[Bf-committers] Steam-powered Blender

Jan-Peter Ewert janpeter at valvesoftware.com
Tue Aug 13 16:45:25 CEST 2013


Hi all, 

There have been some really good points brought up here. 

The suggestion to ship at least some existing plugins that lend themselves very well to modding sounds like a very sensible one. SMD/DMX plugin seems like an obvious plugin to bundle with a version of Blender. If anybody else wants to suggest other plugins that are useful for modding and should be shipped in this bundle, I'm all ears. 

The topic Ton brought up - how to do a license-compatible way to send models generated by Blender to another program - is something that I will need guidance on from the experts here. 

I have looked at the license that ships with Blender, which is GPL V2. What we want is essentially provide the possibility to send API calls to our online service that make it possible to send data out of Blender (models, textures, animations,...?) there. As I said, the main call I have in mind is about Steam Workshop. 

My understanding of GPL V2 is that this would in any case not be a problem if we did just a WebAPI call where you send the data via a clearly documented httprequests. At the moment, what the games on Steam that integrate with Steam Workshop do is they send the models to a compiled C program and that sends the data to our server. 

My understanding of the GPL V2 is that this is still ok since we are not making function calls that will hide functionality - we are only sending off data, the same way that we would if we exported a file locally and then uploaded the data manually via the Steam Workshop website, except we are doing this in one mouse click. 

Is this a fair assumption? 

If not, what would be the license-compatible way to export models from Blender to a different program? 

Best, Jan



-----Original Message-----
From: bf-committers-bounces at blender.org [mailto:bf-committers-bounces at blender.org] On Behalf Of Ton Roosendaal
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 3:21 PM
To: bf-blender developers
Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Steam-powered Blender

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-

--------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands



On 13 Aug, 2013, at 10:25, 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
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers

_______________________________________________
Bf-committers mailing list
Bf-committers at blender.org
http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers


More information about the Bf-committers mailing list