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

Thin_J wrote:

Yeah if they did that there would inevitably be problems with people who create a lot of categories.

I suppose overflow could then get the little dropdown arrow, the same way your hot bar in Firefox does when you put more than will fit.

It's a moot point anyway, I guess, they're not going to implement this.

The font changes seem messed up in the overlay, nothing shows up right.

Lost my text (Arial/Arial Bold) in the middle of L4D2. Weird.

EDIT: And now the "In Game" text came back, but not the name of the game people are playing. Weird.

FedoraMcQuaid wrote:

The font changes seem messed up in the overlay, nothing shows up right.

They've said they know about this and will likely fix it in the very first update.

*Legion* wrote:

Plenty of games sold on Steam, especially small and/or indie titles, have OSX and/or Linux versions sold outside of Steam.

What would be downright awesome is being able to buy such a game on Steam, and have that license apply to all platforms.

Steam already wraps old DOS games in DOSbox to run on newer Windowses, those could work on OSX and Linux too.

You know what would be neat, in the "dare to dream" category? Steam wrapping Windows games in a pre-configured Wine environment for Linux use. At the very least, though, Steam should look at a Linux client for the same in-client dedicated server install ability you get on Windows.

All I want are native Source engine games.

Though I really do like a lot of things about the new beta, it does seem a little more flaky. (Then again, Steam has always been slightly insane on my systems, so I'm not sure how much is the beta, how much is my system.)

Nice that you can see which of your friends owns a game.

But have they set it up yet so that you can automatically decline/ignore/opt out of invites to certain games? Because that's the feature that Steam has been needing for a while now.

Yeah, I'm seeing sluggish page loads (not too bad) and terrible scrolling in the store window. Other than that, it's okay.

Yeah, I'm seeing sluggish page loads (not too bad) and terrible scrolling in the store window. Other than that, it's okay. (To put it in perspective, a Pentium-III had about the same performance as a Cray-X1; a quad core 2.66GHz 9450 should be able to handle scrolling images without jerking, there's enough horsepower there to power Cheyenne Mountain through the 1980's...)

Robear wrote:

Yeah, I'm seeing sluggish page loads (not too bad) and terrible scrolling in the store window. Other than that, it's okay. (To put it in perspective, a Pentium-III had about the same performance as a Cray-X1; a quad core 2.66GHz 9450 should be able to handle scrolling images without jerking, there's enough horsepower there to power Cheyenne Mountain through the 1980's...)

Are you saying your system is a WOPR?

I went back to the old UI. This new one definitely needs some patching and the new UI takes up a lot more memory than the old one does when opened.

I also went back, the new one is great but I think I'll wait for a patch or too before I start using it.

I went back too, it seems a bit unstable for my tastes. I look forward to them getting it patched up though.

Things I'd love to see include bookmarks for the ingame browser maybe even tabs, store 'wishlist' would love this to remember games I see while searching through the store and can't afford at the time, notification control (REAL notification control with a decent variety of options), and a benchmaking tool (or at least a damn FPS tracker for all their games, pain in the ass to load up FRAPs for all those non-source games).

The store needs a wishlist so I can track what games I want and grab them on sale, etc.

mrwynd wrote:

The store needs a wishlist so I can track what games I want and grab them on sale, etc.

COPYCAT!

I wish I could remember which feature I was wishing for...

Are you saying your system is a WOPR?

No, just commenting on the efficiency of the software.

FedoraMcQuaid wrote:
mrwynd wrote:

The store needs a wishlist so I can track what games I want and grab them on sale, etc.

COPYCAT!

Mine was more concise and therefore better!

I'd like custom status messages as well.

I like the new client. It's much faster for me but it also told me that I needed to download 6 GiB of Team Fortress 2 patches (obviously a bug). I verified the integrity of the game files and it went down to 800 MiB although I haven't patched TF2 in quite a while so that might be normal.

I hadn't noticed something other people had talked about until this weekend: empty or munged pop-ups. It seems like the "Friends playing" pop-ups are now empty and announcements have messed up text. I was playing a non-Steam game at the time (EU3), so perhaps that has something to do with it.

I've also seen some slow image loading but it's not that big of a deal.

In general though, I like the new client a lot.

Elycion wrote:

Also, they changed the damn game invite sound!

You can get invited to games?

Maq wrote:
Elycion wrote:

Also, they changed the damn game invite sound!

You can get invited to games?

Yeah, and last night all I got were sounds and no visual notifications when I was in a (non-steam) game. I didn't even get a box missing most of the elements, which has also been happening. I switched back to the old UI after that.

I'd like custom status messages.

I think it's really slick, although I haven't had too much time with it.

I did like the one-click method on the old UI to go to the games section/community etc. Maybe it's just something I'm missing.

The only problem I have had is the web browser tends to crash source games.

El-Producto wrote:

I did like the one-click method on the old UI to go to the games section/community etc. Maybe it's just something I'm missing.

I'm confused. Does clicking on the text "community" not bring up community page for you?

As far as my own opinion of it, it's very mixed. I'm suffering from empty status messages as well. But hey, it's beta software. I can deal. I'm more bothered by some of the fundamental changes.

The store is much busier than it was before. And I don't think that's a good thing. Now it feels more like Impulse, which is not a positive change. I didn't think it was all that great before, but the current store page is a step further backwards.

Community page has not changed as far as I can tell, so no comments there. Other than the fact that I am not very impressed with it as is. For a company that knows a lot about their user's habits and usage patterns, they sure do suck at designing a functional UI.

The new games page is beyond my words to criticize. They took a clean, functional, if somewhat ill organized page, and converted into a spammy, in-your-face, "bought on steam or it's crud", overpowering, confusing peace of junk. It's like they looked at iTunes and decided to take whatever was the worst about it, and put it into Steam. They also took the completely wrong part of Web 2.0 to integrate into Steam UI. I really don't give a flying hoot how many of my "friends" own the game I already have. What I need to know, is what those same friends think about the game I do not own. I need a tool to help me mine the database of 500 games to know what in there I would actually like. What I need are cross-genre user driven tags; user ratings; user comments. Look at last.fm and how they applied a semantic network onto a body of world music. No rigid categories. No enforced structure that makes no sense.

*sigh* I'm very disappointed, Valve. Very disappointed.

But... but it's purty.

MoonDragon wrote:

As far as my own opinion of it, it's very mixed. I'm suffering from empty status messages as well. But hey, it's beta software. I can deal. I'm more bothered by some of the fundamental changes.

I was thinking the same thing until the overlay decided to not even show up in a game launched from Steam.

I will say, I was shocked when I went back to the old one to see how bland it was.

3/01/2010
- Fixed some text not appearing in the in-game overlay for many Vista and Win7 users
- Made sure ClearType color fringes are not included in text outer glow when using DirectWrite (which could incorrectly amplify the color in the glow previously)
- Made sure that DirectWrite type rendering respects user settings for disabling ClearType and disabling font smoothing fully
- Fixed some html anchor tags not being handled as links in News area of details page
- Fixed friends who are not friends showing up as being played with in the in-game overlay
- Fixed long game names overlapping other UI elements in in-game overlay

So it seems they fixed the overlay text issues and it was something with Vista/7
Anyone else having issues updating Steam though? Keeps stopping about halfway through the update...