The All New Gabriel Newell's Digital Wonder Emporium, aka, The Steam Update Thread

pignoli wrote:

Just had time to glance wuickly at this before work and did a happy dance at the loss of IE! Looking forward to messing with the library organisation features when I get home now. Being anble to custom sort and categorise things is soemthing they should have realised would appeal to amny gamers a long time ago.

Dear god, are you trying to kill Wordsmythe? (or posting from a phone?)

Oh man, that was terrible wasn't it? No excuse other than trying to look like I'm working and not posting on internet fora!

Thank you though, for acknowledging me as your god. Had I wished to kill Wordsmythe, I would merely have struck him down with a bolt of lightning.

I want the mini-list back

IIRC, this is the first big redesign for the client plus the web backend (store) since they introduced community before the orange box. It now links in everywhere and feels like a part of the whole steam service, rather than an extension. Hopefully the overhaul lets them further improve and add features faster in future too.

They got rid of the flash 'featured game' widget on the store page too, which is nice.

Looks cool, but I'm definitely holding off until the kinks are worked out.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

The list view of the library (games) tab is quite interesting. I like how you can turn off each column, so those that don't want to see the game icons, metascore, developer, last played info, etc. can just turn it off. This will most definitely be my default view for Steam.

You can do this in the old version of Steam as well.

syndicatedragon wrote:

Huh. I switched to the beta, and now I have to re-download CoH:OP? Weird.

EDIT - Apparently there are a quite a few games that suddenly need re-downloading. I'm going back and let this "beta" bake for a while longer.

EDIT 2 - and, going back, I see the games are still FUBAR'd. Excellent. Serves me right I guess.

That happened to me last night. A 9GB patch for CoH: OP.

This morning, I sat down and the patch was still downloading. Then Steam told me that it needed to restart to fix offline mode. I did that and when Steam restarted, CoH: OP was fine. I launched the game fine as well. You may have jinxed your setup by doing what you did, though. Good luck!

*Legion* wrote:

The fact that games sort by name instead of by "status" (pushing all non-Steam game shortcuts to the bottom) is a big fat "win".

Or, more precisely, "how it should have been in the first place". (Yes, you could click to sort by name, but next time you fired up the client, it was back to pushing shortcuts to the bottom)

Also, user-definable categories for your library is cool.

Hell, I think it reset the sort order if you minimized the damn thing.

Holy crap. I think the "pause downloading" option works now. Hallelujah!

On the down side, they didn't increase the number of people you can see online in a Steam group. Perhaps you'll be able to see group-people in the new "who's playing this game" stuff, though. *poke poke* Nope. Guess not.

Oh hey. And now on the store page they show you the most recent things your friends have bought, like you could see in the blotter before. That's just evil. And cool. Evilcool.

Yeah, the actual Steam Group stuff is unchanged, which is lame.

Hypatian wrote:

Oh hey. And now on the store page they show you the most recent things your friends have bought, like you could see in the blotter before. That's just evil. And cool. Evilcool.

The word you're looking for is evool.

I will make sure to download this when i get home from work.

Fun fact: this new UI update tells me that the last time I've played Civ 4: BTS is tomorrow. Can Steam now see the future? What happens to me tomorrow that will make me never play BTS again?

Grubber788 wrote:

Looks pretty. Also I now know that I've put as many hours into L4D2 as I have the original. A combined 240 hours spent with you knuckleheads...

It's telling me I have 2 hours played in L4D ... haha. 50 is more like it.

and @syndicateddragon, I also had the CoH:OP redownload problem. I'm not playing CoH anymore, so I just canceled and then went to CoH's properties page and told it to no longer auto-update this game.

Change?! Whats this change stuff I hear of? I'm old, I can't deal with this at my advanced age. I like my old steam, especially when the tea kettle makes the whistling sound.

I'm in two minds about it so far. While I like the fact that IE is gone, the client as a whole is incredibly slow and unresponsive. I'll spend a little more time with it, but I thinkI might switch back until some of those bugs are ironed out.

Grid View is sweet:

IMAGE(http://img2.pict.com/c2/fa/48/2944199/0/800/snap24.jpg)

Rallick wrote:

I'm in two minds about it so far. While I like the fact that IE is gone, the client as a whole is incredibly slow and unresponsive. I'll spend a little more time with it, but I thinkI might switch back until some of those bugs are ironed out.

What are your specs? I'm 3GHz C2D/4GB RAM/8800 GTS 512MB/Win7 64-bit, for me, the new client was slow for the first few minutes every time I switched to a different view/page, but after I had viewed everything once it was just as fast as the other one. I'm guessing they just haven't optimized it as much as it could be for the beta.

General Crespin wrote:
Rallick wrote:

I'm in two minds about it so far. While I like the fact that IE is gone, the client as a whole is incredibly slow and unresponsive. I'll spend a little more time with it, but I thinkI might switch back until some of those bugs are ironed out.

What are your specs? I'm 3GHz C2D/4GB RAM/8800 GTS 512MB/Win7 64-bit, for me, the new client was slow for the first few minutes every time I switched to a different view/page, but after I had viewed everything once it was just as fast as the other one. I'm guessing they just haven't optimized it as much as it could be for the beta. :)

3GHz C2Q, 8GB RAM, ATI 4870 1GB RAM, Vista 64, so I doubt it's a machine issue

Does the beta give a bit more flexibility with where specific games install? (i.e. to a second hard drive etc)

Irongut wrote:

Does the beta give a bit more flexibility with where specific games install? (i.e. to a second hard drive etc)

No, that hasn't changed sadly. Perhaps they'll update that after they finish working on the UI.

Irongut wrote:

Does the beta give a bit more flexibility with where specific games install? (i.e. to a second hard drive etc)

I didn't take time to look last night, as it was pretty late, but I sure hope they've changed this.

I'd love to install Steam to my SSD but have all my Steamapps on my games drive.

Does the beta give me back my friends list?

Just making sure.

Just noticed that in the friends list, right-clicking a friend lets you choose individual notifcation options for that person.

EDIT: I just installed the beta client on my laptop, which is 2Ghz Centrino 2 dual-core with 4GB of RAM and a GeForce 9300M GS running Win7 64-bit, and I didn't have any slowdown at all anywhere. Weird.

The friend list problem from yesterday is entirely separate from this beta, from talking to people on IRC.

Many Windows 7 users (including myself) were experiencing an issue where none of the web-based pages would display.

The fix, from this Steam forum post:

"The problem is caused by a setting in Internet Explorer's connection settings. Under "LAN Settings" in the Internet Options, if the box "Automatically detect settings" is checked, the Steam browser will not function. Once the box is unchecked, and Steam restarted (note I do not use a proxy) the browser works properly. So to fix the problem, open IE, go to Tools -> Internet Options ->Connections -> LAN Settings, and uncheck "Automatically detect settings," then close and re-open Steam."

Fixed it right up.

I just opted in for the beta and liking it so far

*Legion* wrote:

Many Windows 7 users (including myself) were experiencing an issue where none of the web-based pages would display.

The fix, from this Steam forum post:

"The problem is caused by a setting in Internet Explorer's connection settings. Under "LAN Settings" in the Internet Options, if the box "Automatically detect settings" is checked, the Steam browser will not function. Once the box is unchecked, and Steam restarted (note I do not use a proxy) the browser works properly. So to fix the problem, open IE, go to Tools -> Internet Options ->Connections -> LAN Settings, and uncheck "Automatically detect settings," then close and re-open Steam."

Fixed it right up.

So it would seem the new Steam browser still uses IE for something...?

NSMike wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

Many Windows 7 users (including myself) were experiencing an issue where none of the web-based pages would display.

The fix, from this Steam forum post:

"The problem is caused by a setting in Internet Explorer's connection settings. Under "LAN Settings" in the Internet Options, if the box "Automatically detect settings" is checked, the Steam browser will not function. Once the box is unchecked, and Steam restarted (note I do not use a proxy) the browser works properly. So to fix the problem, open IE, go to Tools -> Internet Options ->Connections -> LAN Settings, and uncheck "Automatically detect settings," then close and re-open Steam."

Fixed it right up.

So it would seem the new Steam browser still uses IE for something...?

My thought exactly. I was hoping it was entirely free of IE, but it seems to be not the case.

A huge improvement. My two problems are 1) it's unresponsive and slow and I'm sure they'll work this out, 2) the menus and right click context menus are empty.

Just to be sure, everyone with problems / compaints are reporting them via Steam as well as posting here, right? I mean, that's the point of a beta. We want Valve to know how to fix / improve the thing so we should tell them while they're listening.

With that said, I had no problems last night.

That said, is there a way to define banners for non-Steam games / apps beyond just an icon in the middle of the banner field?