Steam releases Big Picture mode | Hacker News Reader

Steam releases Big Picture mode

store.steampowered.com

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There's an excellent post on The Verge forums called "Forget the PS4 and the Xbox 720, build your own Steambox on the cheap"[0]. It will be very exciting to see if a significant number of gamers (many of whom are already familiar with building their own PCs) take the initiative to go down this road.

A nice auxiliary advantage of building a Steambox is that you can use it as a full-featured HTPC as well, since it runs a desktop OS.

0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/30/3706718/forget-the-ps4-an...

I did literally just this last week, with an ITX motherboard, a 65W APU (Trinity), and a case to match. I'm quite pleased with the results, and with Big Picture mode (given it *was still Beta)

Would you consider blogging about this? I'd like to do something similar next year.

I wouldn't mind writing about it, but I don't exactly have a blog. What is a good medium for a one-shot post like that?

make a quick tumblr and post it there

gist.io

Google Plus is usually good enough for this kind of stuff

Ironically, Medium: http://medium.com.

Otherwise, Tumblr or a gist powered by http://gist.io.

Well guys, here's a first pass:

http://gist.io/4199804

Is this something I should be submitting to HN directly?

Also, let me know if there's any particular pieces of information you want expanded/shared. I haven't yet had an opportunity for photos or video of use this evening.

(updated with photos and some brief, not-so-HD cams)

Please do submit it; this is a great write-up. :)

Well folks, I don't think we'll be seeing it on the front page. Perhaps I need to work on my titling.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4872751

Hopefully those who were interested have already had a chance to read it, by now.

Great write up :)

The post I linked in my OP has a full build guide, if that's what you're looking for.

it's not beta anymore.

I'd be interested in hearing about that too. I just ordered parts to build my parents a computer, I'm using it as an excuse to try out a Trinity APU. If I like it I'll look into building an ITX size for myself.

As you may not have seen my further updates, I wrote a short bit:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4872751

Anything that tries to disrupt, or at least compete on the same level with the Xbox and Playstation, is a good thing, and that includes OUYA as well.

Would it be legal for someone to manufacture and sell 3rd party Steamboxes, if Valve has no immediate plans to do so?

It seems like somebody like Alienware, or even just somebody on Kickstarter, could put together something impressive at a XBox720/PS4 pricepoint.

You might want to talk to valve before using the word "Steam" in the name of your product...

Otherwise I can't see an impediment. Maybe Valve could even have a 'designed for Steam' certification program or something.

Well, obviously all PCs are Steamboxes, technically speaking. However, if it's a streamlined box that plugs right into a television and boots right to steam, I could maybe see them putting up a stink, even if the branding was sufficiently ambiguous.

The MistBox ;)

I don't know, though. To be honest, I'm kind of shocked no one has tried this yet. It seems like such an obvious winner, even if there is a slight chance you would go to court with Valve.

I was thinking the other way around - that they might be perfectly encouraging of selling such a device, just that using 'Steam' (their TM) in the name or advertising without permission might get you in trouble.

I think it's a great idea!

The killer feature would be to sell the computer with a preloaded Steam account that already has the orange box plus portal 2 and the L4D games.

Now that's a Steambox.

I've done this ages ago. The big TV in the living room was always hooked up to a console and a PC. It was always a good combination.

Now the PC part is getting even easier to use. Great.

Now they just need to let us keep multiple boxes logged in at the same time. I don't like having to relogin on my settop.

Yeah, this has really pissed me off since installing the Linux beta, since I have two machines regularly logging in now.

Yes, it's particularly troublesome with Big Picture- isn't the idea that I'm going to have this connected to my TV, i.e. without a keyboard?

I can live with being unable to run games on two computers at the same time, but I wish I could stay logged in on two computers. Or at least, I don't know, pass a token.

Watching this, I'm reminded of the OUYA. Isn't this exactly what they were trying to accomplish?

In fact, it seems to me that Valve's Big Picture, combined with the ability to "make your own Steambox", completely trumps the OUYA.

Why would a game developer want to create a new port of their game to a completely new system when they could just optionally add controller support and publish to Steam?

Valve's got the player-base and game library, and now they're in the living room. Is OUYA's niche gone?

Why would a game developer want to create a new port of their game to a completely new system when they could just optionally add controller support and publish to Steam?

Because that's exactly the same thing as the OUYA for Android developers. All they need to do is add OUYA support to their existing application and publish it on their store.

Ouya is $100, a Steambox is ~$300, and the next gen consoles may be $400+.

In some ways, this is an advantage for selling games through Steam. If someone can't afford a decent computer, how likely are they to pay for games? And they will probably expect lower prices, especially if the assets are smaller and simpler.

Ouya has a much lower barrier to entry than Steam, which is none. Anyone can publish a game to the Ouya market (at least that's my understanding) but for an indie developer, getting a game on steam can be quite difficult. See the recently launched Greenlight website and how many games are on that, trying to get published on Steam[0]. I think the ease of publishing will attract a lot of developers, in the same way that iOS/Android grabbed smaller developers that couldn't get on the old consoles.

[0] http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/browse/?browsefilter=m...

I'm a HTML5 game dev so not really positioned to comment on the main story, but I did try out the Big Picture browser:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; Valve Steam Tenfoot/2095; ) AppleWebKit/535.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.989.0 Safari/535.11

So, Chrome 18. What is it with Chrome 18 given Chrome for Android is also stuck on that version? Maybe coincidence and slow release cycles... (Also, Tenfoot? Hmm)

I also tried playing a HTML5 game with it, which could be awesome with gamepad support. It seemed to freeze the browser and kept playing sounds in a loop, even after I had exited Steam... had to reboot to get rid of it. Guess it needs some work.

Don't get too hyped by "tenfoot":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-foot_user_interface

Just a clever reference to the UI paradigm.

Re: Tenfoot, it's apparently a term used to describe TV-sized GUI's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-foot_user_interface

Imagine a responsive web design that goes from 10-foot all the way down to mobile; now that would be impressive!

That would be easy the hard part is solving the responsive image problem. How can we know what quality image to send to a device?

The problems are shifting from display/device types to network types. Great you've got a 1080p phone but we can't shove down our retina quality images on 3g. Nor would you want use to use your battery life for that.

To add to the ten foot comments, since big picture hit the steam beta, there's been files and directories floating around in the steam install folder called tenfoot, so it is indeed just the internal name for big picture.

Steam (and by extension, Big Picture) uses LIBCEF to embed Chromium. As of April 26, the newest supported build of Chrome for LIBCEF was 18:

http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/source/detail?r=60...

While they now support newer versions of Chromium (http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/wiki/BranchesAndBu...) it is likely that Valve either didn't have the time to test everything against a new Chromium revision, or didn't want to take the risk. Every Chromium commit historically has a very high risk of breaking embedding use cases (I used to try and track Chromium for my own embedding purposes before finally giving up because it broke constantly).

As far as Chrome on Android goes, I have no idea. In Google's case you would expect they would have the resources to keep up with changes to their own codebases.

Even better, the update finally includes the ability to install games to drives other than the one steam itself is installed to.

AWESOME! I've been waiting for this! I've got an SSD that I only want to install certain games on because it is not big enough.

This should be the real announcement! Fantastic news for tinkerers.

I'm slightly confused how to use this. I have a gaming PC and a 1080p projector. I was always planning to just run an HDMI cable from the 4th output of my 2 cards into the AVR, and then get a second wireless keyboard or something to use when gaming at the couch, rather than a dedicated HTPC for gaming (I use an old macbook pro for ht, along with ps3/xbox360/appletv/googletv)

...eagerly waiting for the steambox announcement.

I haven't tried AppleTV's Airplay, but I think it just mirrors your desktop correct? So theoretically you could just run Steam's Big Picture Mode off of a Mac and use AirPlay to stream it to your TV?

You could but I suspect the latency might make most games unplayable.

I've attempted this; AirPlay does in fact lag too much for this to be useful.

Seems like Apple hasn't mastered video streaming compression as well as OnLive. OnLive seemed pretty playable to me when I tried it.

OnLive's protocol seems to be far more willing to sacrifice frames and quality to keep everything in sync; where AirPlay will (in my experience) hold up the stream until every last frame gets through, sync be damned. Also, AirPlay doesn't modify apps or input at all to compensate for the lag to the TV.

Could this be the first online movie rental service that runs on Linux? That would be very exciting news.

I just tried it and it's awesome!

But I can see something more awesome, what if Steam would sell hardware? Like a new steambox every year like Apple does with the iPhone.

They have an incredible catalog of games, a new steam box would just be more powerful but would still be able to play all the old games.

I'm looking forward to trying this out with my Mac Mini, which I use as an XBMC machine plugged into the TV. Hopefully the built-in HD4000 integrated graphics will suffice for Portal.

I need a controller. Which is the best one to get?

Let me answer my own question: apparently the xbox 360 controller is the only one supported.

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bigpicture/discussions/1/88...

Not sure about portal, but I've used a PS3 controller with software that emulates xbox 360 controllers. It was fairly difficult to get set up and then running every time but once it was running it was rock solid. Played my way through Lara Croft: Guardians of the light with it.

I think it was this: http://motioninjoy.com/download

I found that my Logitech RumblePad 2 worked great out of the box, and even better (almost flawless, the 360 controller has one extra button) after going through the button mappings in big picture settings.

Which is fine by me, it's one of the better gamepads I've used in a while and its widespread adoption makes for good prices and speaks well for future use.

Make a console, Valve!

This is their console.

This is just a re-imagining of the Steam interface to be optimised for large screens - I think the post above yours is referring to the rumoured "Steambox" that Valve themselves are supposedly working on.

I'd think it's fairly obvious that that's their step after next :P

(the immediate next step being "make the linux games catalog decently large", so they don't need to bloat their $300 console with an extra $150 of MS licensing)

On a tangent -- does anyone know how developing games for linux compares to developing games for consoles? I've heard windows devs complain about linux ("Braid will never be available on linux because ALSA is shit and fundamentally can't handle it", etc etc), but it seems that the valve console'd be more competing against the PS4 / xbox720 / etc, and I wonder if those devkits are better or worse...

> Braid will never be available on linux because ALSA is shit and fundamentally can't handle it

I don't buy it, tons of games with sound effects have been successfully ported to linux with no problems. Probably the devs are just being lazy :-)

I really wish they'd team up with the Open Pandora guys. The Pandora "Next-Gen" seems like its exactly what Valve needs ..

Just curious, how is this any different than using the TV as a projector/second screen? What exactly makes Big Picture, well, anything?

Bigger buttons and text, navigable with a gamepad and readable from a distance. Also, a text input method for use with a gamepad.

Even though it's called Big Picture mode, it looks like it could potentially make a great touch interface.

This made me play games for the first time in ages, it's a great feature that's a delight to turn on.

I wonder if steam will eventually add other media (movies, tvshows, etc) to their ecosystem.

They have "Indie Game: The Movie": http://store.steampowered.com/app/207080

So they may add more stuff in the future.

Anyone have an good suggestions for a controller? I'll probably just get an Xbox one.

Having the 360 controller compatibility is part of any games for windows live certification, plus most games have xbox support anyway it's as close to a de-facto standard controller you can get.

I'm not saying that has anything to do with steam but if I were a game dev and could only be bothered to support 1 controller that's the one I would spend the time supporting.

Steam is rockin it!

My mind is still being blown from TF2 running better in Linux than I've ever, ever, ever had any Source game run in Windows.

Is that from the private beta, or did I miss an announcement regarding wider distribution?

The Linux client is still in private beta, but you can easily circumvent it by just downloading the .deb and installing/running it on Linux anyway. FWIW, I wasn't invited to the beta right away, but about a week after I started running it anyway, I was invited.

The only issue you might run into is that it'll sometimes say your account is not authorized to use the Linux beta, but there are directions online on how to get around this by adding some flags and launching it from the CLI.

I'm not sure why I bothered though, since my Linux ultrabook can barely run any games anyway.

I did install the .deb, but when launching the client I get a message that I am not invited to the beta yet and that I cannot use this - then closes. Any work-around ?

Run "steam steam://open/games" from the CLI to launch it instead. Try a couple times if it doesn't work the first time.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/11/reddit-users-bypass-valve...

Did you do any FPS comparison ? What graphic card are you using? I would be interested to know more about your experience.

Valve did find OpenGL outperforming Direct3D with their engine.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

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