
Steam-powered Blender - conductor
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-August/041483.html?august
======
ngoldbaum
copy/pasted for readability:

Hi everyone, I work for Valve
([http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/)).
We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam
(www.steampowered.com<[http://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/](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

~~~
bvttf
Hands up who else read the post before coming to the comments, saw this and
cursed themselves.

~~~
foolfoolz
I even stopped, "Wait a second, this has nothing to do with blenders powered
by steam", realized the context, and still continued on scrolling back and
forth.

~~~
shurcooL
That's exactly what I thought of.

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reedlaw
Although I'm happy to hear this news, it highlights the importance of
Blender's choice of GPL as its license. If it weren't for the GPL, Valve would
be free to modify Blender and then sell it without contributing anything back
to Blender. Blender is an amazing app that I've enjoyed using for many years.
It's definitely in my top 10 ten list of best open source projects. Hopefully
the increased exposure through Steam will only help the Blender Foundation
continue to provide incredible free software.

~~~
forrestthewoods
That's a strange conclusion to reach. The GPL license is actually a _major_
problem with Blender. Importing and exporting content from artist tools is a
huge headache. The Autodesk FBX file format and SDK have largely solved those
issues. It's a phenominal interchange format and most professional tools
support it out of the box. Just drag and drop. It's wonderful.

Blender does not and will not have official FBX support because of the GPL.
That's unfortunate and actively harms users. Providing support for user
generated content is a _lot_ of work. Trying to support Blender is extremely
painful and adds to that pile of work.

I'd argue that one of the single biggest issues with Blender right now is it's
GPL license.

[http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Ton/Autodesk_FBX_EULA](http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Ton/Autodesk_FBX_EULA)

~~~
reedlaw
I wouldn't say in this case that the problem lies with Blender's choice of the
GPL, but rather with Autodesk's FBX license. The FBX license is much more
restrictive and onerous than the GPL. Whether GPL is freer than BSD-style
licenses or not is debatable, but it certainly respects the user's freedom far
more than Autodesk's "Evaluation License" with "Permitted Number equal to
one".

~~~
comex
Yeah. "Releasing" a file format as a restrictive binary SDK rather than
actually documenting the format is a really weird and aggressive thing to do,
and is very much Autodesk's fault rather than Blender's, even if you ignore
the issues with platforms for which the binary might not be available.

On the other hand, the format does not appear to actually be that complicated,
so integrating the SDK probably wouldn't save that much programming time
compared to just reimplementing it.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Blame whichever license you want. It doesn't matter.

Let's say it is Autodesk's fault and they don't care. Now what? Blender is the
tool that's a pain in the ass to use so the onus is on them to make their tool
not suck. Meanwhile the rest of the world will continue to use FBX because
it's an awesome format to work with.

~~~
StavrosK
"Blame the gun or the guy who died for not having a steel skeleton, it doesn't
matter. The guy is the one who's dead, the gun is fine. The onus is on guys to
not die."

~~~
andrewflnr
If we're going to make this analogy work, the guy who died could have easily
worn a bullet-proof vest or avoided getting in the fight at all.

~~~
if_by_whisky
Or he could have picked a different software license.

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BurritoAlPastor
You know, with a link title like that, I was really hoping to see a food
processor powered by a steam engine.

~~~
joyeuse6701
Third, I'd like to see this. Or a steam powered coffee grinder, who's with
me?!

~~~
zooka2
I'm all for it, now I just need to find that free steam source

~~~
nwh
Go full-circle and make the steam with a Bitcoin miner.

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GhotiFish
It seems strange that steam would want to put blender in steam. Wouldn't they
just work on integrating with blender if they wanted blender?

I suppose the strategy is to get the devs currently working on blender to look
closer at making blender more compatable with the formats DOTA 2 is using, and
putting a little more focus on the UX for that.

Then again, steam is basically a content distribution system, and windows
doesn't have one of those (or at least doesn't have one that anyone wants to
use. I'M SORRY [http://chocolatey.org/](http://chocolatey.org/) I LOVE YOU,
DON'T BE MAD)

~~~
karlshea
From the follow-up posts on the list I take it Blender is already popular with
the mod community and they are trying to make Blender easier to install and
get going to make a mod.

------
j_s
The Unity game engine calls their equivalent to this the Unity Asset Store
([http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/07/19/funding-indie-games-
asse...](http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/07/19/funding-indie-games-asset-
store/)) which was discussed previously here:
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500426](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500426)
("Unity Asset Store: $3000 revenue in 5 days from a spline drawing tool").

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dirkk0
I am not sure if I understand this right - what I understand is, that they try
to attract Blender users (which is a good thing (tm) ). But are they referring
to developers that integrate towards a certain game? What kind of integration?
You fire up Blender and have an exporter? Or artists contributing to mods? Or
are they looking for ideas in general? And where would I post them?

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wickedlogic
Is an interesting proposal, some of the early day blender games + the blender
browser plugin really did show the potential of having the browser be the
delivery system for games... some day, and with webgl, someday sooner!

I'd really love to see this, but only if it comes with a character narrated
walk through of the blender ui... it would do a lot for the future blender
userbase.

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frakkingcylons
Great news. I'm almost surprised this hasn't occurred sooner. Blender is used
all the time in the item and mapmaking community.

~~~
Rovanion
How is it used for making maps? For models that are imported to Hammer?

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johnchristopher
Wait, what ?

What happened to the tools developed by Valve for HL2 and the integration with
Lightwave and their facial animation tool ?

Those were awesome and already proved their usefulness.

How does it fit with Hammer and the fact that... well... modding is never
going to be what it was in the 90's again ? *

* I am looking at all those modders that got folie des grandeurs and turned into studio with 7 years dev. plan.

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przemoc
I hate the papermail web front-end...

I'm not sure about papermail, i.e. whether it supports "format=flowed" or not.
Perhaps the mail lacked it anyway.

Use gmane for your own sake and sanity:
[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/40386](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/40386)

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thomasfoster96
I clicked on it thinking that blender technology might have come into the 20th
Century...

------
ergest
It's be cool to build an actual steam-powered blender, but the article title
is misleading (in a funny way)

------
coderhs
WOW, it would be awesome if it becomes a reality :)

------
brokenparser
I read this is as "Hey, can everyone do our work for us? That'd be great."

~~~
madsushi
Except that you can sell the items you make for cash, and a lot of people make
thousands of dollars making hats for Valve games.

~~~
endianswap
Yup, over 10 million dollars paid out for TF2 items as of June apparently:
[http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=10843](http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=10843)

