A Quick Look at the Steam Community

[Bokuho]

Edited by [user="173994"] @ [time="1186478146"]

Why'd you add other games to team? That just means then, you're having Steam running (and thus, bogging down your computer) when you don't need it to. Just create a normal shortcut like everyone else.



Otherwise, good stuff.



ed: okay so actually GW isn't effected too bad by having Steam running in the background too. Far Cry, Deus Ex, Worms Armageddon, Sims 2 and WoW all won't work with it though, and The Thing suffered huge FPS drops, and then crashed, but works fine booting it up normally (i.e. without Steam). And yeah I really do play all those faggy games.



ed2: community pages/steam ID thingy kinda blows actually. Feels like making a Geocities site again.

[Rupert-]

does anyone have any idea how the steam rating thing works yet?

i thought it may be higher if you have more people on your friends list but im not sure... anyone ? :)

[kerosine99]

Rupert-, its just a function of weekly time played.

[LMN8R]

When you add non-Steam games to Steam, it does more than create a simple shortcut. When you start the game from your Steam games list, it adds all of the Steam in-game features to it too, such as chat overlays.



For example, when I started up Far Cry, a non-Steam game, from within Steam, I immediately got the little notification in the lower-right telling me I could hit shift+tab to bring up the overlays. Worked like a charm too.



Granted, it's still buggy seeing as it's a beta, but this sounds awesome. Basically what XFire does but even more feature-filled.



Hopefully when they get it up and running, they'll track hours of play-time for non-Steam games too. Right now it doesn't seem to do that, but again, it's a beta. For being a beta, it's very very well-done IMO.

[ukHazard]

http://steamcommunity.com/id/ukHazard



Master of Nothing... sounds kinda metallica-ey.

[Zom-B]

I don't like it. The overlay thing makes some games run slower, or perhaps that's just me.



It's getting too flashy for it's own good, needs a simple skin just for launching games imo.

[peagle]

http://steamcommunity.com/id/peagle

[Bokuho]

LMN8R wrote..

words

How the fuck did you even get Far Cry to work at all? When I tried getting it to launch via Steam it crashed out on the opening splash screen. And yes, it does work perfectly fine outside of Steam, and no I don't have weird mods or anything installed. Steam just fucked it.

[meowmeow]

Bokuho wrote..

How the fuck did you even get Far Cry to work at all? When I tried getting it to launch via Steam it crashed out on the opening splash screen. And yes, it does work perfectly fine outside of Steam, and no I don't have weird mods or anything installed. Steam just fucked it.

He didn't start Far Cry via Steam, he started FC seperately, and while he was playing the game a window popped up telling him to hit Shift+Tab, it does that for every game.

[-:Nighthawk:-]

Make sure you restart your system after opting into the beta and letting Steam update itself. I was talking with Thortok today and HL2 crashed for him at the startup screen after opting into the community beta, but a simple restart fixed that up.



Anytime you do overlays you have to expect some FPS drops, so I'm really not surprised. If you don't like the in-game feature, though, it's really easy to disable in the Steam settings. Being able to disable any feature that slows you down or isn't wanted is pretty nice, and should help keep everyone happy whether they enjoy these extra features or not.

[Zips]

There's been a few reports (myself included) that the beta also causes some BSOD's in Red Orchestra. Certainly a lot of kinks to be worked out (especially if some 233 bug report threads are to be believed).

[DevgruSeal H.E]

Shift+TAB is a bad default key combo.



All of the sudden, I'm 'walking' along and decide to check my scores and blamo, I see my friends list.



Regardless, I changed it to Shift+F12. But it's still not a good default. How frequent did they expect people to be using the overlay? ALT+TAB is one thing, Shift+TAB is another.

[Pen2]

Pssst! Watch for your avatar to appear in an upcoming game!

interesting...

[Zips]

DevgruSeal H.E wrote..

Shift+TAB is a bad default key combo.



All of the sudden, I'm 'walking' along and decide to check my scores and blamo, I see my friends list.



Regardless, I changed it to Shift+F12. But it's still not a good default. How frequent did they expect people to be using the overlay? ALT+TAB is one thing, Shift+TAB is another.

Try rebinding it to something like the "End" key, or just any key that isn't used in any game, ever. Works great.

Pen2 wrote..

interesting...

I think it's already known/understood that it's going to be used in TF2 at least. Since they'll have all of those community "achievement" things that people can view on your profile eventually.

[Crilix]

Yeah, I had a friend who had is mic messed up when he joined the beta. It did nothing but transmit loud static until he uninstalled the Steam community and it was fixed. There may be quite a ways to go yet be for this gets out of beta... I can't even get the voice chat feature to work.



On another note... Seeing how halflife2.net already has one, when is someone going to create a CSNation group?

-Cril