ValveTime

Back in February we posted about a large number of staff departures from Valve that started off when Jeri Ellsworth tweeted about her leaving the company. The Verge have revealed Jeri's reason for leaving Valve: She and fellow ex-Valve employee Rick Johnson left to found their own company called Technical Illusions which aims to create augmented reality technology.


The technology itself is being called CastAR and it is quite different to the Google Glasses method ofaugmented reality. A miniature projector is mounted on a pair of glasses which bounces an image off special retroreflecting panels. The panel also has infrared LEDs that a camera on the glasses can detect which the system uses to determine the user's position so that it can project the correct image as if the the user was moving in 3D space. An interesting aspect of the device is that multiple users can use the same screen to see different images as the light from each pair of glasses is reflected back at them.

More information, and a video showing CastAR in action, can be seen at the Verge.

Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have all been updated with Linux support. With this Gordon Freeman's entire saga (to date) is now available on Windows, MacOS and Linux. With Portal having arrived on Linux last week and Left 4 Dead 2 at the end of April Valve are getting all their big titles ready for Linux for their upcoming SteamBox platform.

Aloha! Many of Valve's staff members might have been on holiday in Hawaii this week, but that doesn't mean we were taking a break. What happened in the news this week then? Well, Source Filmmaker received Steam Workshop support, some SteamBox software appeared in a repository on the Steampowered.com website and Valve announced that a new set of Steam Greenlight titles would be Greenlit on April 17th! Last Monday was also April Fools day, so would you kindly go and read all about our 'hilarious' joke? It had everyone fooled. Well maybe not everyone, but we definitely fooled this guy.

Update: Dave Oshry has since released his an official statement to Pixel Enemy regarding the supposed Valve meeting at GDC 2013.

It would appear as if the media have massively jumped the gun regarding this particular rumour, and in turn have managed to blow the tweets from Goldfarb and Oshry way out of proportion. While gaming news organisations (including ourselves) are most likely largely to blame for the initial development of the situation, we feel partial blame should also lie with Oshry and Goldfarb, who willingly exploited their industry positions to spread and further develop fake rumours, which is extremely unnecessary, unprofessional and unwelcome. However, we are pleased to see Dave Oshry attempt to clean up the situation by releasing his full official explanation to Pixel Enemy and ValveTime in order to replace his initially released Twitter statement.

Original: Pixel Enemy and several other gaming news sites are reporting that Twitter is now a legitimate news source. Jokes aside - yesterday, David Goldfarb, lead designer on Battlefield 3, and Interceptor Entertainment's David Oshry both posted messages to Twitter explaining their positive reactions to something shown at a behind-closed-doors meeting with Valve at GDC 2013. Valve had apparently given various game developers an early sneak peek at something currently unannounced. Hopefully these "Nice Things" help explain why it has been such a super slow news week for Valve so far.

Speaking with Engadget, Valve programmer Joe Ludwig revealed that they're releasing the first official Oclulus Rift title on Windows, and it will "be available some time within the next couple of weeks." Of course, the consumer version of the Rift doesn't have a release date, so this is only for those with the SDK but it's good to know this is getting the field experience.

Engadget also demoed the tech and wrote up a little preview accompanied by some pictures of Joe Ludwig with the latest Oculus Rift prototype.


Here's a break down of what's going on in the TF2 VR mode update:

• Team Fortress 2 will have support for Oculus Rift in "the coming days".
• Windows only for now, but Valve will release Linux and Mac support asap.
• Can play on any TF2 server.
• All Oculus owners will receive a free Oculus Rift themed hat! (Who'd have guessed it?!)
• All Gamemodes and Maps are supported.

Joe will be giving a presentation next week at the Game Developers Conference, titled "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", so we'll have the chance to get an even better look.