What's this?

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

Steambox? Sure, but what else?

What else? What else is there?

Well this countdown is only under one of the circles. Two more thingies coming up after? Valve and 3...?

I actually doubt I could guess what they really have in store (hehe pun) but I think it will just end up all being a different aspect of the steam box.

2014 is the year of the Linux desktop console.

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/ yep, more or less.

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamMachines/

Source 2 engine? A new game?

I decided to finally buy a controller.

I want a sequel to Ricochet.

I'm not even joking.

Ricochet was terrible. but I'd totally play a sequel if it were made by Valve.

I had so much fun playing Ricochet. I didn't completely understand what I was supposed to do, but it was good.

really? knock people off. get knocked off. respawn.

Perhaps I should have clarified that I was slightly shitfaced at the time.

Wow. This controller. http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamController/

I don't know what to think. If it was Nintendo I would grumble, but Valve has yet to really screw up. I just know i hate trackpads on laptops, but I know they've already thought about that.

I can just picture knockoffs of Steam Controllers now, where the trackpad is really "plasticy" and unresponsive.

I'd buy it.

If I even had a TV xD say what you want about Valve games, but in the last decade or so they've been solid, well-made products, and they haven't really had major slip-ups aside from Episode Three; so I'd say there's confidence that this could be great.

Do you have the 4chan source for me?

The actual thread's expired but here's the archive link. http://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/211165675/

And for those too lazy for the link,

>>211166052
On Friday, we announce Source 2. It's a video game engine. Ta-da! It won't have a line of Direct X in it, and supports Linux, Windows, and OS X. We have a tentative PS4 port, but I can't guarantee it'll come out anytime soon if ever. It supports seamless cross-platform development.

And as a bonus, a game. A copy of which is to be bundled with Nvidia cards, and redeemed on Steam Boxes the world over. Get hype.

That's all.

Seriously, everything in that 4chan image is complete bull. More obviously now that the announcements are over, but I would have called bull on it before had I seen this thread. It's very obviously written by a linux fanboy.

Consoles are fast compared to equivalently powered PCs because the OS for them is lightweight and more importantly they have low level access to hardware only that's really only possible with a closed / consistent system. Linux is no better than Windows on this, and in fact many cases worse. Valve's recent focus on Linux has helped a lot with that by forcing hardware vendors to get their drivers closer to par with Windows, but they still have a way to go. It's also true that Windows OpenGL and DirectX has a bit more overhead than most Linux OpenGL variants, but turning off Aero on Windows 7 removes much of what little difference there is.

Valve has released a number of comments about their work on linux. Most of the linux users like to point at the fact they managed to get slightly faster frame rates on linux than on Windows. However it's important to note that these are less than 5% improvements on a 5 year old game engine (313 fps on linux vs 303 fps on Windows), and this is after months of working with hardware vendors to optimize their linux OpenGL drivers for that very specific game. Note: video driver updates on Windows often bring much larger improvements to existing DirectX or OpenGL games where they have done minor optimization work for specific games, like 10% to 50% improvements or more.

Also it's important to understand the importance of Valve releasing their own heavily modified linux distro. They're effectively calling out the fact most distros (including Mint and Ubuntu) are not as optimized for gaming as they want. The issue of latency, not just for video but for audio and input, are problems even Valve have mentioned as being serious problems they're trying to fix with linux if you look for it.