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Last week Valve took Half-Life 2 for Linux out of its beta, and now it looks like another Valve game has made its out of its Linux beta as well, this time in the form of Left 4 Dead 2. […]

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Good news gamers, if you’ve always wanted to play Left 4 Dead 2 but didn’t really feel like spending the money to buy it, Valve has announced via the Left 4 Dead blog that come this weekend, Left 4 Dead 2 will be free to play! Players will be able to get their hands on the game for free and enjoy a zombiefest over the weekend, although come Monday, that’s when the free to play offer will end. As for existing players who might feel a bit “cheated” by this, Valve has created an achievement called Good Guy Nick, which has been described as “Plays games with free weekend players and helps them survive a campaign.” In any case if you’d like to download the game and install it before the weekend, head on over to this link (NOTE: Will launch the Steam client, so you might have to download Steam if you do not have it installed yet) to do so.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Valve wants you to test their unreleased games and hardware, Valve finally launches software titles on Steam,

The godfather of Linux, Linus Torvalds, may think that NVIDIA is “the worst,” but Valve respectfully disagrees. The company has been working closely with the manufacturer, as well as AMD and Intel, to boost performance of its hardware under the open source OS. The developer clearly has an interest in getting the best from those companies as it works to port Left 4 Dead 2 and Steam to Linux. That close partnership is already bearing impressive fruit as Valve claims its co-op zombie shooter now performs better on Ubuntu than it does under Windows 7 using a GeForce GTX 680. The first Open GL Linux version managed a measly six frames per second, while the Direct X powered Microsoft one was topping 270. Only a few months later, and Left 4 Dead 2 is hitting 315fps on the 32-bit version of Precise Pangolin, outperforming even the Open GL Windows port which sits at 305fps. Of course, it’s relatively well established that Ubuntu has lower overhead and running Direct X only compounds the issue, though, its unparalleled driver support can’t be denied. While it’s not completely fair to compare performance on a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit one, Valve is proving that gaming on Linux need not be some proof-of-concept exercise. Linus can flip NVIDIA the bird all he wants but, through its work with Valve, it may be doing more to bring Linux to the mainstream than anyone previously has.

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Valve says NVIDIA’s the best, Steam and Left 4 Dead for Linux coming along nicely originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Creating machinima with a video game engine usually requires accepting one of two truths: either that it will require a lot of fudging or that it will have all the sophistication of playing with action figures. Valve Software isn’t very happy with that dichotomy, which is why it’s posting its very own movie-making tool, Source Filmmaker, as a public beta. Any game that runs on the Source engine, whether it’s Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2 or another in the family, can have gameplay run-throughs edited and dissected right down to custom facial expressions. As Valve expounds in the video after the break, throwing a gaming-grade PC at the task gives directors the advantage of seeing exactly how any changes will look in the final scene; there’s no rough wireframes or pre-rendering here. Budding Francis Ford Coppolas can sign up for an invitation to the Filmmaker beta at the project page. If you’d just like to see how far someone can go with the end results, we’ve also included the latest Team Fortress 2 character profile video, Meet the Pyro, after the jump.

Continue reading Valve Source Filmmaker makes a movie out of any Source game, now you’re directing with Portals (video)

Valve Source Filmmaker makes a movie out of any Source game, now you’re directing with Portals (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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