graphics. Well, I didn't beef it up to maximum detail level, but it ran pretty smoothly.

davb• 12 years ago

I don't have a Mac so can't compare, but on my machine (xUbuntu 13.10, Intel Core i70470K (not overclocked), Asus NVidia GTX 770 2GB GDDR5, 32GB Corsair Vengeance CL10, Corsair M500 SSD 960GB) it runs buttery smooth at full settings.

I'm using the NVidia latest stable drivers (from the NVidia website), which were a pain to install under *buntu.

It actually seems a lot smoother running natively compared to running under Wine. I can't put my finger on it. The frame rate under Wine seems OK. The image looked fine. But it didn't "feel" right.

ekianjo4• 12 years ago

nice, but i wonder why they took so long to release it after all the other source engine games.

nness2• 12 years ago

Has got to be either low priority or technical limitations. I guess a Linux port of Portal 2 isn't likely to provide returns anywhere close to PC sales, so it may not have been approach furiously by Valve.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there were some DirectX specific stuff in there that wouldn't easily make the transition to OpenGL either. Not to mention all that driver testing they would have to do...

objclxt• 12 years ago

I also wouldn't be surprised if there were some DirectX specific stuff

Shouldn't be, Portal 2 was released for OS X the same day as the PC release.

AimHere2• 12 years ago

Likely technical; the last three major source games to be ported were Dota2, this and Counterstrike: Global Offensive (as yet not running on Linux), which were their three newest games, and presumably used their shiniest, glossiest versions of the Source Engine.

I'd imagine that CS:GO would have been prioritized much higher if it was purely a business decision, given it's still high up in their top-played games; Dota2, likewise, is their top played, flagship title, so if it was a pure business decision, that would surely be #1 instead of third-last.

ekianjo4• 12 years ago

I guess a Linux port of Portal 2 isn't likely to provide returns anywhere close to PC sales, so it may not have been approach furiously by Valve.

The same can be said of Left 4 Dead 2 and Half Life 2... so why Portal 2 was released so late versus those 2 ?

simcop2387• 12 years ago

Since it had an OSX port already I don't think it would be anything DirectX left. I'm betting it was expected sales and/or driver issues on linux. I know it's been recent that some of the features I think they're using for portal 2 were supported in open source drivers.

NoodleIncident• 12 years ago

It's hot to be the world portals, right? That's a fairly huge feature specific to that version of the engine.

ekianjo4• 12 years ago

Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say.

pix64• 12 years ago

Portal 2 runs a different branch of the source engine. Here is an (incomplete) list of the different branches.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Category:Engine_bra...

notthemessiah• 12 years ago

Has anyone tested to see if it would work with co-op with non-beta players?

optymizer• 12 years ago

I would like to see the SDK and the 'Authoring Tools' working on Linux.

abvdasker• 12 years ago

Better late than never I guess.

wikwocket• 12 years ago

Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/606/ ... Clearly, there are no downsides!

darkstalker• 12 years ago

Looks like I'm gonna buy a Steam game for the first time.

Portal 2 Beta for Linux officially released

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