Steam Beta - Screenshots

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 12:28

iamtheoneneo said:
just because you dont agree doesnt mean i have derailed this thread - its called an opinion, its what happens when you live in a DEMOCRACY. im sorry if i'm getting a little emotional over that.

Calm down love.

iamtheoneneo said:
but time has shown that the more cack that gets added to systems the slower they become. this is already evident with steam and achievements.

I still fail to see this at all. If you mess up the implementation of something, sure you can degrade the performance of an application. Adding features of this kind doesn't have to break or even affect normal performance though.

iamtheoneneo said:
and now they want to effectively take away download speeds , so people can upload and download screenshots? and thats a good thing? ok whatever....

It's not sitting there raping your bandwidth as you go about your business. If you really want, you can entirely disable it from uploading.

Not to mention you're talking like 300k/b for a 1920 x 1200 jpeg, that's not even uploaded until you quit the game. Performance degradation? lol.

BobbyBBB · 2 Feb 2011 at 12:29

iamtheoneneo said:
so basically steam has become xfire....

iamtheoneneo · 2 Feb 2011 at 12:42

orderoftheflame said:
It's not sitting there raping your bandwidth as you go about your business. If you really want, you can entirely disable it from uploading.

Not to mention you're talking like 300k/b for a 1920 x 1200 jpeg, that's not even uploaded until you quit the game. Performance degradation? lol.

where do you think that image goes? where do you think 10,000s of people images go......let me see.......steam servers?????? oh yeh! :rolleyes:

its irrelevant about what 1 user is doing, download speed of games will be affected no to ways about it..and given that a lot of people moan about that already at peak times its not good.
your really not reading what i am saying at all, you just think you are.

Supernaut91 · 2 Feb 2011 at 12:43

glad this feature has been implemented!! STEAM can only improve

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 12:57

iamtheoneneo said:
here do you think that image goes? where do you think 10,000s of people images go......let me see.......steam servers?????? oh yeh!

its irrelevant about what 1 user is doing, download speed of games will be affected no to ways about it..and given that a lot of people moan about that already at peak times its not good.
you really not reading what i am saying at all, you just think you are.

You are aware that "Steam servers" is a very broad term.... Content is not hosted on the same servers as community sites and featues (eg Steam Cloud). I'm fairly sure the skilled workers at Valve are aware of the impact uploading images will have for them.

With all the games now using Steam cloud (new last year) to synchronise save games (up to many MB per game, more your average user will use on screenshots), we didn't see any change in download speeds from before. The content servers get busy at peak time because it's peak time, and people are downloading more!

Put it into context. Even if content and community servers where the same thing, a hundred thousand 300kb images = 30gb. How many gb do you think are downloaded per day in total on Steam?

Just loading the Steam store is 1.4mb! And you really think this is going to bring Steam to it's knees?

Aedus · 2 Feb 2011 at 13:01

I wonder if they'll make it soon that there's Steam videos.

This seems to be a first step to see maybe how the servers handle the load, it could pick up quickly into recording gameplay soon too.

SubFocus · 2 Feb 2011 at 13:04

iamtheoneneo said:
is that your whole discussion point? really?

so how has it not become xfire 2.0? friends, see what games people are playing, now screenshot addition.
its becoming bulkier and bulkier as time goes on, part of steams appeal was that it was lightweight and just served the purpose of launching games under drm conditions. nowadays you cant even get it to do that without hanging.

it might be an 'improvement' but it still is xfire whatever way you look at it.

User error. Works fine for me, never hangs. In a different league to Xfire i'd say, Steam ***!

Swifty55 · 2 Feb 2011 at 13:46

I agree, Steam will soon need an i7, 8+GB of RAM and a top of the range GFX card just to load it up.

Steam is no different to Xfire apart from the e-retail aspects.

iamtheoneneo · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:11

SubFocus said:
User error. Works fine for me, never hangs. In a different league to Xfire i'd say, Steam ***!

nothing to do with user error - lol pull the other one.

dante6491 · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:16

Well surely if steam incorporates this and becomes slightly larger in size, it won't matter as you won't need to load FRAPS to take screenshots :/ Balances out non?

Steam is becoming more and more of an all encompassing programme. It is quite good really, as long as they keep the filesize down I really have no issue with it.

just Scott · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:20

iamtheoneneo said:
nothing to do with user error - lol pull the other one.

Steam has never, ever, ever crashed for me. Not once. We have similar specs too.

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:36

dante6491 said:
Well surely if steam incorporates this and becomes slightly larger in size, it won't matter as you won't need to load FRAPS to take screenshots :/ Balances out non?

Steam is becoming more and more of an all encompassing programme. It is quite good really, as long as they keep the filesize down I really have no issue with it.

I don't really mind how much space it takes up on my disk, it could be 100mb for all I care. It's never going to take up more room than a game or something. I'd be more concerned by the amount of memory it takes up, but looking at it, I'm not all that concerned about that either.

This is with Steam running and open (Steam.exe), and with the overlay (GameOverlayUI.exe) running in a game.

Compare it to some other things that lots of people are likely to have open whilst playing games Dropbox, Firefox, fraps, windows gadgets.

You might get it up to 100mb with cached images if you're browsing the store, but it's not even close to being a resource hog at the moment.

NeoVo · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:43

Will try this out

.

All STEAM needs now is video recording and file transfer, and it will do pretty much everything xfire did, though I cant see them introducing the latter. Stopped using xfire when steam friends was implemented.

Lyon85 · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:51

I've been using it for a few days, it's a little buggy at the moment (buggy beta, no wai) but it's a fantastic touch. Valve are making their platform better and better, everything they add gives the PC more credibility as a gaming platform. They're doing a great job of turning Steam into a real community based gaming hub, much more than simply a client for launching games.

They have also much improved the audio quality if the built in VOIP service (about time). Also, any screenies you take are used as background images in the Library (details view), this includes non-steam games too. There are some issues with it correctly identifying some non-steam games atm, which means screens taken from one game might show up in the background of another, but it's a lovely little feature.

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:52

Lyon85 said:
Also, any screenies you take are used as background images in the Library (details view), this includes non-steam games too. There are some issues with it correctly identifying some non-steam games atm, which means screens taken from one game might show up in the background of another, but it's a lovely little feature.

Didn't realise this, very awesome. Cheers.

Spook187 · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:54

PapaLazaru said:
Like you said, I have been using fraps for screenies as I have just stopped using xfire. I don't even know anybody who uses it anymore. Steam / Vent have been my favoured forms of gaming communication for ages now and this just negates the need for Fraps so is all good.

They just need a decent and free video recorder now.

Xfire still wins for me for screen shots,there is loads of people who still use xfire in my list

eggcup · 24 Feb 2011 at 11:02

anyone else having problems with the beta, like everytime you turn on yoru pc the steam client "updates" and somethimes gets stuck?

gronf · 24 Feb 2011 at 11:09

...Oh, I thought this was about old screenshots back from when Steam first started *shudders*

Yeah, this is an overdue feature and imagine I'll use it quite often.

Hzza · 24 Feb 2011 at 11:19

eggcup said:
anyone else having problems with the beta, like everytime you turn on yoru pc the steam client "updates" and somethimes gets stuck?

I'm not even on the Beta and I get this about every second or third time I try to open Steam. I've found that deleting both the .blob files every time the update bar stops updating gets you in eventually, but it can take about an hour to get in sometimes...

dbmzk1 · 24 Feb 2011 at 11:46

eggcup said:
anyone else having problems with the beta, like everytime you turn on yoru pc the steam client "updates" and somethimes gets stuck?

Hzza said:
I'm not even on the Beta and I get this about every second or third time I try to open Steam. I've found that deleting both the .blob files every time the update bar stops updating gets you in eventually, but it can take about an hour to get in sometimes...

I'm getting this with the beta. Took 10+ mins to "update" this morning, restarting Steam (by ending in task manager and opening it again) made no difference, it was as if it was just sat there doing nothing. In the end I used -clearbeta to go back to normal and I was up and running in 20 seconds.

I've never had this issue with non beta, at least not since the first year or so of Steams release!