Steam releases new built-in recording feature | Hacker News Reader

Steam releases new built-in recording feature

store.steampowered.com

100 pointsS0y24 comments

I'm not the target audience for this, given that I don't post gaming videos online or share them with friends, but I think it's very nice how Valve is continuously creating cool new stuff for the masses.

It's going to be an interesting time for developers playing with the new "events" API to find the right balance between too few and too many "events" to notify Steam about. Hope it won't carry too big a penalty for those not recording.

Sony's PS5 has had this cool feature from launch, Nov 2020. But doesn't offer game event metadata integreation to the timeline like Steam.

A github project exists for another SDK for videogame recording editing, fwiw.

https://github.com/lulzsun/RePlays

IIRC, it's been there in some form since the PS3, which would save a screenshot along with every achievement. Loved that feature!

Absolutely super fire experience:

> Timeline and Event Markers. The Steam Timeline appears whenever you’re actively recording. Timeline-enhanced games generate event markers as relevant game events happen. Steam achievements and screenshots automatically create markers as well.

It's wild that games have done so so so little to expose the game to the world, to offer APIs. It's been Steam and a couple other major top-down drivers of yore (achievements) pushing games to think beyond the scope of the game window. Remarkable to me how close-minded & slow games have been, that they have to be pushed, to making the game relevant and interesting & enageable broadly.

And a bit sad there aren't open protocols for games play with. It's various intermedies (each tied to their own marketplaces) or bust.

Still, love to see it. And there's already a strong community of folks re-inplenting Steam SDK (ex: nucleus coop) at least, which is great.

Game devs are notoriously bad at integrating outside of the game loop. There's also the issue that there's over 15 years of games that support achievements and most of them will never be updated to a new API. The Steamworks API has been reverse engineered for a long time by pirates. People really don't realize how vendor locked in games are on Steam. It's convenient, but don't think for a second that you own the games.

I'm pretty sure as long as they are on my HDD, i can play them with an unconnected steam account. That's how we shared games 15 years ago, instead of trying to find keys or cracks, the person owning the game installed it on an external HDD, and with a few weird manipulations that was enough to play it with a disconnected steam account. Maybe that changed?

Anything that uses the steamworks SDK is going to require an active account to initialize properly. That may or may not be a fatal error, it's up to the devs to decide.

It varies wildly from game to game. It's very possible to use steam as simply a means to copy the game files onto your PC, or integrate with it so tightly it's 100% required to have an account in good standing (as well as one with the game publisher, or whatever), or anywhere in between (a lot of games make the integrations optional, which is the best solution IMO).

> It's wild that games have done so so so little to expose the game to the world, to offer APIs

Are you talking about steamworks SDK that help games be more "streamlined" (like those using steam Gameserver) should have been done by the industry without external (steam) push, or are you talking about allowing games to be contacted via API calls?

The big question I have is how well does it work on Linux. I'd assume pretty well considering all of their work on making gaming on Linux a great experience, but if I stream on Discord my FPS tanks hard with an NVIDIA card and X11. I look forward to seeing how well does in comparison.

May very well be a Discord issue as I have never had problems with either OBS or ffmpeg(1) for RTMP even on modest hardware when streaming on X11 and Linux with both NVIDIA and AMD cards.

Pretty poorly unfortunately. You're better off using OBS on linux to record your gaming sessions. Same as how you're better off using sunshine/moonlight to remote stream instead of their remote play feature.

Considering they're mentioning sharing videos from the steam deck, sure does look like they support Linux.

I'm on bazzite, in game mode I'm not able to record at 60fps for 4k,not sure if it's even using my gpu (7900XT)

In my experience only NVENC is supported by most video recording tools, and if you are on AMD, it's using the CPU, thus slowing everything to a crawl.

AMD should be using VA-API but it's not a very good system as it fails or breaks if you look at it the wrong way. I use a tool to stream my desktop to my TV (sunshine) which uses it, and every month VA-API fails with a new error so it has to resort to CPU encoding.

What has Discord anything to do with a Steam feature?

You can stream video on dc

This Steam update allows you to record stuff

Works great for me on Fedora Atomic Sway

One of the frustrating things is the native Linux Discord's lack of ability to stream audio from the program you're currently streaming.

The only way I've gotten it to work is to run a wrapper around the web version of Discord that does some funny things with audio streams to get something that works about 75% of the time (which is 3/4 more times than I worked before, progress!).

I notice that my CPU and GPU get hit much harder than in Windows when I do that.

I've been using this on the Steam Deck for a while and it is excellent. I mainly use it to grab video of glitches or other gameplay / menu effects which I can then share with developers. Very handy.

With screenshot and video recording built in for so many years, this kind of rolling recording is a natural fit. I suspect most gamers will ditch Nivdia ShadowPlay.

I did so because ShadowPlay was so unreliable. It would just randomly stop working and, when it did work, more often than not the footage it would save would have its audio desynced gradually towards the end for the last minutes.

I've been using Steam's recording feature since beta and it works quite well. One disadvantage (or advantage depending on how you look at it) is that it doesn't save raw footage, but only already compressed video which makes editing more difficult. I'm hoping they introduce the option to choose how it's saved in the future.

Rolling recordings are a massive boon for developers too. Any time something odd or buggy happens, the user already has it recorded, they just have to hit the button to save it.

It'll be nice to have this on the average user's PC, just like every current console and some previous do.

That's cool, considering ShadowPlay breaks every driver update or two.

Can't count the times I had to manually restart it because it was disabled for some reason.

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