Steam Beta

Technology and Gaming
#1

So, who here has downloaded the new Steam? What are your thoughts?

It looks quite snazzy. I haven’t really messed with it enough to get a good indication, but early impressions are good. They give you much more convenient access to all of you game stats now.

#2

I’ve been using it for the past month, I really like it. My main gripe is that it feels more sluggish than old steam.

#3

I used it when it first came available, loved it, got locked out of Steam and had to reinstall to log in. I’ve not used it since for fear of that happening again.

#4

I think it was one update that they screwed up. I waited a few days for another update and it worked fine.

#5

Been using it for a while and love it.

#6

Using it now, love it.

#7

Usin’ it, lovin’ it.

#8

^this

#9

On the contrary this version of steam actually feels faster for me. It’s probably just me though because it does use more ram when I look in the task manager.

#10

I’ve got 4GB of RAM(-inator) and a 3GHz dual core so I don’t think my PC is underpowered to run STEAM :hmph:

Let’s hope that when it comes out of beta it’ll be more optimized.

#11

I think Steam beta looks better, is more easy to use and makes Steam faster then the older version :smiley:

#12

Sux, needs steam chat tabs

#13

I hates it.

#14

I love it :3

#15

^Tabbed chats would be epic. Good to see they dropped IE on teh interface tho. WINRAR
.

#16

I agree chat tabs would be great, I don’t like still having to navigate to the group page of black mesa or any other group to go in group chat, otherwise I love the new steam it’s faster than the old one and feels sleek and polished, while the older version looked and felt sluggish.

#17

I love it.

  1. All the mods and games I have can be organized into different categories. All mods and shortcuts that haven’t been assigned a category get defaulted into “games” so I can easily pick out which games I haven’t configured yet.
  2. The Steam overlay seems to work much better. I use a fairly small screen size in source games, so before it ended up really stretched out and hard to use. Now it works perfectly for me.
  3. I really like the detail view that gives achievement and friend information on games that have it, but they also brought back small mode so I can just get the bare essentials too.
  4. I don’t know if this was the case before, but you can customize the menu list that shows up when you click on the icon in the notification tray (next to the clock) I have it set so that it only offers my friends list, store, and exiting steam. It displays the last 5 programs you’ve run by default. So that lets you get even MORE barebones; you don’t have to even open steam to play your games.
  5. The Store section has been overhauled so sales stand out much more obviously.
  6. Downloading, as well as pausing and resuming downloads feels MUCH more responsive. Before the beta I almost religiously kept from pausing ANY downloads simply because they always took so long to resume that I wondered if they weren’t just starting over completely. There’s still the problem that smaller games that could usually get downloaded in seconds will get a huge chunk stolen out of their download rate by any larger games you also have downloading.

On a side note. A closed steam beta for mac started a little while ago, has anyone managed to get into it at all? I signed up for it using my cousin’s computer, but I haven’t heard any word back yet.

#18

wait wait! you can sort your games!!!

#19

I think it’s loads better than the old skin, lots of pretty new features and all. I’m not really fond of the style they went for though. Something like this guy’s concept would look much better imo.

#20

I like it. And I also didn’t know you could organize games… I’ll have to check that out :smiley:

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.