discuss-gnustep  

Re: Porting Valve's Steam to GNUstep

Ivan Vučica
Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:07:46 -0800

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 <jel...@in.tum.de> wrote:

>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> 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 - i...@vucica.net
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