I've recently become a pretty regular user of Steam Big Picture Mode. I have my desktop in the same room as my TV (I live in a 4 room apartment) and run an HDMI cable from one to the other.
With all the talk of SteamOS and Steam Machines, which I desperately want to succeed, I have been testing some stuff out. My impressions are pretty negative, and I'd like to hear if things are working better for anyone else.
First of all, in Windows. I own 147 Steam games with controller support, but it feels like less than 25% of those have full controller support, which means I'm configuring them on my PC, or often going through an intermediate "launcher" to get started. This is fine for me now, but what about people who aren't going to have a mouse plugged into their Steam Machine? Will they have to read the tiny config popup text from the couch while using the trackpad to click "Go"? For example, Skyrim is horrible to click "play" on from the couch, even with a wireless mouse. Note not even many of Valve's games have full controller support - Half Life 2 does not, and TF2's controller support which I recently tried is serviceable, but the UI needs a "big" mode for configuring from a TV.
Plus, Big Picture Mode is still BUGGY. Pretty much half the time I launch a game in it (lately I've been playing Dark Souls, Spelunky HD, Poker Night 2, and Geometry Wars), after popping in and out of the overlay a few times, the interface gets confused. The most common error is that even though I'm in the overlay and I can HEAR it responding to my actions, what I see is a chat screen, or game info screen, or what have you frozen in front of me. So the visual part of the interface is frozen while it's clearly still working in the background. The only way to fix this seems to be quitting Steam and restarting, not a good option on a TV-only Steam Machine.
Another bug I have is that sometimes when I quit a game I don't go back to big picture, but rather to the windows desktop with big picture in an unfocused window in the background. Again, not a big deal when I have a mouse, but a huge pain in the ass without one.
I've also put some (though admittedly much less) time into testing Steam out under Ubuntu. Multimonitor support in Linux is a train wreck for another year at least until the X stack gets phased out, so I'm forced to change to single monitor, TV-only mode to even get basic behaviours working, such as putting Big Picture mode on the correct screen. Once I do this, launching a full controller support game like Mark of the Ninja is still liable to change my system resolution until I change it back manually in the system settings (it feels like trying to run 16bit color mode games in Windows XP). This may actually be the most surmountable of the problems for Steam Machines and SteamOS though, as they can pretty much consistently expect an unchanging 1080p display - but if the games don't take that as the default, the problem may still show up.
Another problem under Linux is load times. First of all, disk performance on Linux is generally bad. But I think what's really killing it is the need to compile shaders just in time. Loading up Crusader Kings 2 takes literally 10 minutes on my i5 3570K and GTX 660Ti. This is exactly the opposite of the "pick up and play" mentality we want on a console-like platform.
So basically I'm pretty disappointed in the level of polish here. Things are not as "good to go" as I'd hoped. The Steam software has traditionally been pretty bad (it had hanging problems and would delete categories/favorites until quite recently) but I'd hoped Valve would have gotten it together by now for this much more entry-level platform.
Is anyone else using BPM or Steam Linux regularly? Are you experiencing similar issues, or have things been better? How ready is Valve for this leap deeper into user space?
With all the talk of SteamOS and Steam Machines, which I desperately want to succeed, I have been testing some stuff out. My impressions are pretty negative, and I'd like to hear if things are working better for anyone else.
First of all, in Windows. I own 147 Steam games with controller support, but it feels like less than 25% of those have full controller support, which means I'm configuring them on my PC, or often going through an intermediate "launcher" to get started. This is fine for me now, but what about people who aren't going to have a mouse plugged into their Steam Machine? Will they have to read the tiny config popup text from the couch while using the trackpad to click "Go"? For example, Skyrim is horrible to click "play" on from the couch, even with a wireless mouse. Note not even many of Valve's games have full controller support - Half Life 2 does not, and TF2's controller support which I recently tried is serviceable, but the UI needs a "big" mode for configuring from a TV.
Plus, Big Picture Mode is still BUGGY. Pretty much half the time I launch a game in it (lately I've been playing Dark Souls, Spelunky HD, Poker Night 2, and Geometry Wars), after popping in and out of the overlay a few times, the interface gets confused. The most common error is that even though I'm in the overlay and I can HEAR it responding to my actions, what I see is a chat screen, or game info screen, or what have you frozen in front of me. So the visual part of the interface is frozen while it's clearly still working in the background. The only way to fix this seems to be quitting Steam and restarting, not a good option on a TV-only Steam Machine.
Another bug I have is that sometimes when I quit a game I don't go back to big picture, but rather to the windows desktop with big picture in an unfocused window in the background. Again, not a big deal when I have a mouse, but a huge pain in the ass without one.
I've also put some (though admittedly much less) time into testing Steam out under Ubuntu. Multimonitor support in Linux is a train wreck for another year at least until the X stack gets phased out, so I'm forced to change to single monitor, TV-only mode to even get basic behaviours working, such as putting Big Picture mode on the correct screen. Once I do this, launching a full controller support game like Mark of the Ninja is still liable to change my system resolution until I change it back manually in the system settings (it feels like trying to run 16bit color mode games in Windows XP). This may actually be the most surmountable of the problems for Steam Machines and SteamOS though, as they can pretty much consistently expect an unchanging 1080p display - but if the games don't take that as the default, the problem may still show up.
Another problem under Linux is load times. First of all, disk performance on Linux is generally bad. But I think what's really killing it is the need to compile shaders just in time. Loading up Crusader Kings 2 takes literally 10 minutes on my i5 3570K and GTX 660Ti. This is exactly the opposite of the "pick up and play" mentality we want on a console-like platform.
So basically I'm pretty disappointed in the level of polish here. Things are not as "good to go" as I'd hoped. The Steam software has traditionally been pretty bad (it had hanging problems and would delete categories/favorites until quite recently) but I'd hoped Valve would have gotten it together by now for this much more entry-level platform.
Is anyone else using BPM or Steam Linux regularly? Are you experiencing similar issues, or have things been better? How ready is Valve for this leap deeper into user space?
