SteamOS

Tuco_sl said:

Yup. Any kind of streaming is going to have both compression and lag and it will be awful for any decent gamer.

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They claim that the OS-level improvements allow for enough performance so that you only take a 10% fps hit and maintain "playable" latency. Obviously, that's vague enough that we won't know for sure until it's released.

Golgotha_sl said:

I seriously do not understand who the Steam Machine is suppose to appeal to? Console gamers already have their living room machine. PC gamers, can buy, build and use a PC for the same purpose for a cheaper price. Those inbetween....its just too much money to try out something different. The only advantage Ive seen on any of these Steam Machine is form factor for a living room area, but that seems like such a small concern compared to everything else.

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I think it's to appeal to people that have a varied environment for their games... With steam cloud, you can PC game at home, then play the game on your profile/save at a friends house playing co-op... and then at bedtime you can sit back and relax for 20 minutes at home and play video games from your own bed... all with one device / game purchase.

Essentially it wants to become the facebook of gaming... if EVERYONE uses steam, then it will be impossible to switch away because all of your friends and game collection is there... and it is an upgradeable platform that you'll never need to switch away from no matter what device you use in the future.

Valve has decided to kill off the touch screen on the controller and just use physical buttons (Exactly like their beta units). Honestly it seems like a smart move to me. I have an LCD screen on my keyboard that I never look at it, and I couldn't see myself looking at a touch screen on the controller either. It always felt awkward looking down at a LCD on the keyboard to see information, especially any fast action game where my attention was always pinned to the screen. Hopefully it'll reduce the cost of the controller by a decent amount.

Up to 16 controllers can be used at once as well.

Steam Controller drops touchscreen, adds physical buttons

Do NOT read the comments on that article.

I gave installing this a try over the weekend. I went with a re-spin of it that supports Intel/AMD graphics and non UEFI booting. I managed to get it through the partitioning process and it died on the floor in the final software installation step. No idea why it failed, there was no visual indicator or log that I could see, just that the finalization of the software failed. It dropped me back to a list of things it does for the install and I attempted to get it to install GRUB then I could boot it up and try to fix it, sadly that seemed to do nothing.

The re-spinned version comes with a tool to resize your drive (worked successfully for me) and the ability to install GRUB for non UEFI capable machines.If anyone is interested here is the version I attempted to install:Ye Olde SteamOSe

Anyone else had any luck getting SteamOS to install?

For streaming to work they would need to do something similar to what they do to combat latency in fighting games.

Like the game loads up enough material, where if there is a latency spike it compensates by having some of that time already loaded up.

I have no clue how they would do that tho, I'm still confused on how it works in fighting games.

I got into the beta and will update how it goes when I configure it, but I don't know if it will work for me since the other computer is incredibly old (10 years maybe). It can't even stream youtube properly so I might be out of luck to help test it. I won't update if I find out that I'm not supposed to however.

These guys are a bit obnoxious, but they demo the streaming stuff at around 35min.

Yeah, obnoxious, but pretty informative. Am I getting this correctly, you can in theory stream win->win as well as win->linux?

I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty sure Win->Win streaming works.

I finally got steamos installed on the weekend and it's very much a beta product. Most of the stuff that needs polish is related to the operating system specifically, I had issues with trying to use some basic system options such as switching users and it refused to save my HDMI port as the default audio output. It also refused to login and load up steam in big picture mode directly, no matter what it drops me to the desktop and I have to load steam directly. I tried all of the various desktop options (Gnome, Gnome Classic, Default X Session, and steamos) and it was the same thing for all of them. The install had a bunch of issues where it would randomly fail, I tried a few USB keys to rule those out but I ended up having to take out my 6970 to get it to install.

Steam itself seems fine, the only thing I found pretty terrible to use was the actual setup of my 360 controller. It makes you configure all the buttons one at a time via the interface but if you mess up for any reason you have to abandon the entire setup. Since it's making you configure the axis directions, as well as analog stick button clicks it's just ripe to accidentally click something wrong. Without a mouse/keyboard to correct things the controller is effectively useless because you have to abandon all the bindings, which means doing anything on the controller does nothing. Other than issues with the bindings it was pretty straight forward after that, it functioned almost entirely like the Windows version.

Streaming worked pretty well, I tried Batman Arkham Origins for a bit. For whatever reason near the beginning of the game the FPS dropped to something retarded low like 6FPS for awhile, but after that it was at a solid 60 for the rest of the game play. I have an i5-3570 powering the machine/graphics and it seemed more than sufficient for smooth streaming game play. It consumed 15megabits roughly streaming, and the latency seemed fine. Near the end of the session I had an issue with Batman's view always moving to look towards the floor, but the cat was laying on my HTPC controller so it might have been interfering with the game.

Overall it wasn't a terrible initial experience but unless you have some decent linux skills it might be quite the pain to navigate through and deal with the quirks.