Steam Beta - Screenshots

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 08:02

Couldn't find a thread on this so far. So hopefully have dibs on it.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/4947/

Steam Screenshots Feature Now in Beta

Steam screenshots are now available in beta. Now players can use Steam to take and share screenshots from any game that runs the Steam overlay. If you’d like to help test the feature, please opt-in to the latest Steam client beta by going to Steam > Settings > Account then changing your beta participation to “Beta Update”.

Once you’ve signed up for the beta, press F12 in any game to take a screenshot. Screenshots are automatically uploaded to the Steam Cloud after exiting the game, or can be manually uploaded while playing through the in-game overlay. Screenshots can be managed through the Steam Community web site and can be published to your profile to share with your friends. Games that use DirectX 8 and earlier are not yet supported.

You can adjust the screenshot hotkey by visiting the In-Game section of Steam settings. If you prefer to not have your screenshots automatically upload to the Steam Cloud, you can set this in the Downloads + Cloud section of settings. Currently in the works is an interface that will allow you to manage your local collection of screenshots and choose which ones to delete or upload to the cloud manually.

The feature is still a work-in-progress while in beta and we’ll be fine-tuning it over the next couple of weeks. Please visit the Steam Screenshots thread in the Steam Forums to point out bugs, suggest improvements or provide general feedback

Had a bit of a play with it, and it's pretty slick as far as the process goes. Much easier than loading fraps up.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/orderoftheflame/screenshot/559773622922631002?library=1
http://steamcommunity.com/id/orderoftheflame/screenshot/559773622922627001?library=1

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 09:59

PapaLazaru said:
I would say that Steam has improved on xfire, and this is a very cool addition.

This basically.

I'm not really sure how adding useful features to the client is a bad thing in anyway.

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 10:14

Seraph said:
sounds good, just wonder is the f12 key is transferable for when one uses a controller

I know you can rebind it the same as you do for the overlay. I don't know about binding it to a controller though.

You could bind it to the space bar and just nudge it when you want to though I guess.

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 11:54

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

I lol'd. Community features = Awesomeness.

Steam would interest me far less if I just used it for "launching games".

orderoftheflame · 2 Feb 2011 at 12:06

iamtheoneneo said:
i lol at peoples dire excuse to mock without giving reasonable explanations at to why steam isnt becoming another xfire and in the process becoming more unstable, much slower and more weighed down with ****.

Thanks for trying to derail the thread, really. If you don't like Steam, nobody is putting a gun to your head to use it.

What you may think is ****, other people clearly welcome as great new features. Slower and unstable? Adding the ability to take screen shots hasn't done either of these for me.

It's an extra feature that removes the need to run another third party program for any games that don't support it themselves. You seem to be the only person that doesn't want this stuff here...

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.

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?

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.

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.