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

peterb wrote:

This announcement (assuming the Valve games are ported) just reduced my need to Boot Camp by about 50%.

Very much looking forward to that. I thought getting married was going to be my big event for April, but now I've really got something to look forward to! I mean, something else to look forward to... honey? You're going to your sister's? Baby, please... leave your MacBook, I still have to boot to XP on the iMac. Call me later!

Hobbes2099 wrote:
HedgeWizard wrote:

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

I figured developers like PopCap that have a PvZ for iPhone to port it to Mac OS X, but this is a totally different caliber of gaming.

Er. PvZ was released for the Mac at the same time as it was released for PC.

HedgeWizard wrote:
Ulairi wrote:
HedgeWizard wrote:

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

I think they're hoping there is a market for games on the Mac. We'll see how it turns out. I worked at an apple store while in grad school and I really never had people asking about playing games or looking to purchase games the 1.5 years I was there.

How long ago was that? Was it pre intel chipset? After?

07 to 08. So after Intel and after iPhone.

I wonder if this is successful, will it start a rush of companies porting their dev tools, engines, middleware to mac. A lot of multiplatform games should be reasonably friendly to porting, especially if they include PC and PS3 (not just microsoft platforms) and so are not tied to DirectX. It could be a good move for everyone on all platforms as I remember one of the reasons John Carmack said he ported his engines to linux/mac was that it showed up bugs in common areas of his code that would not show on just one platform, so hopefully one effect of this is better coded games.

HedgeWizard wrote:

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

Translation: Someone at DICE tweeted that they maybe might be looking at possibly making BFBC2 available on some Macs at some point in the future.

Way to go, Kotaku.

BadKen wrote:
HedgeWizard wrote:

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

Translation: Someone at DICE tweeted that they maybe might be looking at possibly making BFBC2 available on some Macs at some point in the future.

Way to go, Kotaku.

The first few BF games were available for Mac, I think through Aspyr, so it at least has precedence.

Hypatian wrote:

Er. PvZ was released for the Mac at the same time as it was released for PC.

Douh! bad example, but that's what I meant by "mac early adoption", very casual game developers jumping on first.

Hypatian wrote:

Apple's choice of video cards has gotten a *lot* better in recent years.

We got our son a 15" Macbook Pro for college with the 9600M GT video card and 4gb of RAM. The Mac version of Dragon Age runs very nice on it.

Valve's Steamworks Seeps Into Unreal Engine 3
This seems like good news to me, up to now UE3 supported GFWL and gamespy, adding a modern PC centric method of game networking and socialnetworkiness looks awesome.

Scratched wrote:

Valve's Steamworks Seeps Into Unreal Engine 3
This seems like good news to me, up to now UE3 supported GFWL and gamespy, adding a modern PC centric method of game networking and socialnetworkiness looks awesome.

I've had to go through so much effort to get GFWL and Gamespy working properly (or at least as close to properly as possible). This is definitely good news, and I hope more games opt to go with Steamworks. I hadn't realized it wasn't an option before with Unreal Engine 3 games.

Scratched wrote:

Valve's Steamworks Seeps Into Unreal Engine 3
This seems like good news to me, up to now UE3 supported GFWL and gamespy, adding a modern PC centric method of game networking and socialnetworkiness looks awesome.

It'd be amazing for this support to extend to UDK made games. No word on that though.

cyrax wrote:
Scratched wrote:

Valve's Steamworks Seeps Into Unreal Engine 3
This seems like good news to me, up to now UE3 supported GFWL and gamespy, adding a modern PC centric method of game networking and socialnetworkiness looks awesome.

It'd be amazing for this support to extend to UDK made games. No word on that though.

I doubt it'll be retro fit into games already released. But hopefully it'll be added to coming games. I really hate how GFW works in game.

It's probably related to steam on mac, as GFWL is, ahhh, for windows and not mac. For example if 2k wanted to put bioshock2 on mac, they now have a supported network framework they could use.

So, if they're porting Valve games to Mac (OSX is basically *nix with a pretty version of X)... does that mean maybe a full on linux port would happen eventually?

cyrax wrote:

It'd be amazing for this support to extend to UDK made games. No word on that though.

I have heard that it will, but I'm not sure that it's finalized one way or another.

Scratched wrote:

It's probably related to steam on mac, as GFWL is, ahhh, for windows and not mac. For example if 2k wanted to put bioshock2 on mac, they now have a supported network framework they could use.

Does Unreal Engine 3 support OS X? Didn't think it did, although they've recently been showing an iphone version so that might change.

MannishBoy wrote:
Scratched wrote:

It's probably related to steam on mac, as GFWL is, ahhh, for windows and not mac. For example if 2k wanted to put bioshock2 on mac, they now have a supported network framework they could use.

Does Unreal Engine 3 support OS X? Didn't think it did, although they've recently been showing an iphone version so that might change.

I know the Unreal Engine has always supported OpenGL and Linux, I wouldn't be surprised if it worked on Macs as well.

Switchbreak wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:
Scratched wrote:

It's probably related to steam on mac, as GFWL is, ahhh, for windows and not mac. For example if 2k wanted to put bioshock2 on mac, they now have a supported network framework they could use.

Does Unreal Engine 3 support OS X? Didn't think it did, although they've recently been showing an iphone version so that might change.

I know the Unreal Engine has always supported OpenGL and Linux, I wouldn't be surprised if it worked on Macs as well.

According to this it apparently does. The wikipedia page doesn't mention it.

UT3 was in development for the Mac, though it appears to be in limbo at the moment. UT99 and UT2004 had Mac versions as well, so Epic does have a significant history of Unreal Engine on the Mac.

Kannon wrote:

So, if they're porting Valve games to Mac (OSX is basically *nix with a pretty version of X)... does that mean maybe a full on linux port would happen eventually?

Phoronix is rumor-mongering that it might. No official word yet that I can see.

You'd have most of the ground work done for it, porting it to OSX. Hell, if Valve games and BF:BC2 got ported to Linux, I'd be able to ditch windows entirely.

Just a quick word for the other person running Steam on Wine, the new interface works very well in Wine - as long as you set your Windows emulation to Vista (or Windows 7, for newer Wine versions). The webkit browser works perfectly and I can now actually navigate in the window to do something besides select my game.

I've been keeping an eye out for the Mac version of Torchlight, which they were more or less promising as far back as January. I've been getting a little annoyed by the wait. But now I suspect that they're holding onto it for the Mac rollout on Steam.

So... the steam client beta. I had actually stuck with it despite the issues. They updated it, fixed the issues with overlay messages not appearing correctly and all that stuff. Everything got smoother.

Then today when I got home there was an update asking to start. So I did it.

Now I can't open the games library. I can look at media, and tools, and downloads, but the games tab won't open. I can't start any of the steam games I didn't make toolbar shortcuts to. Completely broken.

Back to the ugly vanilla client I go.

Looks like they fixed that bug, Thin_J.

I cannot look at my games library also, Thin_J. It just started this morning.

Hopefully, when I get home tonight it will work.

I've been using the Steam Client beta since it was released, and I'm liking it. The new interface is a large improvement and they've added a little bit of extra functionality by letting you see which of your friends has played a game in the last two weeks.

The new in-game overlay is much improved as well.

Once I got over the 'change is bad' adjustment period, I like the new Steam quite a bit.

nihilo wrote:

I've been using the Steam Client beta since it was released, and I'm liking it. The new interface is a large improvement and they've added a little bit of extra functionality by letting you see which of your friends has played a game in the last two weeks.

The new in-game overlay is much improved as well.

Once I got over the 'change is bad' adjustment period, I like the new Steam quite a bit.

I liked the parts that showed you who had the game and who had been playing too. But other than that, the only thing it had going for it was that it was shiny. It caused me to crash quite a bit and the missing buttons on the bottom for servers and stuff was annoying. The way the games are listed on the left that default to show all games when it first turns on sucked too. I don't want to have to click an extra button to show my favorites every time, i'm lazy.

Ulairi wrote:

I cannot look at my games library also, Thin_J. It just started this morning.

Hopefully, when I get home tonight it will work.

I had the same problem last night. A quick fix is to access your Games Library through the View pull down menu at the top of Steam, since then it ceased to be an issue.

ToeKnee79 wrote:

I had the same problem last night. A quick fix is to access your Games Library through the View pull down menu at the top of Steam, since then it ceased to be an issue.

I tried that last night. Didn't work for me.

For the moment, as I intimated earlier, I've gone back to the old interface. I like the new one, and prefer parts of it over the old one, but the old one works. And I can't remember the last time an update came out for that interface that broke a function as core to the entire steam client as allowing me to look at my games list.

At the moment I'm thinking I'll just stick with the old one until the new one is standard.

I'll be looking forward to it, because I really like the new in-game overlay and the added community bits like knowing which friends bought a new game.