It sure is gettin Steamy in here! (SteamOS)

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Seems Steam is rampin thing sup with a Linux based OS of their own.


Steam is coming to a new operating system

As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the
environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.


The rest here (http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/)

I'm mighty interested in this! Won't completely replace windows for me since there's a lot of things I need it for. But hey, competition is never a bad thing.

[Revising Ocelot]

What's with all the crazy fools now predicting that Half Life 3 will be SteamOS exclusive? HL3 doesn't exist and will never be developed or released, fools.

[MuMu]

Not exclusivity, but availability. If the OS is a modification of Linux, it has around the same capacity for games that Linux has(Aka, not much). Even though Valve helped port ~200 games for Linux is the past time, they're most simple indie games and not something you would change your OS for.

If the next announcement is(And most likely will be) the availability of existing AAA games or maybe even the announcement of a soon to be released game for the SteamOS then this will be slightly more interesting.

edit: not Half-Life 3, of course, that doesn't and will never exist.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Speaking in monetary terms methinks a lot of developers, big and small, will be interested in this. Microsoft's certification model is fuckall terrible across the board. Takes too long, too expensive, too much beaurocratic BS, ego stroking, etc.

What I'm curious about is how will drivers be handled? Especially nvidia. The Linux community and nvidia arent exactlyon the best of terms due to conflicting ideologies on openness. Nvidia doesn't want anyone knowing what's going on under the hood of their driver software and their Linux tech support is...fucking awful at best. Linus Thorvald and the Linux community cry foul at nvidia because of the open source ideology that Linux is all about. It's a big clusterfuck, really. AMD has always been more Linux friendly, but considering that Nvidia has a large market share of the GPU market it'll be interesting to see how the StOS repository will handle it all.

[Aldurin]

I agree that it'll be interesting to see how they try to bridge compatibility with the ungodly mess of software of varying levels of "no we won't work with Linux". But if it works then I'll definitely be sold on a dual-boot.

[mauve]

Valve, you know that I love you, but I miss the days when you used to make video games. I know you've had lots of success with Big Picture Mode and Steam in general, but... you were so good at making video games!

[phil_]

Speaking in monetary terms methinks a lot of developers, big and small, will be interested in this. Microsoft's certification model is fuckall terrible across the board. Takes too long, too expensive, too much beaurocratic BS, ego stroking, etc.

What I'm curious about is how will drivers be handled? Especially nvidia. The Linux community and nvidia arent exactlyon the best of terms due to conflicting ideologies on openness. Nvidia doesn't want anyone knowing what's going on under the hood of their driver software and their Linux tech support is...fucking awful at best. Linus Thorvald and the Linux community cry foul at nvidia because of the open source ideology that Linux is all about. It's a big clusterfuck, really. AMD has always been more Linux friendly, but considering that Nvidia has a large market share of the GPU market it'll be interesting to see how the StOS repository will handle it all.I'm quoting all of this because I don't know enough about what I'm talking about to unpack it, but all my searching along the lines of "How do I fix my Linux machine this time" have said something along the lines of "Linux has no AMD support, buy NVIDIA or cry more." Seems kinda odd that google would lead me astray like that. Not that I've had any trouble with AMD's drivers.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

I was on my phone during break at the time so I couldn't really go into as much detail as I wanted. The gist of it is AMD is courteous enough to have open-source drivers and continues to provide support for them whereas Nvidia is all NOPE NOPE NOPE FUCK NO TO OPEN-SOURCE DRIVERS NOPE NOPE NUH-UH NOT GONNA HAPPEN NOPE NOPE. A long history of being stubborn asses eventually caused Linus Thorvald to say Fuck You (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g) to Nvidia.

Hardware-wise Nvidia cards are fantastic..but that really only applies to a Windows based machine. The drivers are unstable at best, terrible at worse, and generally run inefficiently across the board on a linux system. Take an AMD card of equal specs and it'll run significantly better on a linux machine in comparison. AMD offers flexibility, is basically what I'm gettin at.

[MuMu]

Valve, you know that I love you, but I miss the days when you used to make video games. I know you've had lots of success with Big Picture Mode and Steam in general, but... you were so good at making video games!

Good news: At least one of those announcements will be about some new Valve game that will(also) run on SteamOS.

Bad News: It most likely will be or involve L4D3

[BB]

Considering the recent appearance of this (http://store.steampowered.com/app/247120/), the second icon on the /livingroom page looks a lot like that Sens device. Presumably this will act as the "Steam Box"'s version of Kinect.

[Ryong]

Considering the recent appearance of this (http://store.steampowered.com/app/247120/), the second icon on the /livingroom page looks a lot like that Sens device. Presumably this will act as the "Steam Box"'s version of Kinect.

Given that the first bubble had a circle that represented steamOS and the second bubble has that same circle inside those brackets - that form a box, no? - I'll say the second bubble is the steambox.

I want to say the third bubble is some sort of cooperation thing, but no idea what.

[Arcanum]

Given that the first bubble had a circle that represented steamOS and the second bubble has that same circle inside those brackets - that form a box, no? - I'll say the second bubble is the steambox.

I want to say the third bubble is some sort of cooperation thing, but no idea what.

Last I looked on reddit this seemed to be one of the more popular theories.

It makes sense too. It's nice if you have an OS designed for the living room, but if the only people who would get it are people who would buy/build a new machine to plop into their living room then your market is kind of limited. Providing a small and effective machine that comes pre-installed with Steam OS is a much better option if you're trying to take a stab at markets that aren't as tech-savvy.

And with the news that you can use SteamOS to stream games from one machine to another it looks like the Steam Box will be a cheaper and less powerful companion machine. It doesn't take much to run casual, family friendly games so it will run those on its own, and if you want to run more demanding games then you just stream them from a more powerful machine.

[Shyria Dracnoir]

HL3 doesn't exist and will never be developed or released, fools.

edit: not Half-Life 3, of course, that doesn't and will never exist.

http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n22/suesskissing/believe.jpg

[Ramary]

Valve, you know that I love you, but I miss the days when you used to make video games. I know you've had lots of success with Big Picture Mode and Steam in general, but... you were so good at making video games!

Dota 2 is a video game and it technically came out somewhat recently.

[Aldurin]

And on the note of Nvidia's poor cooperation with Linux. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/nvidia-seeks-peace-with-linux-pledges-help-on-open-source-driver/)

The biggest reason for this (in my opinion) is that the pressure is on with the announcement of SteamOS, which threatens to drag a significant portion of PC gaming to open source, which will leave Nvidia in the dust if they don't scramble to establish themselves as a prime, friendly choice of graphics hardware for the open source community.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

This pleases me. Nvidia has the hardware clout but their drivers leave something to be desired in terms of overall stability. Given the strength of linux' open source community the detection and remediation of problems that arise is a very powerful force!

[Revising Ocelot]

There's also the fact that there's two giant elephants in the November-shaped room that are both AMD. NVIDIA will be feeling the need to completely take over PCs to compensate.

[Arcanum]

Ladies and gents, have some steam boxes. (http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamMachines/)

[MuMu]

I'm glad it's not actually a console, just Steam doing some tests with pre-made machines.

Overrall a pretty lame announcement, unless I missed something?

Edit: Just got an Announcement, Family Share beta has begun.

[Loyal]

Can I hack this box? Run another OS? Change the hardware? Install my own software? Use it to build a robot?
Sure.
Ladies and gentlemen, failure is not an option here. We must obtain this machine.

[Flarecobra]

So it's what the Ouya wants to be.

[Revising Ocelot]

I'd like to know what the cheapest SteamMachine is worth, as I'd only use one (and SteamOS) for the streaming feature from my normal PC. A nice small machine would be great for hooking up to a TV, to show off to people. Well, if I knew anyone I could actually show off to. So that's a 0% chance of me ever buying a SteamMachine...

Also the most expensive one just to drool at specs.

EDIT: I'm guessing third announcement will be a gamepad.

[mauve]

Except every time I hear this thing's name I think of this.
NkEYnXd5VkY
They'd better use this in a commercial somewhere.

Dota 2 is a video game and it technically came out somewhat recently. I refuse to accept DOTA 2 as a Valve game. It's a game that Valve makes merchandise for.

[Aldurin]

Ladies and gentlemen, failure is not an option here. We must obtain this machine.

Valve has sold every geek in existence with this single part of the FAQ.

I welcome our hat-obsessed overlords.

[MuMu]

hats

Update 3:
http://i.imgur.com/ZKvVEQK.png

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

So it's what the Ouya wants to be.

Yeahhhh. Ouya was ambitious but..yeah. it had ambition.

That's about it.

[Aerozord]

I am inherently skeptical of such things. People are very slow to adopt a new OS and I dont see anything steamOS will offer your average consumers. Sure it will be a thing and have a market presence but probably rest at about the same level as googles chrome OS.

Then again this is the guy who made a name for himself by porting Doom to Windows which arguably is what made Windows the dominant force in the market place. So who knows.

[Aldurin]

Then again this is the guy who made a name for himself by porting Doom to Windows which arguably is what made Windows the dominant force in the market place. So who knows.

He created this monster, turned the little OS into the behemoth it is today. It's only proper that he's the one to put it down.

That actually sounds pretty epic when worded that way.

[Azisien]

I'm pretty excited about this. On a personal level this doesn't mean much to me.... yet. For gaming, I need to see benchmarks before anything else. For media stuff, I don't spend much time in the living room, though the cheapest Steam Machine for streaming might be cool.

SteamOS being open source is VERY cool. Now I have a future possibility of a new gaming PC loaded with Windows, Linux, AND SteamOS on triple-boot partitions. Smexy. Also tinkering with Valve's OS might be a neat future project.

Steam Machines, again, not that important to me. I build my own PCs no sweat. If the benchmarks for the OS turn out to be significant, and the support for games is as large as Windows, then I would just build my own rig and put SteamOS on it, no need for SM.

But Steam Machines is also open to the market of all those little living room box things that already exist for non-gamers, casual gamers, console gamers, etc. If there's a selection, that's just so awesome. I've always wondered, myself, why consoles don't come out with variants beyond hard drive size differences. Fragmentation, yes, but variants can still be kept within more structured frameworks to minimize that. I'd pay $200 extra for an Xbox 360 with a next step-up video card, some more RAM, etc etc. A choice of a few models instead of just one, but in a more structured way than the PC market of 'let's take every variant of electrical components in existence and make a huge tornado out of them, have fun, programmers!'

And that seems to be part of the experiment with Steam Machines. And I'm super okay with that.

[Revising Ocelot]

Told you.



It's... different?

[BB]

The whole screen itself is also clickable, like a large single button. So actions are not invoked by a simple touch, they instead require a click. This allows a player to touch the screen, browse available actions, and only then commit to the one they want.

!!???!???!??!??

Why the hell isn't that industry standard yet!? They fixed touchscreen input! No more accidentally fudging up what you were doing because you brushed against it, no more trying to scroll and instead selecting, ACTUAL TACTILE FEEDBACK when you do a thing, damn man mobile phones gotta do that!

Oh, uh, rest of it all looks... well, I trust valve to know what they're doing, anyway. We'll have to wait and see how good those trackpads are.

[Revising Ocelot]

Thumb-operated trackpads sound like a neat replacement for sticks, but not for a mouse. They talk about being able to play RTS games with them, but I really doubt you could do all the rapid fire box-selecting in something like Starcraft that a mouse can do, with the same precision.

[Loyal]

I just hope the trackpads are durable and not prone to getting broken/jarred loose by impacts.
Why the hell isn't that industry standard yet!?You'll notice that the touchscreen here is very small, like half again the size of your thumb. Even that appears to be somehow split into four even smaller buttons, but I may be just misinterpreting that.

Even the smallest smartphones on market are at least a few inches long, and that's without going into the much larger tablets. If you had to continually push down that again and again it'd get pretty difficult/tiring quite rapidly, assuming you didn't just break it. It's a necessary flaw of the system, at least until someone invents a flexible touchscreen.

[akaSM]

At first, I thought the HORRIBLE virtual touchscreen controls would come to Steam but, I'm curious about how will they work with the technobabble haptic feedback. I mean, this isn't some cheap hip moneygrubbing company we're talking about, it's Valve. Everyone loves Valve, and Valve loves us back.

Just look at how Big Picture and it's lotus somethingorother keyboard thing works, if the controller is as good as that, I'm sold.

Also, yeah, the clickable touchscreen is pretty nice, my laptop has a clickable trackpad and I love it. Also, I ALWAYS disable the "poke to click" thing in trackpads but, the clicky ones make me happy.

[Revising Ocelot]

this isn't some cheap hip moneygrubbing company we're talking about, it's Valve.



pffffffffffffffffffffffttttttttttttt

[akaSM]

pffffffffffffffffffffffttttttttttttt

You don't seem happy.

Here, have a hat.

http://i.imgur.com/tTBo4OP.jpg

[Revising Ocelot]

You don't seem happy.

Here, have a hat.



http://i.imgur.com/CHqEPBd.png

[Aerozord]

I worry about the lack of physical feedback, especially for establishing a zero position.

Admittedly this seems like the kind of thing you need experience to really get a feel for it.

[phil_]

http://i.imgur.com/CHqEPBd.png::V: "Cursed Wood."

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Select game developers used the steam controller. Here's what they said. (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/201195/Select_game_developers_used_the_Steam_Controller_H eres_what_they_said.php)

The most prominent, and for some developers and players off-putting feature of the controller are those circular trackpads. But developers who we spoke with essentially said to drop your expectations of what a trackpad is capable (or not capable) of.

"These are not like laptop trackpads," Tabar said. "Everyone is like, 'Oh we're replacing thumbsticks with trackpads, oh shit.' [laughs] But this is not at all like a laptop trackpad. It just feels good. It's a challenge to verbally describe it.

"When [your thumb] moves toward the outer zone of the trackpad, you can feel that. [The zones on the trackpad] are independent of each other," he added.

...
Remo played a couple different games: Double Fine's upcoming point-and-click adventure game Broken Age and the already-released platform-adventure game The Cave.

"We just plugged it in, and it worked," he said. "We didn't have special support for it or anything. It worked really, really well. I was really impressed with the mouse imitation. It doesn't feel like a trackpad."

[BB]

Video showing the controller playing Portal 2, Civ5, and Papers Please. (http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse#announcements/detail/2091086367898728503) I'm not familiar with any of those except Portal so I dunno how convincing this is.

[Ryong]

And CS:GO.

Civ5 is the one I was expecting to not work very well and I guess that's how it went.