Valve is bringing Steam to your TV Today
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
I think it was Killzone on PS2, but can't be certain.
(I would link to screenshots of said browser, but I can't find any.)
edit: Found it! It was named linksboks, here's screenshot: http://www.tdubel.com/artikkelit/kuvat/linksboks/linksboks.j...
1) At first I thought it was like SMS numberpad entry, but it looks like they're chorded - with the combination of the directional and number you could enter keys pretty fast.
2) It's geared to gamers and anyone comfortable with a console gamepad will pick this up quickly.
3) Strategically, it could push consoles (specifically Steam-powered ones) as the best interface with which to enter text in a TV environment. In particular, it seems potentially better than Boxee's controller keyboard or the iOS Remote app's soft-keyboard, leave alone any console key-entry system to date.
If they haven''t patented this method, it'd be nice to see some implementation of it show up in XBMC / Plex / etc.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuoq__t7NjE
[2] http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/05/circboard-offers-an-intere...
It's not a new idea by any means, but it may be the best execution of that idea so far.
One way to do that is a game streaming service, but OnLive is floundering and Ouya is too far away for that. If Valve goes the other way and ships a set-top computer, that might help but now they're in the same race that MS and Sony are in with their console lifecycle.
Would you mind sharing why you think of Ouya as related to streaming? It's not an uncommon thought, I know plenty of people who work in the games industry who have the same misconception about it, so I presume something sometime caused this?
I think of Ouya as a game streaming device because:
(a) this seems to be the direction a lot of companies are headed in;
(b) the device itself is so small[1] that it seems like it can't run a powerful game, so I just mentally jumped to the conclusion that it is a streaming device; and
(c) the pictures I keep seeing on news websites and such are of the game controller, not the device itself, so I assumed that it was similar to the OnLive service (I recall their ads only showing the game controller as well).
[1] It has the same footprint of an Apple TV or Roku box.
Food for thought, anyway.
Sony bought Gaikai, Onlive never had a way of controlling costs, but those two weren't the only players here. Agawi (a startup I joined a few months back) is making a big push into cloud gaming.
The folks at Dell/Alienware have made a small box to fit exactly the need you're thinking about, I decided not to go with it because it wasn't available with an SSD, but it's an impressive little bundle. http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112...
Is there a way I can use a controller (like xbox360 or something) where my PC is still kept in my 'office'.
ie. Can I play games from my PC on my TV in the lounge room, without having to have an actual PC in the lounge room?
I'd definitely be interested in building a PC that's small enough to fit under my TV, but powerful enough to run any of my steam games. I wonder if there might be a market in producing those for people. I assume that's what the steam-box is going to be, but apart from this I don't see any hints of that coming out soon.
If you look around there's already a somewhat healthy market of pre-built computers for that purpose. Most of them are HTPC types but some of them can be upgraded enough that will play games nicely.
I think a lot of gamers including myself can tolerate the fan noise, especially if you have a good sound system. The earlier generations of Xbox 360 were really horrible for fan noise, and most people needed an extra 3rd party fan to keep it from becoming defective; which adds another level of noise (it took me four years before I had a red ring problem). I don't think this was even fixed until the latest gen in 2010.
Plus, depending on the games, many PC gamers use headphones.
But that's PC gamers though, I see your point about your 360. Your example is basically what I'm saying, I don't think many people would care for that very much. When it comes to electronics connected to the TV the most common experience is that they produce no noise.
Most HTPCs are built to perform their duty with little to no fan noise but putting in a proper discrete video card can ruin that. You can get accustomed to it over time but you have to get over that initial unfamiliar white noise coming from the general direction of your TV.
The reason I feel that this is important is that if Steam were to start being used on a typical TV environment it will expand beyond games. They've already tested the waters with one movie, granted it was very relevant to their market. Steam is already well suited to be an iTunes and/or Netflix type service.
My Xbox 360 along with the 3rd party fans sounded like a leaf blower. You don't need a good surround system, you just need to turn the volume up on your TV or get a cheap sound bar. With PC's it's even cheaper to get a 2.1 speaker system that does the job for like $20.
> But that's PC gamers though, I see your point about your 360. Your example is basically what I'm saying, I don't think many people would care for that very much.
People still care but many either tolerate it or work around it based on the games.
> People still care but many either tolerate it or work around it based on the games.
Of which I totally agreed with. My point is that it's an issue because I expect Steam to expand beyond games. If the box is not built with this in mind then it's a potential issue. To expand into the TV audience market you'll need a box that won't make noise that people who are not accustomed to may not like.
I think there's a bigger problem than noise if they want to expand beyond techies and gamers. Ease of installation comes to mind. It's hard to compete against the Apple TVs, Rokus, PS3's and Xbox 360s on that end.
It won't save you any money, but quiet gaming PCs are doable if you're willing to invest a bit more time.
Actually, if you bought a Voodoo then you needed two slots; three if you did SLI.
The setup you describe is done now, more or less. My case has the video card at the bottom directly in front of a large fan that blows outside air across it. The card itself has two fans that suck that air in and partially blows it out the back. At the top the CPU has a small attached fan with a large fan on the upper rear of the case sucking hot air out. Some cases also have an extra fan on the side of the case directly above the CPU.
The only thing missing is the tunnel as you describe. But I have seen people do that with custom SLI rigs. I think that the problem isn't necessarily the ATX form factor, meaning the motherboard, but the case design itself. I've seen some creative case designs from pre-built computer manufacturers but it makes it difficult to service yourself.
You dont even need to port Crysis to be a "mobile" game (touchscreen, etc.). You just need to make it run on the hardware using Android/ios.
I'll bring the Dualshock.
Hahahaha, no. (I love the non-gamers on HN. So optimistic. Go look at the current state of emulation and hardware power, it's a bleak situation.) Current desktop graphics technology is still only sorta able to run the Cryengine at full speed, and they're pumping out on the order of 1000(mid-grade)-2500(high-end) GFLOPS.
An iPhone is somewhere between 5 and 15 GFLOPS. So unless we're going to have a 100x leap in graphics bandwidth, I wouldn't expect to be able to play desktop quality PC games off of a mobile phone anytime soon.
Even my CPU (2500k) has higher throughput than the iPhone GPU, at 50-100 depending on the benchmark.
Should be able to run a poker game or Farmville though.
I write 3D code for mobile devices, and I'm continually astonished by what these things are capable of, i.e. your comment about poker and Farmville is a bit too much snark. Besides, it seems you're equating game quality with poly count. There are a lot of visually stunning, intelligent games that run great on phones that would be perfect on a larger screen.
Not really. A Python port, PyGG2, is currently in development, and that might have a chance of mobile support, but I don't expect so. The current GG2 is written in Game Maker. While GM has cross-platform Mac/HTML5/iOS/Android support, we use a custom-built windows-only networking library, so this isn't really an option. Also, we've been meaning to migrate away from GM for quite some time, due to its performance and limitations.
(I used to be a GG2 and PyGG2 dev...)
Otherwise, what you say is perfectly reasonable and quite true. But comparing a phone with a computer running Crysis doesn't seem quite right.
What I want to know is what's stopping people from doing this now? Wouldn't most tablets, and probably phones, have something in place to connect video to a TV? HDMI would be nice but I'd imagine a proprietary cable of some sort?
As someone who, in terms of raw gaming time, spends more time beating Ninja Gaiden on the NES than playing the favorite FPS of your average 11 year old, that seems dubious at best.
The original Ninja Gaiden series is the Liszt of gaming.
It's interesting to see people who think their phone somehow equals the abilities of a console or PC. I can see comparing gameplay experiences but not hardware capabilities.
If he had only stated "let me play games on it" then it wouldn't matter. At the same time I don't see what's stopping him from doing that today, assuming his phone has some sort of video out support.
Maybe one day we'll have that super computer in our pockets we all dream of but then our birth rates will likely decline.
I don't know of anyone who thinks that, and I don't read the above post that way. It's almost a pointless discussion, though, because the three year old phone in my pocket is more powerful than most of the desktop computers I've owned in my life. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect mobile devices a couple of cycles hence to be able to match 90% of what's on people's desks right now.
I don't think it's unreasonable either. I would agree that to compare today's tech with yesterday's or today's with tomorrow's is sometimes pointless. I didn't realize that's what we were doing.
> Please let me dock my 2013 mobile phone with 4 GB RAM and 4 Kepler-PhysX cores...
Are there any phones currently with Kepler cores in them? A quick search didn't yield any.
I think one big reason we're seeing comparable graphics on mobile devices now is that they are just now getting close to the capabilities of the 5 year old console hardware. Most dev studios need to target this old hardware and make their games scale to it.
When the new consoles come out the gulf between mobile and console gaming will again be huge and the consoles will immediately begin to lag behind PC hardware as usual.
Maybe game companies will continue to make an effort to scale their engines to mobile hardware as well but I doubt it as the architecture is fundamentally shifting to make use of massive parallelism.
Desktop quality gaming is already here on your mobile. Yes, I do understand that it is not Crysis quality, but it is a superb indicator of where its heading.
It was not my intention to devolve this discussion in this direction. My excitement stems from Valve's innovative new keyboard that reduces dependence on a keyboard paradigm as well as its recent leanings towards Linux ( ~ Android).
With that many cores you can do some things orders of magnitude faster. Take this Nbody sim my friend and I wrote for example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOUxTSjowY&feature=plcp
It computes an n^2 algorithm over 20,000 particles at 30fps, and that's with my old card which has 200 cores.
You just can't do that without massive parallelism.
I can't even imagine how ridiculous a phone with active cooling would be. I've seen a few wintel tablets with active cooling and they look/feel like garbage compared to their thinner lighter ARM based android/iPad counterparts. The extra size would be way even pronounced on a phone.
Not by itself, but summed with mobile it will: http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/when-the-consoles-die-wha...
No idea how Valve is implementing their vision but the idea of having casual games be available like this on a subscription service can be really nice if done well.
Basically it's just a UI for using a controller while lounging.
XPadder works OK, but it's kind of a pain to use. It would be nice if you could set up a configuration for a game once, and Steam would remember it every time you played the game.
It would also be nice if people could share their configurations, and maybe when you buy a new game, it would default to the highest rated game-pad configuration.
For those of us who don't want to give Kotaku pageviews.
So many times people talk about Steam when it seems they are really talking about the Source Engine. It's almost a shock to see an article about Steam that really is about the client app.
Why would I put my good desktop in the living room just so I can use a controller in a more traditional environment? I can use a KB/mouse and a controller at my desk or in bed. Steam isn't going to magically be able to bring the graphical quality and versatility of the PC (which are it's primary benefits) to the living room without being forced to sacrifice most of it.
The dev time spent on this would have been much better used as an investment towards a home streaming technology. The Steam box should be an OnLive mircoconsole that uses your desktop PC running Steam as the server. It's perfectly possible, Apple does that exact thing via AirPlay except it uses your iPhone as the server. Try Real Racing 2 on a 1080p AppleTV, your doubts about the technology should vanish.
As it stands, this isn't notable news for anyone unless you're the type to be willing to build and maintain two gaming PCs just so you can play in two different rooms. If you are that type, something tells me lack of a 10-foot interface wasn't the obstacle in your way.
Either that, or be willing to compromise on graphical quality and versatility pretty heavily to get a cut down PC with standardized specs that you can put in the living room for cheaper...
...Wait, isn't that just a console?
I will be buying a wireless Xbox 360 USB receiver and giving this a whirl.
Did you mean to say "This doesn't fit my particular use case."? I can name a dozen people off the top of my head that will be excited about this.
General purpose computers are general purpose enough that your attempts to predict the shapes people have their setups arranged in falls flat on its face.
As it stands, this isn't notable news for anyone unless you're the type to be willing to build and maintain two gaming PCs just so you can play in two different rooms.
Or keep the beefy computer in the living room as thats the only place they play PC games (as I do).
Or have a TV in their bedroom / want to point their monitor towards the bed and lay back to play (think kids living at home/dorms).
Or don't completely shit their pants over the idea of moving a box from one room to another.
Or are OK with using this box for some not-top-of-the-line games on the couch. The exciting indie titles don't have the budget necessary to make graphically demanding titles. And No, that isn't just a console. Releasing onto a console (even to XBLA) has monetary and certification requirements some developers can't meet or are unwilling to compromise their game to meet.
From what I've heard wireless HDMI is not at that level of stability and reliability yet.