The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Athelas]

Who is this supposed to appeal to, exactly? Most games have such a simplistic control scheme that they play much better with a (normal) gamepad.

By the way, you could tell the movement of the cursor was a bit janky/lacking in precision.

 

[Infinitron]

It looks like they took two really shitty mouse touchpads from laptops, made them circular, and put them onto an Xbawx controller. Anyone who has ever tried to play a FPS competitively with those touchpads knows that this controller will suck.

They have haptic feedback so they're not like laptop touchpads.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Appears there's some bugginess with buying games that are in a borrowed library. Bruticis bought Dark Void and Lost Planet during this Capcom sale, and I decided I was going to pick them up too. When I tried buying them for myself, Steam gave me the "You already own some games in this order!" error message and wouldn't let me go through with the order.However it didn't mark either game as already being owned, which it normally would. So then I bought both games as giftable Steam inventory copies and then went to my inventory and tried adding them, and it tells me "Limit exceeded".

All I can figure is it's throwing a fit because it thinks I already own them from the shared library, even though I hadn't installed or played either of 'em. As far as I know this is the first time I've tried buying something that was listed in a shared library so I don't know if this is a widespread problem or what.

 

[Bruticis]

Appears there's some bugginess with buying games that are in a borrowed library. Bruticis bought Dark Void and Lost Planet during this Capcom sale, and I decided I was going to pick them up too. When I tried buying them for myself, Steam gave me the "You already own some games in this order!" error message and wouldn't let me go through with the order.However it didn't mark either game as already being owned, which it normally would. So then I bought both games as giftable Steam inventory copies and then went to my inventory and tried adding them, and it tells me "Limit exceeded".

All I can figure is it's throwing a fit because it thinks I already own them from the shared library, even though I hadn't installed or played either of 'em. As far as I know this is the first time I've tried buying something that was listed in a shared library so I don't know if this is a widespread problem or what.

That's terrible, MHC! I feel awful that you're having a hard time trying to wrestle the crown back from me..........(Evil plan phase 14 complete).

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Gaben's watching. Gaben's always watching.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

 

[DalekFlay]

I feel like that entire green dot in Batumi, Georgia was me.

 

[felipepepe]

Scary how few they are in Japan...

 

[Bruticis]

Looks like the latest Steam beta added in home streaming support. You can't actually access it by default though.

To access it you need to do this
edit \tenfoot\resource\layout\settings\settings.xml and edit a setting you have access too to onactive "RemoteClients".

 

[Clockwork Knight]

...is that a green dot on Easter Island?

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Just messed with that. All the UI stuff is functional, once you get both machines in and connected it correctly recognizes what the hosting machine has installed and gives you a streamy play button, but trying to launch anything doesn't work.

 

[Caim]

Gaben's watching. Gaben's always watching.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

Scary how few they are in Japan...

Japanese gamerbros all live close together since most of Japan consists of fuckhuge mountains and monasteries where you don't have fiber.

 

[felipepepe]

Japanese gamerbros all live close together since most of Japan consists of fuckhuge mountains and monasteries where you don't have fiber.

Is not only the spots, there's the data consuption as well:

Glorious Japan:

Total Bytes:288.5 TB
Average Download Rate:21.3 Mbps
Percentage of global Steam traffic:0.8%

Glorious Brasil:

Total Bytes:786.5 TB
Average Download Rate:3.8 Mbps
Percentage of global Steam traffic:2.3%

Also, your comment was very funny, it implies that there's fiber in Brazil. In fucking São Paulo, biggest & richest city of all south america and all that, there's only like 2 areas of the city with fiber... and it's expensive as fuck.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I shudder to think what will happen to the internet when BR gains widespread broadband connectivity. Hopefully I will be dead of alcohol poisoning at that point.

 

[Caim]

I shudder to think what will happen to the internet when BR gains widespread broadband connectivity. Hopefully I will be dead of alcohol poisoning at that point.

HUEHUEHUE

HUEHUEHUE everywhere.

 

[tuluse]

There is cultural stigma against PC gaming in Japan. In the 80s it was all porn games.

 

[LundB]

Even now, in most stores I've entered that sell games in Japan, console games are on one floor (or multiple floors in some), while normal PC games tend to be on the same floor as the porn ones (albeit sometimes in a different section divided with a curtain). The few normal PC games on the shelf (yes, often just one shelf) are vastly outnumbered by the shelves and shelves of porn.

That should tell you something about the Japanese PC game market.

 

[Caim]

Many makers of good JRPGs started out making ero RPGs. And also the makers of "good" JRPGs. And the meh ones. And the bad ones. And the OH GOD NO ones.

 

[Bruticis]

SteamDB has done quite a bit of analyzing all the new features added to the beta client (but hidden for now). Aside from the streaming crap mentioned above there are two interesting tidbits.

SteamGuard Multi-login
There's some SteamGuard related changes that indicate that it's prepared to handle users being logged onto the same Steam account on 2 local devices. Functions like RequestSteamGuardCodeForOtherLogin and SteamGuardLoginAttempt_Notification make this pretty clear.

Remote Control via HTTP
(this stuff might get a bit more technical)
We touched on this yesterday but have since investigated this a little bit more.

When the built-in HTTP server is running (starting steam with -enableremotecontrol), it listens for requests on port 8080. There will probably be a mini web-app here through which you can control Big Picture. When you access it, it'll throw you a 404 error because Valve hasn't actually pushed out the HTML files required to run the full thing.

They have however implemented the technology behind it, and by writing our own little test web-app we've gotten the following results.

There are 3 main URLs accepting input:

• /steam/button
• /steam/list (?)
• /steam/keyboard
  • /key (?)
  • /sequence

We haven't figured out how URLs with a question mark work (lets figure it out in comments), but the here's what we have figured out.

When you send a GET request to /steam/button/(a,b,left,right,up,down etc), Steam will emulate that button press in Big Picture.

When you send a POST request to /steam/keyboard/sequence with the parameter sequence, Steam will enter the value of sequence in a currently selected (and in-focus) text input field in Big Picture (and Big Picture alone).

With these two requests you'll already be able to navigate through most of the Big Picture UI (this doesn't work in games) using just your phone's browser (for example).

The eventual Valve-authored web-app will presumably use jQuery (and the mobile variant, indicated by some file references) to send these requests.

Right now this all seems a bit too open, and I'm unsure if this can be abused or not. As this is clearly not supposed to be used yet, I suggest you use this feature (and the -enableremotecontrol flag) with caution.

Whether or not this actually ships into the regular Steam client, we'll have to see.

 

[Achilles]

I hope the streaming stuff arrives soon, I have an old pentium 4-based PC that I would love to turn into a Steambox.

 

[toro]

Gabe versus nVidia!?

 

[Achilles]

Versus? Why?

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Hey bros, is anyone else having trouble logging into steam right nao?

Works ok now *shrug*

 

[Infinitron]

MHC's place of employment located:

 

[Caim]

MHC's place of employment located:

 

[Bruticis]

First peek at the steambox prototype
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2022180559_briercolumn04xml.html