[Bf-committers] Steam-powered Blender

[Jan Albartus]

Hi Jan-Peter

Is at this time known how and who is going to manage the Steam store 
page for Blender? Will Valve (help to) handle this?

I like to help wherever possible. As mentioned in an earlier port, I'm 
not a Blender developer but a Blender user.

I don't know what's happening behind the scenes, but some questions remain;

- Who is going to set up and manage the Steam store page?
- Will Valve automatically download the latest releases of Blender?
- Is there anything specific needed to be done before Blender will 
appear on Steam?

The newsgroup discussion seems to go in all directions, also because 
many people never used Steam or have experience with actual publishing 
of content on Steam. Maybe some information about what already has been 
done to further the release of Blender on Steam can help focus the 
discussion toward the (future) technical issues like Blender addons and 
how in the future the connection is made between Blender (addons) and 
the Steam Workshop.

Having Blender on Steam is in my opinion the first step toward getting 
the (game developers) community involved in the next step; creating im- 
and export addons.

Best regards,
Jan 'LOGAN' Albartus


On 2013-08-28 10:00, Jan-Peter Ewert wrote:
> Hi Ton,
>
> We are currently working on improving the ingestion process for various file formats on our end, but that is indeed an entirely different topic. I don't expect an import path for .blend files to happen anytime soon, since these can do a lot more than what we will probably ever need.
>
> A more realistic goal would be to work on improved import and export paths between Blender and game engine files, including solid support for character rigging, weight maps, facial animation setups etc. Doing that within Blender plugins and making these available both to the general Blender community at Blender.org and via Steam seems to be the best way from my perspective to gain momentum.
>
> I believe the right order should be to bring the current version of Blender to Steam soon, with a few useful existing plugins included in the initial download or as DLC, and to go from there in making people on Steam interested in Blender. That's something that could happen within the next couple of weeks within our regular release calendar.
>
> Best, Jan-Peter
>