blender - Valve colaboration!!!!

This is really good news

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

Hi all,

To put this in perspective - I’ve been in contact with JP and others from Valve (they added a donation system, to mark a percentage of sales going to Blender Foundation).

Valve was very interested to find other ways to support Blender, and I suggested them to more activily involve users of their platform in a stakeholder role. That could be by adding forums there, maintaining todo or issue lists, inviting people to contribute to Blender (C or with add-ons).

Game modding is a popular 3d activity online, and Blender for sure has a big following there. Their requirements probably won’t differ much from game artists in studios either - it’s all about getting the tools well defined and functional, and ensure I/O is as smooth as possible.

JP’s suggestion for platform integration I cannot judge really… nor how much it would be a priority or how it can be delivered license-compitable. I’ll leave that to the experts here.

-Ton-

Sounds like a plan. :eyebrowlift2:

Would be great ! Making DOTA 2 items is quite a pain for now, would be so cool to have an integrated workflow :slight_smile:

The good side will most likely be that game development tools get a bit more love from the devs and some money runs in the Blender Bank.
The bad side will be the kids seeing Blender on Steam, expecting it to be easy to do stuff and coming over here to complain and make noise.
The ugly side will be the shitstorm that will be unleashed once more when a new portion of the broad public gets in contact with Blenders UI and usability paradigms.

Where exactly does Blender benefit in this proposal? I don’t think Blender can get any more exposure this way. If you’re interested in 3D modeling and haven’t heard of Blender, you must’ve been living under a rock at the bottom of the ocean.

Valve wants to leverage free software? Well, how about putting some developers or money on the problem? This is how it’s supposed to work, maybe the game industry hasn’t learned this yet.

This.

But still good news anyway. It will help improve Blender.

Well, one, more exposure is always good. Two, Blender will be officially supported by Valve and Steam. This will make users of Steam use Blender more. Three, Valve is donating (or going to) a portion of sold game assets created by users directly to Blender. More users = more money.

Didn’t they just commit to donating a bunch of money to the blender foundation?

= more money
= maybe in future? co-op on blender-game-engine (valve donating code)
= more users
= easier for existing user to content create and, maybe earn some money themself.

I see just win-win, with one of THE AAA game companies out there, as they said. Valve is built upon modding. To have Blender as THE 3d suite for content creation is just a good thing.

Who knows, maybe Blender could be listed as a req. when looking for jobs at valve in the future :slight_smile:
for modeling/texturing/rigging/animating the future valve title.

No, they didn’t.

I must admit, I have overread that part. It says they are adding the possibility for their users to donate to Blender. I find this kind of commitment pathetic. This is a company that wants to make as much money as possible with the least possible investment (or involvement). Well, fair enough, it’s their choice, but don’t expect me to cheer for it.

Pay up, Valve.

Wow, this is pretty amazing!

They allow people to choose who to share profits with in the Steam Workshop. I’m not aware of them directly donating though.

I guess Valve endorsing Blender for modding is not a bad thing.

But I wish they’d commit code instead. You know, like a real tech company with many programmers on staff.

Like Cycles baking code. Or vertex normal editing code. Or import-export code. Or multi-object-uv-editing code. Or grid-snapping code. Or any one of a hundred other things that would make Blender better for game asset creation.

Well, couldn’t a system like this - where Valve sorta encourage use of it - possibly lead to Valve contributing more directly in the future if they see that it works?
I personally think we should at least be open to the idea and see where it leads, if implemented :yes: Leaving doors open, you know?

Having gotten into Steam quite a bit recently with games like TF2 and DotA2, I know that I’ll definitely be looking into modelling items/weapons/stuff for the Steam Workshop portions of those games.

Valve “hosting” a community made game, (made by us) that we contribute for free, could generate an intense revenue stream just by having ads in the splash screens,

This is the idea behind “Project:Wrectifed”

I would like to see $$$ going full time to the BGE devs to implement things like tessellation…

Selling “god components” - things the player has to work very hard to make themselves could pay for alot…

This is great! I don’t see where all the negativity is coming from, sure Valve could have done so much more being a big company, but obviously they aren’t a charity.

I see nothing but benefits.

This is a good thing as it shows confidence in Blender by one of the biggest players in the games industry: Valve.

Blender gets a lot of positive vibes over on GameDev.net, and for a while have suspected that Blender will do better in games development than in film. If Valve does become a sponsor of Blender, then that would be a big thing indeed.

+1. Don’t be so automatically negative and suspicious guys …

It looks like it already got some publicity. http://tweakers.net/nieuws/90702/valve-wil-3d-pakket-blender-via-steam-aanbieden.html English translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=cs&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftweakers.net%2Fnieuws%2F90702%2Fvalve-wil-3d-pakket-blender-via-steam-aanbieden.html&act=url

(Source: https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/367347464396742657)

This type of mentality is seen towards more than just Valve, there’s a lot of people who think that a company should be ashamed of itself if it has millions of dollars in the bank (and they often use the old chestnuts like children starving in Africa).
Running a big company is expensive, and you will often need a lot of money stored for future uses like R&D, rolling out new products, expansion, and for hard times.

There’s a reason why they’re considered a for-profit business, it’s good that they are lending a hand to aid Blender development and the BF, but don’t expect them to pour millions into development resources for the cause. Now I’m in full support of companies being generous towards charitable causes and supporting separate non-profits, but companies like Valve need to have money to stay in business.

Not to mention this is just a potential start to a cooperation of sorts between the Blender community/developers and Valve. Doesn’t mean they won’t toss a bit of code in Blender’s direction later down the road - what with Pixar, Dreamworks, ILM and other big names out there publishing code under open-source licenses, there’s always a possibility Valve might do the same at some point, right?

EDIT - On top of which, there might not be much point to any company aiding Blender development in the gaming field if Blender’s not doing anything to get into that territory. The BF has been focusing much more on animation and film, and most of the open-source code published recently has been created by none other than animation and film studios.
They would probably want to test out these kinds of gaming-related waters first-hand before they start putting time and money into code contribution :yes:

The good side will most likely be that game development tools get a bit more love from the devs and some money runs in the Blender Bank.
The bad side will be the kids seeing Blender on Steam, expecting it to be easy to do stuff and coming over here to complain and make noise.

Check the Unity forums or the GameMaker community for a preview of what could happen when an app. like Blender gets popular with kids, I sure hope this forum can beef up its moderation efforts in anticipation because we might get a lot of new members who have not yet grasped how to be civil in forums. (not saying that all of the new members would be this way because I’m sure there will be many who will be constructive and make useful, high-quality contributions).