211–220 of 291 posts
Look at the beta eligibility list: they require the would be participants to get a leg in the steam community facilities, and try playing in living room mode. That would give a huge crowd an incentive to try Steam the way Valve is hoping it'd be used in the future. So they give 300 boxes, but get thousands of people trying their console-like services. Evil geniuses, those Valvers are.
So the only thing I learned from this is that its not a SteamBox, it is a SteamMachine.
I'm excited about where Valve is going with this, of course, but to be honest I'm concerned about controllers the most. Buying a good controller for a PC is not hard, but it's not simple either. Picture yourself as a "living room console guy" getting into PC gaming. You'd like to use a controller for a certain game. Consider: - You can use your XBox360, PS3 controller, or WiiMote, but that's not obvious. You'll need…
From TFA: >Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room? >If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input. The third announcement will be the controller Valve patented some time ago. This controller replaces a thumbstick with a trackball, and might let you swap out input devices for different games. Rega…
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> Oct 2013 Apple likely to announce $149 A7X based console killer. Maybe I'm just missing something here, but I'm pretty sure an ARM-based system has exactly zero chance of displacing current gaming platforms. They could whip up a sexy Ouya competitor, sure, but Ouya isn't exactly setting the gaming world on fire. An ARM console would be a competitor to phone/tablet gaming, not to console gaming.
The Ouya GPU pushes 12 GFLOPs (gamecube, original xbox quality). The GPUs in the 5S give 76 GFLOPs and are underclocked at 300 Mhz for battery reasons. A hypothetical A7X which, following the A6X, has twice as many GPUs as the A7, would put us at 150 GFLOPs. Keep in mind the A6X is still on a mobile device. Up the clock speed to 500 Mhz and we've arrived at 250 GFLOPs. This is comparable to the PS3 (230) and 360 (260…
Any "console killer" is going to have to compete with...well, current consoles (and now, Steamboxen). Apple could certainly ship an underpowered "do your mobile gaming on your TV" device (and to be clear, I think there's room in the market to siphon off some casual gamers), but actually going head-to-head with the console market just isn't going to happen without putting some more raw power into the box and shipping an architecture that won't make ports a pain in the ass. The Xbox One, PS4, and Steambox are all going to be X86-64 architectures. Throwing an ARM platform into the mix and expecting it to kill existing consoles is silly.
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Well, provided that you find the 360 controller's d-pad acceptable, the wired xbox 360 controller works directly, however the wireless 360 controller does not work directly, a different wireless controller that specifies working with the PC has to be purchased and uses a specialized receiver as well. However, once that is accomplished it works well. I do find it obnoxious that it both requires an external USB receive…
That isn't true. The wireless controllers for the 360 work just fine with the PC. I personally swap mine between them all the time.
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Be interesting to see how they tackle the player-with-controller vs player-with-mouse/keyboard issue... clear advantage in FPS games with a mouse. I'd buy a console tomorrow if they allowed mouse/keyboard - sick of all the cheaters in PC gaming, and having games get _better_ as the hardware ages would be a welcome change from having to constantly upgrade my video card to play new releases at a decent frame rate!
You could buy a console and a XIM3[1]. You could dominate any FPS, I think. [1] http://xim3.com/
The way FPSs interpret mouse movement is by mapping units of mouse movement onto units of rotational movement. If you move the mouse x units to the left, your view will rotate f(x) units (an absolute relation). When mapping joystick movement, the location of the joystick determines the speed at which your view rotates. If the joystick is x units off center, you will move at f(x) units per second until the joystick moves again (a relative relation).
For this reason, it's pretty simple to convert relative joystick movement into mouse movement, since you simply need to map the joystick position onto an absolute mouse velocity. However, it's extremely difficult to turn the absolute mouse movement into a relative joystick position. From what I can tell, it takes the velocity of the mouse movement and returns it as a joystick position, so if you're moving the mouse at x units per second, it will return a joystick position of g(x), which the game will then turn into f(g(x)) units of rotation per second.
What you end up with is jerky and unresponsive. Mouse movement just can't be translated into joystick position in a transparent way. I used the thing for a couple days, and ultimately gave up on it. Even as a hard core Mouse/Keyboard gamer, I preferred the controller over the XIM.
> Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room? > If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input. This excites me. Valve's bread-and-butter, as a gamedev company and not a game reseller, uses a pointing device. FPS games and Dota are both genres that do far better with a mouse. Obviously, supporting gam…
>FPS games and Dota are both genres that do far better with a mouse. Toupée fallacy. I'd argue that games built for a gamepad -- Halo and Gears of War come to mind -- feel much better on a gamepad than they do on a keyboard and mouse.
I'd say that Genres built for a gamepad, such as platformers, feel much better on a gamepad, but shooters still feel best with a more precise and fast device. Sure you can design around it to make it suck less, but in the end you still need to add in aim assist to make it an enjoyable experience (as pretty much all console shooters do).
I wish they would follow Apple's lead and tightly control the hardware. It would make it easier for devs to test and consumers to make a choice. Apple's wildly successful with their iPhone business model. Please try to avoid the fragmentation issues with Android. Windows already owns the home PC market, why go after it?
To add further: there is only one XBOne hw configuration, there is only one PS4 hw configuration, there is only one WiiU hw configuration. Does Valve think it knows better?
I'm gonna say "Yes, they do know better".
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Games designed for the gamepad do work nicely on a gamepad, but they achieve this by slowing down the FPS gameplay so thoroughly that they functionally exist within their own genre, as well as providing substantial auto-aim. The PC-style of FPS gaming, which is substantially faster-paced than the console-style, is dependent on having a pointing-device for aiming. Experiments in allowing gamepad and mouse players to c…
Interesting point, but I think you don't mean to say vector, but something more like 'velocity', 'momentum', or better yet, joysticks are meant to control a rate of change.