Steam announcement countdown..


ekianjo said:
SeeThruHead said:
As long as streaming is lag free
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That's one of the problems, it's never lag-free... the question is always "does the lag affect the game?". For some types of games, even the smallest lag is unacceptable. 
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I totally agree, but depending on the TV even playing directly on the HTPC do not offer a lag-free experience...

edit: it will just end up in how small is the lag...
 
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yes, but current HD TV with there up-scaler, filter and whatever else add some lags and some TV do not offer "lag free" (as in "really reduced") video input for gaming console.

thus lag is really relative nowaday

edit: better formulation
 
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no, nothing specific, just pointing that lag isn't completely avoidable with nowaday hardware...

in the end, streaming game CAN work well, all depend on the effective lag we'll get with the box
 
True. If you're playing a game that is competitive and require little to no lag you're probably going to stick to playing that on the PC. Multiplayer FPS games come to mind as well as strategy games that need mouse input . Those will probably continue to be played solely on PC. But any game bought for PC will be steamplay if it has a SteamOS version available, so you can play the game on both you steambox (whether its home made or store bought) and your pc. Most likely the save files will be synced across the platforms as well. The performance benefits they're talking about compared to windows will bring down the cost of the boxes as well. Youll need less beefy hardware for 1080p gaming on steamos than you would for a windows machine. This is basically what I've been trying to make my windows htpc do for a long long time but at a much more in depth level. It's incredibly exciting.
 
Cool. Let's see how this pans out but by the look of it I can play all the humble bundle games I activated on Steam with my kids on the television then.


I wonder if you can play one thing on your Steambox and another on your pc at the same time. Or will logging in to one boot you out of the other.


Otherwise there is always the family sharing thing to work it out with.
 
SeeThruHead said:
True. If you're playing a game that is competitive and require little to no lag you're probably going to stick to playing that on the PC.
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To be fair, if you're playing competitively it probably isn't going to be the lag that drives you away. If you're so concerned about the extra 10ms round trip (approximately 1/2 frame. Let's double it to account for encoding/decoding time and go 1 full frame of lag) a good network connection (not even a great connection, this is just what my desktop gets pinging my Laptop with my 4 year old cheap-ass router) will give then I'm willing to bet you're more concerned with things like input and image quality. At least that's all the professional FPSers I've talked to have said. Spend hundreds on a good keyboard or mouse because human reaction is going to be way higher than any lag a decent solution could introduce.So in my mind, the people that generally legitimately care about lag (as opposed to the people that care simply because "higher numbers are always bad") are not going to be interested in it for many other reasons, and for the people that don't get themselves wound up about the number of buttons they have on their mice the lag shouldn't actually be noticeable at all.

Like I said, a good network ping is 10ms and a great one will be even smaller. Encoding/decoding the frame will definitely take less than a frame itself; it has to, if it takes longer then you start skipping frames and that's worse than lag, so they will absolutely find some way of making this happen. So at 60fps you're looking at 26ms round trip at most between hitting a button and seeing the result on screen: 1.6 frames of lag. Meanwhile your brain and fingers take hundreds of ms to respond. Even assuming a really good response rate, 120ms, at 60fps that means 7.2 frames have passed between you seeing something and actually hitting the button. The extra 1.6 frames (which is probably going to be even smaller in the final product) is a drop in the bucket.
 
AMD has a conference planned at the same time as the second announcement. Maybe just a coincidence, or they could be making their SteamBox announcement at the same time.

If that's true, that would really suck ass, because I certainly dont want a cheap-ass APU from AMD like the ones they have put in the PS4 and Xbox one into a brand new Steambox.
 
WizardStan said:
Crionic said:
Then let's hope they'll do an ARM version :)
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"Freely licensable operating system for manufacturers" suggests to me that even if they don't, EvilDragon (as a manufacturer) could sign their documents and get the source code to have one of his "employees" do the port work. Or I guess Nvidia or someone else with an actual team of developers, whatever. :p
That is assuming that Steam's other claims to "openness" mean what they seem to be suggesting.


ooo, I think I got it. SteamOS was the first announcement: a single circle. The second announcement is a circle in a box: SteamBox, official Valve hardware I bet. But what could that third one mean? Circle plus circle...
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I also reached that conclusion. I thought perhaps the second circle represents something like a new (launch?) Valve game, or perhaps Source 2?

Edit: Three announcements. HL3 confirmed.

:lol:
 
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2nd annoucement is Steambox hardware - multiple 'partners' producing various spec levels, and Valve themselves doing a high performance gaming version -

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamMachines/

Their machine is going open beta, they're offering 300 machines in a couple of months to people willing to partake..... (details are there)

The final sentence hints at a controller announcement to come, maybe that's the third thing...
 
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Make 10 Steam friends (if you haven't already)
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No beta for me, I guess. :p
edit:

What games will be available during the beta?

The nearly 3,000 games on Steam. Hundreds already running natively on the SteamOS, with more to come. The rest will work seamlessly via in-home streaming
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Oh snap. That's a lot of native games. I hope it means good things for the Linux users too.
 
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I wonder if they'd make HL3 a Steam Machine exclusive...
 
Qualified for beta. Easy as that exactly how I play my steam games already. Looking forward to hopefully a controller announcement for the 3rd.
 
Pritchy said:
WizardStan said:
Crionic said:
Then let's hope they'll do an ARM version :)
Click to expand...
"Freely licensable operating system for manufacturers" suggests to me that even if they don't, EvilDragon (as a manufacturer) could sign their documents and get the source code to have one of his "employees" do the port work. Or I guess Nvidia or someone else with an actual team of developers, whatever. :p That is assuming that Steam's other claims to "openness" mean what they seem to be suggesting.

ooo, I think I got it. SteamOS was the first announcement: a single circle. The second announcement is a circle in a box: SteamBox, official Valve hardware I bet. But what could that third one mean? Circle plus circle...
Click to expand...
 I also reached that conclusion. I thought perhaps the second circle represents something like a new (launch?) Valve game, or perhaps Source 2?

Edit: Three announcements. HL3 confirmed.

:lol:
Click to expand...
I thought this was obvious? The circles are software - the first circle is the OS, the second image is the OS in hardware. The third image is two pieces of software. Two pieces of software that are possibly linked - Portal and HL? (That would indicate Episode 3, Not HL3). If it's another bloody L4D I'll be very disappointed. Or the possible link is Team Fortress 3 and some new higher-resolution/poly count hats.

Occulus Rift support is unlikely to be a feature, as games already have that (TF2 in particular has it, and pretty much any 3D game will be able to be played on it in stereo-3D so it's unlikely as it's not "new").

It doesn't really matter anyway. The third announcement isn't coming, though everyone dearly hopes that it will sometime in the next year or so.

D.
 
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