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SteamOS

store.steampowered.com

71–80 of 532 posts

Re: SteamOS

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The announcement page claims all 3000 titles are available via streaming, similar to the OnLive service but only for your internal network, I'm guessing. Effectively working around the porting issue.

I don't know if they are going to attempt something like onlive, but this streaming is on your local lan from your Windows or Mac box.

Sure that's what I meant, I edited my comment to be more clear.

Re: SteamOS

#72
post #26

This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch. Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform? Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time portin…

Any console has its own platform to target. When that platform happens to be Linux-based, this magically becomes an onerous and unlikely requirement.

This has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with who wants to target Steam's pet platform (vs Xbox pet platform, etc.) Comparing this to Windows is nonsensical.

Re: SteamOS

#73
post #16

wOOOOOOOOOO!!! If that works on normal machines (like, my laptop), I will kick Windows for good finally!

Yeah I hear you, I thought that this announcement would hurt M$oft stock, but I guess Valve isn't on the radar at all in the mind of investors.

Re: SteamOS

#74
post #26

This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch. Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform? Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time portin…

There are a good chunk of games that barely make it to the consoles... (or just simply never do). I think it is much more rare to not make it to PC/Windows.

A hunch I have is that developers are unwilling to target linux because of its diversity. By providing SteamOS they are providing a stable target for developers to release games against instead of trying to support all Linux distros.

Re: SteamOS

#75

The streaming of other OS games from your other OS systems seems like a pretty compelling and surprising feature. I wonder if it will work with all games.

I can't see how they'd manage to get twitch games like online FPSes to be playable with the addition of another layer of latency between the player and the game. A 100ms delay between input and response is death for games like that.

Online FPS haven't been twitch based since the times of Quake 3 and Painkiller. Because they had local lan. And CRT monitors able to deliver 120 FPS. The moment online gaming moved to hosted servers and TFT ... well I still find them too slow even with 50ms ping.

Re: SteamOS

#76
Some responses say SteamOS is not open source, in the press release, it says "Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want." So I'm guessing if not open-source, the user would download a disk image, then go in and change the configuration, install media-center front-end software, etc, after the fact?

Regardless, I'm very interested, but just curious how easy and flexible it will be.

Re: SteamOS

#77
post #10

Oh my god. This provides a genuine chance for year of the linux desktop in 2014, for gamers at least.

Isn't this specifically not a desktop system?

I assume he is implying that games coming to SteamOS should be able to run on any desktop linux that supports the Steam client.

Re: SteamOS

#78
post #10

Oh my god. This provides a genuine chance for year of the linux desktop in 2014, for gamers at least.

Isn't this specifically not a desktop system?

Yes but it's virtually the same core software stack as on the desktop. So the linux distros get a huge leg up in that arena.

Re: SteamOS

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see how they'd manage to get twitch games like online FPSes to be playable with the addition of another layer of latency between the player and the game. A 100ms delay between input and response is death for games like that.

If you have 100ms latency on your LAN you have some serious problems.

There's latency for pings and latency for sending moves to a multiplayer server, those are going to be low on the LAN. Then there's user experienced latency for sending high frame rate HD graphics to another machine every frame and the input back from that other machine. That is not going to be without hiccups, even on a LAN.

In reality, most consoles are hooked up by WiFi nowadays which will make things even worse. Android manufacturers have struggled with smooth display mirroring over WiFi for a long time and the only time I've seen it work good enough for gaming is WiFi Direct connections via Miracast or wired connections via MHL.

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