Re: Porting Valve's Steam to GNUstep

[Ivan Vučica]

Without source code, which noone outside Valve posesses, no.

But I'd like to point out that Valve probably uses very small amount of Cocoa, the OS X API that GNUstep uses. Valve is almost certainly painting all Steam windows using OpenGL on OS X, and probably either using OpenGL or Direct3D on Windows. You can see this by windows being painted somewhat slowly (certainly much slower than native windows) and certain glitches that occur occasionally.  WebKit is only used to paint the browser portion (shop and community).

Some things indicate that Steam is written almost entirely in C++, not in Objective-C, further indicating that they don't really use Cocoa, and that GNUstep's existence doesn't help in bringing Steam to Linux (even if you did have source code).

Valve itself has already worked on Linux port of Steam, as reported on Phoronix[1]. I'm pretty sure they needed no Cocoa/GNUstep APIs to get it to work. 

GNUstep is also not a way to run OS X apps on Linux; it's a way to port OS X apps to *BSD, Linux and Windows in case you have source code. You need to recompile the app; you cannot run existing apps. This is different from Wine which allows running existing Windows executables. 

Oh, and let's not forget that Steam itself is worthless unless it's filled with games.

[1] Steam for Linux: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODIwNQ

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 14:46, Jonas Jelten <jelten@in.tum.de> wrote:

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Hi all!


You all know that Valve ported their Steam client to Mac OS X in May 2010.

Since then, Steam uses WebKit as the internal browser renderer.


Valve's best games, Half Life 2, Portal (2), CounterStrike:Source and
Left4Dead (2) have been ported to Mac as well, using OpenGL.


My big question is:

Is it possible to port the Steam client and Source games to GNUstep,
so that Linux users can finally enjoy gaming without having to use
Mac or Windows?



I know, I can also use Wine to run Steam, but i think GNUstep
would be much more performant, as the Mac games use OpenGL.



Thanks for any help,

Jonas
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Ivan Vučica - ivan@vucica.net