I was thinking about SMD/DMX when I first saw this email. I think it would be more intuitive for new users to find the SMD/DMX and potentially other Valve addons included with Blender rather than having to go hunt for them to add to a vanilla build. I know when I was a new user the task of finding and installing addons was quite daunting and kept me in the dark from a number of great tools (but this was only my own experience; I know most users are far more savvy than I was). Plus, if the addon(s) are bundled with the download, Steam could keep them up to date with the current release (if I'm understanding Steam's software distribution correctly; I've only done brief testing of the software system).
I am also not representative of the BF, but I do like the sound of this, especially as one who has used Blender to play around with Source in the past. On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 2:21 AM, Tom Edwards <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi John. I'm not part of the BF team but I do make the SMD/DMX addon > that everyone uses for Source games > (http://code.google.com/p/blender-smd/). I'd be very interested in > integrating it with Steam! > > On 13/08/2013 9:25, Jan-Peter Ewert wrote: > > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > > Bf-committers mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers > > > > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers > -- Jeffrey "Italic_" Hoover _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
