Steam - Valvetime in profiles



  • Both screenshots were taken a few minutes ago on the Steam Android app:

    Written from a smartphone, can't be bothered to fix any discoursisms.


  • Is Valvetime anything like Discoursetime?



  • No sticky cache, probably...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Your phone is clearly a time dilation device


    Filed under: also an anal dilation device




  • I know what Valve Time is, it was an obligatory bashing-Discourse opportunity 😈



  • We already have a topic on Steam being unable to do any kind of math correctly.



  • I couldn't resist making a Valvetime reference. Sorry, Blakey!



  • Worst of the worst etc. But how about how the latest Steam client upgrade broke pinned icons in Windows 8? How the fuck is that a feature you can even break?

    They're hiring some creative motherfuckers to come up with bugs like these.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    But how about how the latest Steam client upgrade broken pinned icons in Windows 8?

    Did it set you up the bomb?


    Filed Under: TDEMSYR



  • How about how much Steam SUCKS at just being a game collection browser.

    I have hundred or so games. I can instantly tell what they are for maybe 10 of them. For the rest, I need some kind of reminder. A screenshot, video, something. Even just a box art would help a bit. Does steam provide that? Sure... if you don't mind clicking through 3 fucking slow loading pages FOR EVERY FUCKING GAME YOU WANT TO INSPECT.

    Seriously, how hard would it be if they cached a few screenshots and a video link, and displayed them next to a game? Instead, they give me this FUCKING USELESS page that has:

    • a help text that is THE SAME FOR EVERY FUCKING GAME. "Oh, remember when you read this useless instructions for the previous game you clicked? Yes? Never mind, just to be sure, here's it again. And again. And again" Fuck!
    • a bunch of empty (in my case) badges I don't fucking care about
    • a bunch of useless comments I don't need when I'm just browsing games, looking for something to play

    All this makes Steam completely useless for me as a "let's pick a new game" browser. I can't fathom how this wasn't fixed in one of the 20 daily updates that fucking thing is forcing me install every single time I want to play.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Maybe you should stop playing games.



  • My solution: stop buying on Steam, and move to Desura, no-DRM direct downloads and torrents.



  • I'm working on a webapp to replace Steam's library feature.

    Trouble is, Steam's API really sucks. For example, even if you auth a Steam account, there's no way to tell whether a game is installed. Or in their wishlist, for that matter. Steam itself has that data, natch-- go to a SteamCommunity profile and click "games", but there's no way for a third party to get it short of making a browser plugin to scrape the page.

    Also, Steam deletes store pages for games they don't sell anymore. Which is fine. But they delete them from the API database, not just the front-end. So there's a significant number of games that have zero meta-data attached to them.



  • Desura and Gog are even shittier. They have no API at all. (Desura has one, but it's only aimed at game developers.) Neither does Origin.

    The original concept was to make a single webpage that consolidated all your games from all app stores, but none of them have APIs except Steam, and Steam's API sucks on toast.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Desura and Gog are even shittier. They have no API at all. (Desura has one, but it's only aimed at game developers.) Neither does Origin.

    I don't care about API on Desura. They have reasonably good interface, where I can search through my games, find the one I want, download a nice non-DRM version and play. That's all I want.

    @blakeyrat said:

    The original concept was to make a single webpage that consolidated all your games from all app stores, but none of them have APIs except Steam, and Steam's API sucks on toast.

    I would use that.

    IMO the only way to make it work universally is through scraping. Then each game store site can be handled by a separate plugin, based on a common API. And open-source community could then contribute new plugins and bug fixes. Maybe you could even allow both ruby and go as scripting languages, so that everyone could contribute and help make something amazing!

    I believe in you, blakeyrat. You were born to create this.



  • @cartman82 said:

    IMO the only way to make it work universally is through scraping.

    The only way to make that work is with browser plug-ins, and fuck that noise. I've build browser plug-ins before, they're torture.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The only way to make that work is with browser plug-ins, and fuck that noise. I've build browser plug-ins before, they're torture.

    I'm pretty sure some of the newer scraper libraries are basically like a headless browser engine in a library. Where you can do pretty much everything like in a real browser, including run javascript.



  • And yet page scraping is a dick move and I'm not doing it.



  • No homo?


  • kills Dumbledore

    I've used PhantomJS, which is basically this. It's an absolute nightmare.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    (Desura has one, but it's only aimed at game developers.)

    They have another one that their desktop client uses. Open source too, if you can find it buried in that horrible mess before your eyes start bleeding.


    Filed Under: even the OMGWTF contest entries look better, we need a new tag cloud to attack



  • Shockingly, I somehow didn't find it when I was doing research.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I'm working on a webapp to replace Steam's library feature.

    Trouble is, Steam's API really sucks. For example, even if you auth a Steam account, there's no way to tell whether a game is installed. Or in their wishlist, for that matter. Steam itself has that data, natch-- go to a SteamCommunity profile and click "games", but there's no way for a third party to get it short of making a browser plugin to scrape the page.

    The Steam API stupidity doesn't end there. They have an API for getting what APIs Steam supports. That's not one of the WTFs, though.

    Some WTFs with it are:

    1. It lists maybe a quarter of the APIs they actually support.
    2. This API is the only documentation for a lot of the APIs it returns.
    3. For the APIs that aren't listed, Valve employees will tell you the wikis (hosted by them) are "unofficial documentation." This is despite Valve employees editing them in the past and this being the only documentation they have.

    The sad part? I know someone who works for Valve. Writing Web APIs.



  • @powerlord said:

    It lists maybe a quarter of the APIs they actually support.

    Right; much (most, at this point) of the functionality is in the once-completely-independent TF2 API, which has now been renamed/co-opted into the rest of the shit but hasn't been made compatible with it.

    The Store API ("API") consists of viewing the page in JSON mode, and the only reason anybody even knows that exists is because Steam does that when in kiosk/fullscreen mode and people found it using Fiddler. Of course that only lets you get data for games currently on sale, there's no way to get data on games that were on sale in the past.

    @powerlord said:

    The sad part? I know someone who works for Valve. Writing Web APIs.

    What an incompetent ass. Next time you see him, please punch him for all the fucking time he's wasted. What a waste of skin.

    I'm exaggerating but. If Valve's going to do something (like provide an API), it would be nice if they gave ONE THIRD of a shit whether it's actually any goddamned good, or fit-for-purpose, or anything.

    Then again, you haven't been able to change the font size in Steam for like 7 years now. They got rid of that feature when they turned it into a Chromium disaster and it's gone fucking forever. Valve sucks shit.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    They got rid of that feature when they turned it into a Chromium disaster and it's gone fucking forever.

    Well, it's either Chromium or Grumpy Cat.
    And you seem to hate both.



  • What are you talking about.

    Look. My laptop has a 1080p screen in 13.3 inches. Steam IM is unreadable on my laptop. UNREADABLE. There is no way to increase the font size to make it readable without breaking the layout of every window in the app.

    You honestly don't think that's a problem?


  • kills Dumbledore

    I think the worst thing about Valve/Steam is the way the community fucking worships them as if they can do no wrong. Origin seems no worse than Steam to my untrained eye but Valvetards criticise it for things that Steam does as well. At least Origin doesn't waste several minutes updating itself literally every time I update it



  • Origin has gotten on my "good list" by creating a refund policy that's completely automated.

    On Steam, if you get a broken game, or a game whose description is a lying liar or missing critical information*, you send in a ticket, and if you're lucky in a week maybe someone will look at it and if you're SUPER-lucky maybe they'll refund you for the game you can't even play.

    *) Speaking of which: whether or not the game requires Java is pretty fucking important to know and Steam still doesn't put it in the system requirements. They should also call-out RPGMaker games, which are (no shitting) limited to 640x480 and thus literally do not work on many video cards/monitors.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Speaking of which: whether or not the game requires Java is pretty fucking important to know and Steam still doesn't put it in the system requirements.

    No, it isn't. Requiring Java is no different from, say, requiring XNA or .NET Framework. And mentioning that on the store page would be too confusing for the Bumbledore fans.



  • @aliceif said:

    No, it isn't. Requiring Java is no different from, say, requiring XNA or .NET Framework.

    Yes it is, actually, because by installing Java (using their default installer at least), you're opening yourself up to computer viruses and other malware. The only saving grace there is a lot of (but not all!) browsers take it upon themselves to block the Java plug-in, since Oracle is too incompetent to secure it themselves.



  • This is possible.

    Copy the file steam.styles from {STEAM}/resource/styles into {STEAM}/skins/{SKIN_NAME}/resource/styles/

    Create the directories if they don't exist and change SKIN_NAME to whatever you want.

    Then edit the new steam.styles, specifically the areas starting with friends_chat_

    Then go to Steam settings | interface and choose the new skin. Restart and it should be good.

    That should fix the messages (existing message will remain unchanged).

    To fix the entry text you can mess with ChatRoomDlg.res and ChatRoomDlgFriend.res. Copy them from {Steam}/friends to {STEAM}skins/{SKIN_NAME}/friends/.



  • It displays screenshots behind the "play" button and the latest updates, at least for me.



  • It displays one barely visible image that fades into the background. I guess they don't want to distract me from reading the fucking help text yet again and showing me all the stale news I don't care about.



  • Two things that might help:

    • Order games by Recent. (click on the GAMES label that isn't.)
    • Actually do enable the grid view.

    The main drawback is that the combination of the two things does not show what games are installed and what aren't. You can filter the view to just show installed games, but then it's back to alphabetic order. Perhaps even worse, the list does not show games you have never actually launched.



  • That helps for 100 games. It fails horribly for 500+ games.

    The dumb thing is Steam has tons of meta-data about the games, they just don't let their own users use it to filter.



  • Almost helps... But then if you want more info (and you're gonna need it because most of these aren't even in-game graphics), you're back to loading two more slow-ass screens for each game.



  • Speaking of which, in related efforts, Enhanced Steam is trying to build a library clone that integrates somewhat with the store search feature, but it's kind of a mess and it doesn't seem to do tags. Screenshot.

    Filed under: how does this even work; blakeyrat was actually the person behind Enhanced Steam all along; critical meta tagging failure



  • @bp_ said:

    Speaking of which, in related efforts, Enhanced Steam is trying to build a library clone that integrates somewhat with the store search feature,

    I've never heard of Enhanced Steam, is that a browser plug-in? The URL looks like it belongs to Valve.

    @bp_ said:

    but it's kind of a mess and it doesn't seem to do tags.

    The Steam API doesn't expose tags, because why would it? Exposing all store data might be useful to third-party developers.

    @bp_ said:

    blakeyrat was actually the person behind Enhanced Steam all along;

    I don't know if this is a joke or what, but I'd never heard of it. The site I'm building is totally different, and I really need to move my ass on it, development is going too slow.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I've never heard of Enhanced Steam, is that a browser plug-in? The URL looks like it belongs to Valve.

    Yeah; it's a bunch of pretty vital client-side quality-of-life improvements to the Steam website. It's pretty much a no-brainer, unless of course you are afraid about the extension turning hostile. Most of those are just extra panels to the webpages ("here is how much you have spent and made on the Steam Market! here is a link to the list of games you can buy with your steam credit!"), but he's trying to hack together an entirely new "view" with that library view. It also interfaces with isthereanydeal for historical and regional pricing.



  • Interesting, I thought about making a browser plugin (since that's the only way to find out what games a user has installed, because natch that isn't in the API even when you're authed by that user), but scrapped the idea pretty early on. Not least because writing browser plugins is a bitch and a half, especially if you want to support more than one browser, double-especially if you want to support IE.


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