Valve News #1: Valve intends to make Bleader available for Linux via Steam:
As you may know, Valve brought a lot of popular games to Linux, via Steam. In order to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games, Valve intends to make Blender available for the Linux systems via Steam.
As a reminder, Blender is an open-source suite for animation, modeling, interactive creation, post-production with support for a lot of file formats. For now, it can be easily installed on Ubuntu and Linux Mint systems, because it is available via PPA. The latest version available is Blender 2.68. If you need instructions on how to install Blender 2.68 on Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, Linux Mint 15 Olivia, Linux Mint 14 Nadia and Linux Mint 13 Maya, see this article.
This is what Jan-Peter Ewert, a Valve developer said in the mailing lists:
“I work for Valve. We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam 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.”
Valve News #2: Hammerwatch arrives on Linux via Steam:
Hammerwatch is a hack and slash action adventure game, developed by Crackshell. It allows the user to play solo or co-op and fight agains different enemies in the Castle of Hammerwatch.
- 4 different classes, with unique features and skills
- Character development through unlocks and upgrades
- Hard, medium and easy of course
- Customize difficulty with several different modifiers
- Controller support, supports various different gamepads
- Multiplayer COOP, for up to four players, online, LAN and local
- Mod and editing support, make your own levels and change other things to your liking
Playing Hammerwatch on Linux requires sudo or root privileges. It can be bought for only 8,09 Euro until the 19th of August, because it’s 10% off, for now.
System requirements:
- Dual core processor
- 1 GB of RAM
- OpenGL 2.0 graphics card
- 300 MB of free space