Steam

[Mr. GOH!]

Just got into the home streaming beta. Fuck YES!

[staySICK]

as did I.  Been away from home the last two days, so haven't had a moment to try it yet.

[Mr. GOH!]

Works well over my wifi. I stream from my living room PC to my laptop at 720p and it performs well, aside from the occasional hiccup.

[TheMightyEthan]

What's your gfx card? I'm curious if mine could handle it.

[Mr. GOH!]

GTX 570 in the host machine, a gt 335m (I think) in my laptop. It seems like the only bottlenecks are in the network, for me. The hiccups only occur on the laptop and not the host machine. 

 

It's fast enough in the same room that I can reliably use my laptop to control the game on the host machine with little delay, aside from during a hiccup.

 

My router is a Motorola cable modem/router combo given to me by Time Warner cable. I was worried it would not work for streaming, but it's fast, apparently.

[TheMightyEthan]

Do you have to have Steam OS on the client machine, or can you do it with the regular Steam client?

[Mr. GOH!]

Fuck if I'm going install Linux just to play a few games. It's all handled on the client. Gotta be logged in on both machines.

 

Added bonus: finally being able to leave multiple machines logged into the same account!

[TheMightyEthan]

Nice.  For some reason I'd gotten the impression you could only stream to SteamOS, but I couldn't actually find anything confirming it.  Glad I was wrong.

[deanb]

I think the SteamOS thinking might be due to the streaming being pushed as the only way to play Windows games on SteamOS.

 

Shame it can't overcome the network stuff. Who would have thought that software could only do so much?   

 

Oh in other news apparently you can now get refunds on Steam pre-orders. One day you might not even need to get a refund on a pre-orders and Steam might not be so consumer hostile in that department. Of course with Steam introducing "Early Access" they'll continue to rake in the cash.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3219981

[TheMightyEthan]

Shame it can't overcome the network stuff. Who would have thought that software could only do so much?   

?

[Mr. GOH!]

I think he means the hiccups I mentioned. Yes, it's a shame Steam doesn't magically fix my kinda shitty cable company router, eh?

 

I mean, when I stream amazon or netflix over wifi, it encounters the same sorts of hiccups, although caching helps cover them up. I notice mostly when downloading a steam game to my laptop when the DL speeds drop for a fraction of a second every few minutes. I had no expectation the same wouldn't happen with in-home streaming over wifi.

 

I suspect that it will not happen if I wire my laptop into the router. I'll test it out this weekend. This would work just fine for me, since I plan to use in-home streaming when my girlfriend wants to watch DVR'd TV shows I have zero interest in. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Is your main PC hooked up to the TV?

[Mr. GOH!]

Yes. My gaming PC is in my living room. My TV is my monitor and the coffee table my desk, for now. Although we have two TVs with cable, only the main TV has DVR capability because Time Warner wanted an extra $50 a month for a second DVR box. So when we DVR shows, we can only watch them on the main TV.  But now I can stream to my laptop. I can even hook it up to our bedroom TV or, once we set it up, a small monitor in our second bedroom/home office. I have not tested streaming to the bedroom or office yet, but I think it should be fine since the modem/router has ridiculous (for New York City) signal strength; I get a "good" connection to my wifi half a block away at the end of my street. 

 

I did not expect to be able to play action games over in-home streaming, but it seems I will be able to, after all. It's not ideal, but it's far from unplayable.

 

Edit: My main PC is connected by ethernet wire to the router. It streams to my laptop which generally is just connected via wifi.

 

Edit: Did some testing this morning. Wifi is a bit wonky outside of my living room, meaning the hiccups are more frequent and last longer. Happens about once every five minutes for a second or two. Not ideal for action games.  Since bedgaming usually consists of strategy games or RPGs, it's not a problem.

 

When I wire the remote play laptop into the router for couch gaming while watching TV, however, it's smooth as butter. less than a millisecond input lag. Any slowdowns are the result of a slow decoder on my laptop, according to little fraps-esque overlay.

Edited January 25, 2014 by Mr. GOH!

[jayc4life]

I played Sleeping Dogs, Europa Universalis IV and Football Manager over this over the last 2 days or so, and strangely enough, Football Manager was the one game that had the most delay/frameskip of the bunch. Dunno how that happens. I had the F6 panel open with the latency graphs at the bottom of the screen, and Football Manager would just generate these massive spikes in the middle of matches for seemingly no reason at all. Weird.

 

Europa Universalis 4 was as smooth as a baby's arse, and while Sleeping Dogs did have a little bit of latency, it's still very, very playable.

 

Wouldn't recommend using it to stream PCSX2 though (you can stream non-Steam shortcuts), but mounting ISOs over remote streaming and such is a bit iffy, not a thing you want to mess with I think, unless you pre-mount it. The streaming window cuts out the command menus at the top of the window so it's a bit fiddly. I've yet to try streaming my Origin or uPlay PC stuff over it, I'd imagine Battlefield won't work because it'll probably try to open Chrome locally, then forget that Origin's being streamed, not find Battlefield.exe locally and generally be quite rubbish, but I'd wager that regular games like Mirror's Edge, Far Cry 3, or The Sims will work fine.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Hoping to get this setup soon. Need a HDD for my old rig which should have all of the necessary equipment since IIRC I replaced a working PSU. The RAM and mobo and processor are all still in it since they're all outdated as fuck and nothing was modern. I have a spare 6850 to use, too.

 

Also, what if you launched into games using the battlelog phone/tablet app instead of your browser? Might try that.

Edited January 26, 2014 by Faiblesse Des Sens

[Mr. GOH!]

Uplay works fine, since I was able to play AC4.

 

I notice that sometimes the client seems to freak out and I get slow encode/decode consistently for no reason until I restart steam. Happened twice in 8 hours of gaming so far, with dragon age and civ 4.

[FredEffinChopin]

http://store.steampowered.com/tag

 

I feel like I was just recently in a discussion talking about how Steam needs this. 

 

*poof!*

[deanb]

On one hand this could be useful given for years Steam has seemingly insisted that "indie", "Family" and "Action" are useful genres. But on the other hand, it's probably going to take an age to actually work and it's once again another new feature on top of the burgeoning 2010 build of Steam.

 

Someone at Valve really needs to stop the feature creep and get Steam a major overhaul in usability, especially if they're going to continue adding games at the current accelerated pace.

 

Since the 2010 redesign they've added:

• Greenlight
• Tags
• Steam OS
• Big Picture Mode
• Market
• Workshop
• Hubs
• Steambook
• Guide
• Early Access
• Linux
• Recommendations
• Reviews
• Screenshots
• Software
• Probably others

 

And this is all built upon two websites, one a store for games, and the other a community feed.

 

Edit:

I'm not sure if this will work without like a billion people using the tag (from how it reads on the page) but:

http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/PXOD/

If you tag games as "PXOD" that you recommend, potentially they'll end up on there.

[Mr. GOH!]

Yeah. For all the things I love about Steam, the client is a big fucking mess, usability-wise. Slow as hell, and core functions are hidden in odd menus or separate pages.

[madbassman39]

I always feel guilty for liking Origin's layout and quickness more than Steam. I don't use Origin like I use Steam, but when I do I am always impressed by their overlay, usability and just the overall design.

[TheMightyEthan]

Unless they've changed it recently, their store layout is horrible.

[madbassman39]

I don't know much about their store :/ I tend to buy origin codes from other sites for games that require Origin.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

I don't know much about their store :/ I tend to buy origin codes from other sites for games that require Origin.

 

Yeah, all I've ever done is enter in codes, I've never tried to browse their Steam. I never browse the Steam store, either.

[Mister Jack]

Valve recently got in some hot water because it was discovered that steam was collecting a user's browser history, even outside of steam.  In a surprising display of responsibility, though, Gaben himself descended from the mountaintop to explain it directly.

 

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/

[FredEffinChopin]

So Kerbal Space Program has been in early access for over a year now. I'm not one of the people who complain about the (early access) program too much, even though I'm wholly against a couple of aspects of its popular implementation. This though, I feel like is starting to set a really bad precedent. From scanning the forums, its seems like they're trying to evolve the game based on feedback, which is nice, but I didn't think early access was about crafting the perfect product under critical eyes until you're satisfied that enough people dig it. I can envision a day when this sort of game limbo becomes common enough to become an annoyance. Am I alone here?...