f13.net

No More IE! Rejoice! Now fucking awesome!

Settings -> Beta Opt-In -> Restart

It's realllly nice looking and a condensed view of your downloads now.

Yay! Flash is dead too.

The opening up of the IE window whenever I wanted to look at a screenshot made knives fly out of my eyes.  Is that gone?

Really like it so far.  Only thing I miss is being able to sort-to-top installed games like in the old listing (can only show Installed or All).  And there needs to be an option not to auto-play videos when you go to a game's store page.  That's annoying as fuck.


Pretty much, it opens up the Screenshots gallery in a separate application window.  It's still just showing you a (rather pretty) web page, but no IE.

Edit:

You should have the option for sure, but the videos are an improvement for me....you can turn off sound on the videos by toggle, if that counts.

Cal, 1.5M hours in the last 2 weeks? Go fucking outside, man.

I'll wait until the final product; the beta I tried was slow and unwieldy with far too many gimmicks for my tastes.

Slow and Unwieldy is not what I'd describe it as considering the previous IE abortion that passed for a front-end. I can't even compare the two - or the memory footprint of the new one versus the original (which is so vastly improved it's not even funny).

What I have now works. I click on the games tab, I double click the game I want to play and I hit play. I don't have to wait for the choppy client to slowly load my games page, wait for it to load a random splash screen, and then hit play. The gradient also looks like ass... But it's a beta client; so as I said...

The gameplay stats seem to work well in actual Steam games (like Dragon Age (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40252/steam-beta-dao.jpg)) and in games with Steam Achievements you get information about that instead of hours played.  I'd check if the "15mil hours in the past two weeks" hilarity schild noticed is an isolated case, but the only other non-Steam game shortcut I have is the SC2 Beta and that's just refusing to launch from Steam now :heartbreak:.

I haven't tried buying anything, which I guess is sort of the point of Steam, but if you can stomach generic beta quirkiness (like the below) I'd definitely suggest trying it out.  Also, if it breaks your install to the point of not being able to start it, just add -clearbeta to your Steam shortcut when you launch and that'll get you back to stable (hat tip: comments over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/24/valve-reveals-new-look-steam-beta/comment-page-1/#comment-405776)).

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40252/steam-beta-last-played.jpg)


You can just use Games List or Grid view instead of Details.  Details is nice because you can see if friends are playing the game without having to open up the little Friends window, but I haven't actually launched something from the Steam window since they added Jump List support (except for the first time, natch) a while back.

Oh god I love custom categories.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39720/f13/steam_custom_categories.png)

Edit: For those wondering, that first category has 8 games in it.

Which games!

Its definitely still beta. All my menues are blank, I can't even revert to the non-beta.

I think it's for the category Christ Fuck Stay Away games.. ie 8 games.

I had some issues last night with loading the store/community pages but there is another platform update this am that fixed most of my issues.

About time, hopefully its less of a system hog too.

Erm, I think he was asking schild which games are in that category.   :uhrr:

So far it is good.  Reminds me, though, that I need to find out how to remove a couple non-Steam-game items from my list.  Still no obvious delete button.

Isn't there a right-click "Remove Shortcut"?

Yes.

I simply did not delete enough things from my steam directory. :oh_i_see:  That's the problem with carrying the same directory structure since Steam was released.

Holy crap this new UI brings my system to a crawl.  My CPU usage jumps to 80% on steam every couple of seconds and makes everything pause.  I hope that doesn't persist!

That must be tough for them to nail down (hence beta test, SEND FEEDBACK, VALVE IS GOOD ABOUT THAT SHIT). On my system it's a dream come true (/reiterate).

I can't even turn if off without text in the pull-down menues.

Does that include the right-click menu for the tray icon?

Sadly, yes.

There's always process killing.

That would kill Steam, but not the new UI.

OIC

Someone who is registered on the forums please ask for chat logging. Every other chat client ever has that option, yet it is mysteriously missing from steam.

Supposedly there are a bunch of Mac OS X files running around in the Steam client. Looks like the move to Webkit may not have been just to kill the idiot child that is IE.

This Steam forum post (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1160394) has a fix for the no text problem.

Chat logging requested.

Kill the Steam process, add -clearbeta to your Steam shortcut, and relaunch Steam.

Thanks Prospero, changing Arial to Verdana did the trick!

Alright, Comic Sans, here I come.

Overall the client seems pretty nice and smooth for me. Two gripes. The Store page is way to big and crowded. Feels like a step back. Icons everywhere and I have to scroll way down to even get to the New Release and Coming Soon pages. Do not like. The other being, I wish my installed games would show up at the top of the list, like the old Steam. Just me I guess, but I liked that better.

The games list is filterable by category; switch to "installed" in the dropdown and you only see installed games.  It seems like it might not remember this, though, which is annoying.

Yeah, I figured this out but I liked to see everything.

This is so much faster for me now, good work Valve!

If your overlay text disappeared in the past few days (like mine did), you can add -no-dwrite to your Steam shortcut and that'll fix it until they can get a patch out.

The text also seems less blurry now which is a definite plus.

I uninstalled the beta version. I was just having to many issues, and the performance was identical.

I actually rather like the current interface for steam.....

I'll give this a shot though.

All the view modes for the library are fucking awful. Scratch that, pretty much all the new layout is incredibly bloated and shitty. It's like a 26-inch iPhone interface. There was nothing wrong with the old interface, even the fact that it was running in an IE window.

I would like the old sort list back.  I could fit a lot more games into the window without scrolling.

Figure I'll ask here rather than make a new thread.  I'm going to reformat my HD and install Windows 7 (because my release candidate expired and is yelling/resting at me now).  All my steam info is on another drive.  Is there any way for me to re-install steam, and then reconnect it with all the data I've already downloaded?  I'd really rather not re-download 100 gigs worth of games..

I would think that if you just re-install Steam and point it at the same cache directory that it'll see the cache and go "oh, okay".

IIRC there's also a special option in Steam to make a backup of your cache?

You can also update your release candidate with a real version without losing your installs. That's what i did and it worked beautifully.

Valve is sending out Apple inspired ads for their games. The majority are pretty much win.

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/03/valve-teases-upcoming-half-life-release-for-mac/

Holy fuck, you weren't kidding:
(http://images.macrumors.com/article/2010/03/03/154550-valve_4.jpg)

Owns so hard I can't describe it.

......I didn't even think to try this.   :facepalm:

Google for the hack to do it; it's very simple. It takes one quick edit of a text file and a couple quick registry tweaks. 5 minutes tops.

I did a reinstall anyway, to get a clean OS.

Steam worked fine once reinstalled.

Yep, I've done that multiple times - back up the entire Steam folder, restore it after reinstalling Steam.  I recommend doing a "validate game files" afterward just in case.

Cool, thanks all.  Yeah, I'll probably do a clean wipe anyways.  I like to do clean OS installs, always leery of any sort of upgrade approach, even if I shouldn't be.

I did a clean install and I have Steam on a separate disk.  I can't remember if I reinstalled Steam or just started it... probably reinstall.  In any case it should find everything if you use the same directory.  My steam.log has stuff as far back as 2007 in it so apparently I have not wiped the directory tree since then.

Impulse works differently but almost as easy.  Since Impulse games go into their own directories rather than some secret place under steam, you will need to tell new-Impulse where the game dirs are.  After that it should validate and not need a redownload.

Wired article on Steam for Mac. Awesome. As a user of both platforms, this makes me stupidly happy.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/03/steam-mac/

Yeah, that's awesome. The part about getting Mac version "at no extra charge".

Most of my computer XP is in the Mac world these days, but I do run Windows when running those apps and games not available on OS X platform. I never know which version to buy — hopefully, this solves the gaming dilemma…

Best part of that, if I understand the release correctly, is that the games are being written natively for the Mac, not as cider ports.

Fucking. A.

Now if you could run OSX on a homebrew pc hardware platform, I'd give a shit.

I know one gamer who only runs macs, and he can't afford a mac that would run TF2. If he could, he'd probably build a gaming pc for the catalog of everything else. I love OSX, but the hardware is an albatross.

Usefully cynical commentary.

You can. Hardware permitting of course.

I know at least one person who buys Mac hardware and installs Windows on it so he can run games.   :awesome_for_real:

Maybe....

:crying_panda:

/boggle

I posted that hoping to see a cage fight between Prospero and Sky, and so far I'm disappointed.

Eh, if I had the money that's probably what I'd do.

Look it up and see if your specs fit the drivers they have for the installs. It was pretty varied from what I recall and wasn't a scenario of "You need an Asus M7NCD-EX-PR mobo. Won't work with the non PR version."

Yeah, I've been watching for a while. I've got an X-Fi.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Creative

Not too surprising. Apple hardware is pretty top of the line. Overpriced compared to what you can custom build, but its sexy and all that. Pity about the one button mouse nonsense. Otherwise I would have gotten a mac book pro and put on Windows 7.

FFS shut up about the one-button mouse already. We've had machines that work with a right click for years now.

True story.

You do realize you can configure the trackpad to recognize various gestures to be right click, right? If you want a middle mouse button, however, you are SoL.

Or, ya now, just plug in any old usb mouse that you want.

Magic mouse (http://www.apple.com/magicmouse/) is best mouse ever. It only took Apple 25 years to refresh the mouse, but multi-touch mouse is awesome. Accelerated scrolling, gestures, etc.… (and yes, Virginia, right click (as well as any other tap/press/swipe combo, though to enact the really esoteric sequences you need to DL a freeware utility app (http://blog.boastr.net/)) is easily enabled)

Ok.

Ya, but even the mac users I support end up using a usb mouse when in Windows bootcamp or parallels when using an apple notebook. Its sorta like consoleitis. Technically it works like a normal 2 button trackpad, but it just feels just wrong to them, probably because the trackpad wasn't designed for navigating context menus.

When was that released? I haven't seen one and I probably won't get another imac until next year. The mighty mouse blows, we've bought 17 minis in the last year and not a single apple mouse. Do like the current apple keyboard (the full size, not the runt). Bought one for everyone and they love them, too. Especially those upgrading from the Tray of Shit Collection keyboard.

Last year sometime? Not sure…

It came bundled with 27" iMac I got for Christmas.

Keyboard bundled with it was the wireless one which I soon lamented giving away my 15+ year old old school clangy Apple OS 9 keyboard… …but bought a full size one with same touch style which I now enjoy (really missed the Control keys and for gaming, the half-laptop-style-keyboard really is a hinderance). Saving the wireless keyboard for a new Mac Mini and/or iPad.

Yeah, Apple mouse iterations all blew chunks until the Magic Mouse. And I was skeptical, ready to discard and plug in USB Logitech mouse, but it truly is revolutionary. Best I compare to is gestures on iPhone, the accelerated scrolling, but with more — two finger swipes, taps and clicks, etc.… …by default, OS X does not enable right hand clicks (!) but easily toggle in settings. Like stated, some more esoteric sequences (i.e., I use a 3 finger tap to equate to middle mouse click) are available with Better Touch Tool.

Really like the side to side scrolling — that is if you do any audio/video editing, you really get used to side scrolling (not much application web browsing, though two finger swipe back/forward to navigate through your browser history I use a lot) with just a finger slide.

Downside: it does seem to require battery replacement every month or so.

MY buddy just got his first Mac, a Macbook Pro, supplied by his work, and he went out and bought one of these. He is in absolute awe of the thing. Granted, he doesnt use it for gaming, but for navigating around the OS while working, he said it cant be beat right now.

Mighty mouse was indeed shit. The Magic Mouse seems really solid though. It's not quite worth giving up my Mamba for, but it's a good piece of kit.

As to the whole buying Mac hardware for gaming, I was all set to pull the trigger on a new iMac of Doom until folks started oohing and ahhhhing over nVidia's 3D stuff. I desperately need L4D2 in 3D. And probably some adult diapers.

What steam game are you trying to play w/ a trackpad?

I actually do have win 7 on a macbook pro and have been using it as my sole gaming machine for the last year or so.  Works great for everything on Steam.

Hell, I even use trackpad, in windows, to play civ 4 and armored princess.  Works splendidly.

Steam for Mac launches tomorrow!

Valve details Steam for Mac launch, includes Torchlight (http://www.destructoid.com/valve-details-steam-for-mac-launch-includes-torchlight-173401.phtml)

"Luckily" my mini is a first gen Core Duo with shitball graphics, so the mac-compat steam stuff won't run, leading me not into temptation.

Sweet!  They have three games already!

Torchlight would be pretty awesome on the iPad.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3667682/steammac.jpg)

I see 19^^63 now.

Granted, most are of the casual variety and dated, like Bejeweled, Diner Dash, Chuzzle, etc.…

…but yes, Torchlight, Portal and Football Manager (which already had a Mac version available) are also for choosing.

I understand that every Wednesday a new batch of Mac releases will be added.

If you grab Steam today for the Mac they are throwing in Portal for free.

GlaDOS pimping free portal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj1fYlwR00)