[Bf-committers] Steam-powered Blender

[Jeffrey H]

I was thinking about SMD/DMX when I first saw this email. I think it would
be more intuitive for new users to find the SMD/DMX and potentially other
Valve addons included with Blender rather than having to go hunt for them
to add to a vanilla build. I know when I was a new user the task of finding
and installing addons was quite daunting and kept me in the dark from a
number of great tools (but this was only my own experience; I know most
users are far more savvy than I was). Plus, if the addon(s) are bundled
with the download, Steam could keep them up to date with the current
release (if I'm understanding Steam's software distribution correctly; I've
only done brief testing of the software system).

I am also not representative of the BF, but I do like the sound of this,
especially as one who has used Blender to play around with Source in the
past.


On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 2:21 AM, Tom Edwards <contact at steamreview.org>wrote:

> Hi John. I'm not part of the BF team but I do make the SMD/DMX addon
> that everyone uses for Source games
> (http://code.google.com/p/blender-smd/). I'd be very interested in
> integrating it with Steam!
>
> On 13/08/2013 9:25, Jan-Peter Ewert wrote:
> > 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
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Bf-committers at blender.org
> > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
> >
>
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-- 
Jeffrey "Italic_" Hoover