The PC Thread - Tips, Benchmarks, Specs, Laptops, Custom Desktops, Pre-Builds and more.

[Orbital-Fetus]

I think most of them are FTP.

yo, i just counted and Steam gave away like 80 games...what the fukk is Gabe trying to do to me?

 

[daze23]

I think most of them are FTP.

Anybody else use BPM here?? Idk but it seems like the latest steam update messed something up in regards to my performance. I started getting a lil worried because I was noticing games that were usually butter smooth slowing down so I thought it was my CPU and updated my bios and checked the settings but idk. It seems like when I go into BPM the CPU utilization goes WAY up like in the 90%. It was causing major slowdowns in my games. I then went back into desktop mode and it vanished. Wtf?? I love using BPM but wth?

BPM?

yo, i just counted and Steam gave away like 80 games...what the fukk is Gabe trying to do to me?

they're free2play games breh

 

[Fatboi1]

BPM?



they're free2play games breh

Big picture mode. It seems like it hogs up the cpu resources now. I noticed it was doing that last night but I chalked it up to the game. But now I now it's that. I'm gonna test it again to see.

 

[daze23]

Gaben is supposed to be doing an AMA on reddit in a few

*prepares for 1 million HL3 questions*

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1zkfmv/wearea_videogame_developer_aua/

 

[daze23]

Hi! First of all, thanks for bringing Steam on Linux.
1) Do you use Linux in your everyday life? If so, what is your distro of choice?
2) Do you think that in the long run Linux will not only be the future of gaming, but also the future of desktop?
3) Is Valve planning to release any exclusive for SteamOS?
Thanks in advance for your time!

1) Debian. 2) Probably. 3) No.

What is your favorite non-Valve video game?

Mario 64.

What improvements will we see out of the Source 2 engine?

The biggest improvements will be in increasing productivity of content creation. That focus is driven by the importance we see UGC (user generated content?) having going forward. A professional developer at Valve will put up with a lot of pain that won't work if users themselves have to create content.

http://i.imgur.com/lp1HN4o.jpg When is Ricochet 2?

When we announced our products years in advance in the past and then were really late delivering them, it was pretty painful for both us and the community. We'd rather not repeat that.

How do you feel about the Internet's obsession with you?

It's entertaining for my friends.

Are you able to go into any details as to why Valve's VR headset is "lightyears ahead of the original Oculus Dev Kit"?

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. We are collaborating with them, and want their hardware to be great.

Hi Gabe, first of all many thanks for all the work with valve and the steam software

With the success of Dota2, and then with CS:GO, what do you think is the future for esports on the PC?

Also, with micro transactions in the games helping fund prize pots for tournaments, when do you think we will see a tournament fully funded by micro-transactions?

We still think we have a long way to go to get to the point where all of the different people that are contributing value to competitive play get everything out of it that they should. Feels like we are making pretty good progress though.

Giving the consumers of content a direct relationship with the creators of content is something we think about a lot. That is what drove our thinking about how the community could be more involved in the tournaments that mattered to them.

Seeing as you (valve) are now rolling out the steam OS and steam machines will be coming to market soon, what do you think your core target market is, the desktop, pc gamer, or the living room console player?

We see Steam Machines (along with SteamOS and the Steam Controller) as a service update to Steam, porting the experience to a new room in the house. As we've been working on it, we've focused first on the customers who already love Steam and its games. They've told us they're tired of giving up all the stuff they love when they sit in the living room, so it seemed valuable to fix that.

 

[daze23]

Hi Mr. Newell & colleagues at Valve - first of all thanks for taking the time out of your day to do this AMA!

I'm a member and moderator at the Oculus Rift subreddit and I am writing to you today on behalf of all users of /r/oculus. Ever since you and Mr. Abrash supported the original Rift kickstarter, it was clear that Valve had a huge interest in Virtual Reality. So I would like to ask a few questions relating to that topic, some of them coming directly from our users.

1. Recently, the experimential Valve VR headset has stunned developers and has shown what's possible in the years to come. When did Valve originally start to research VR technology and why?
   
   
2. /u/Gl0we asks: SteamOS could potentially be the first commercial Virtual Reality OS - what plans do you have for the future of the platform? How do you want to tackle the harder problems like user input for example?
   
   
3. /u/Pingly and /u/druidsbane ask: The vast majority of demos for the Oculus Rift are done with Unity. Does Valve have any plans to turn Source or Source 2 into a more user-friendly development system with a C++ API as well as easy tools and release it early to give VR developers a headstart?
   
   
4. /u/remosito asks: What VR experiences are you personally looking forward to the most for Year 1 and 5?
   
   
5. Have you personally played the HLVR mod that expands Valve's current VR implementation for Half-Life 2 into a full-fledged experience with body tracking? Seethis article for a short example of the great work that /u/Wormslayer and/u/adoral84 are putting together with the community's help.
   
   
6. Finally - and I guess you get that question a lot - I wanted to ask about the title that everyone is waiting for and that lends itself perfectly for a VR adaption, due to its way of storytelling, the open world as well as the puzzle elements: Ricochet 2. Did the long development time have anything to do with evolving technologies such as Virtual Reality? Are you planning to bring full VR support to future titles, such as Ricochet 2?
   

Again, thanks for your time and please accept our humble invitation to join the discussion in/r/oculus. We would love to hear your feedback on emerging technologies in the video game space!

Best greetings from all users of /r/

1) Abrash was thinking about it for a while, and started to get serious around 2 years ago. He thought that we'd reached the point where VR problems were getting tractable.

2) User input is hard. We haven't seen a solution yet to the problem. It's in the next round of problems to tackle. We need to start doing experience fragments to help drive this.

3) Alex Vlachos is working on this now (getting Source 2 working well with VR). Unity is pretty useful for lots of things as well.

4) Having a product ship that is worth customers money and time.

5) No.

6) We aren't holding any game until VR is shipping. You don't want to create that kind of dependency.

 

[daze23]

Has Dota 2's growth been unexpected? And where will TI4 be held?

We knew there were a lot of people playing Dota 1, and quite a few of those people worked at Valve, so our hope was that we'd do a good enough job on it that those people would play Dota 2.

We haven't finalized where this year's International will be. We are pretty sure it will be at Key Arena in Seattle, but we haven't gotten everything finalized, and there is always a risk that our schedules and theirs won't align in some way. As soon as we get everything finalized one way or another, we'll get the dates out there for everyone who would like to attend. Should be fun this year.

How many hours a week would you say that you spend actually playing video games and whats your current favorite?

Dota 2 and about 20 hours.

Do you play Dota 2 a lot? What's your favorite hero? Have you ever been raged at by a teammate?

1) Yup 2) Sand King / Random 3) Yes

 

[daze23]

A year ago at the D.I.C.E. summit, you and J.J. Abrams mentioned you’re going to collaborate on some projects. I’m incredibly excited as a huge fan of both of you.

Bad Robot is going to make movies based on Valve games. Will the game you're working on feature Bad Robot’s property? (I’d love to see a new Lost game, especially if it was made by Valve.)

What is it that appeals to you in J.J. Abrams as a filmmaker?

The main thing is that when we talk with him it's like talking with someone who works at Valve. That's not usually the case with people from the film industry.

Hello Gaben how hard was it to promote Steam in 2004?

Any time you do something new, it can be challenging. There's basically a normal distribution of pain. With that proviso, it was pretty much in the middle of the pain curve.

Do you ever play games such as tf2 on a secret steam account?

Yes

Hello GabeN (if I may call you that), how are you doing? Here's my question: Before Steam Greenlight was introduced, what was the process of adding a game to the Steam store?

We got bottle-necked pretty fast on tools and decision making which lead us to Greenlight, and is now leading us to make Steam a self-publishing system.

 

[Ciggavelli]

I didn't get any free games added to my library

 

[daze23]

I didn't get any free games added to my library

do you use the beta client? anyway, it's just free2play crap

 

[daze23]

Thank you for doing this ama!

I have had the pleasure of being a part of the Steam community for over ten years. I joined when it all began in September 2003.

Looking back to 2003, what were your (and Valves) goals and visions for Steam back then, and did it turn out as planned? Also, What is your vision for the Steam platform and PC gaming over the next ten years?

I'm not trying to dodge the question, but we find it more useful to think in terms of feedback loops than in terms of visions/goals. Iterating with the community means that your near-term objectives change all the time. The key benefit to Steam is to shorten the length of the loop. Longer term, we see that working at the level of individual gamers, where we think of everyone as creating and publishing experience. "How can we make gamers more productive" sounds weird, but is an accurate way to characterize where we're going. It may make more sense if you think of it as "How can we make Dendi more entertaining to more people".

Are you aware that a Redditor has to eat a hat now because you're doing an AMA?

Post pics or it didn't happen.

Hey Gabe. What is your stance on the current government issues both in America and Europe around privacy and internet rights?

A couple of years ago I donated a million dollars to the ACLU.

My question: In the future, do you expect all Steam games to run on Linux/Steam OS? Has there been any trouble getting developers to add Linux compatibility?

Yes.

Surprisingly little. There is a lot of popular sentiment in the developer community about Linux and gaming.

 

[Ciggavelli]

do you use the beta client? anyway, it's just free2play crap

nah I don't use it. Glad I'm not missing out on anything good

 

[daze23]

Hey!

We haven't heard any more about lower cost Steam Boxes for streaming from existing hardware. Is that something that's still on the agenda?

Yes. We're making some progress.

Hello! This question is directed to Eric Wolpaw. I'm sure you've had this questioned asked many times, and if that is the case I apologize for repeating the past, but I'm curious as to how the process of writing a game looks like? A brief summary perhaps. How many fresh pots of coffee per hour? Etc.

Wolpaw: It's a lot of loose sketching at first, and then a lot of dot-connecting and backfilling as the game gets closer to being done. Lots of procrastinating, too. Lots.

Has the decision to allow publishers to have their own storefronts and manage their own "stock" gone forward, or was that just an idea being kicked around?

We realized that a store ought to be UGC (not just for publishers).

Hello Gabe and all, thanks for doing this AMA! Are there any plans to offer a solution so that we can legitimately run WINE instances of Windows games on GNU/Linux through the native GNU/Linux Steam client? Thank you (That is to say, right now we need to run Steam Windows on Linux as well through WINE in order to run any Windows games, which gets troublesome)

WINE is definitely a useful tool for some things, but we're taking what we think is a more sustainable position by asking game developers to support Linux and SteamOS natively, for current and future titles. We think this is mostly what gamers want, too. It puts more power into the hands of developers and will result in better quality games in the end.

Hi, Gabe! I've got a question about Steam Music. Forgive me if this isn't your area, or whatever.

Is it possible for some sort of integration with services like Pandora and Spotify, in the future? I don't have a music library, per se, and mostly just use internet radio, so it'd be great if I didn't have to alt tab to change stations or skip songs. Could this happen?

Yes, we've got some things in the works that we think you'll like.

 

[daze23]

 

[Bboystyle]

damn brehs, i had this build since october of 2013 and im already thinking of going Intel route. My older AMD processor booted windows 7 faster then this one and it even had a cheaper MB.