Epic Pres: PC A Primary Platform Again

[Sir_Brizz]

XFire delivers that for me. In fact, it delivers everything else that Steam has, minus the distribution and DRM.

I used to use Xfire until it got even more ads, even crappier UI design, and started partnering with all kind of pointless companies. Then,it finally got to the point where it was slow and the in-game overlay was miles behind everyone else.

I use Raptr to augment Steam and have no complaints, really. The Raptr in-game overlay is much nicer and it supports other chat clients (MSN/Yahoo/GTalk/etc). Raptr was also started by the guy that founded Xfire.

Fallout 3, GTA 4, BioShock 2, Bulletstorm, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Section 8, Street Fighter 4, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Dead Rising 2, and a bunch of others.

Egg. On my face.

 

[GreatEmerald]

The ad at the top doesn't bother me much, and I don't see many more ads there. The skins can be changed easily, and I don't see how it's slow. Oh, and on Linux, I use Pidgin with gFire, which doesn't have any of the issues you mentioned in exchange for the lack of XIG.

 

[Plumb_Drumb]

Egg. On my face.

Those are supposed to go in your mouth.

Just think of it as getting a free education

 

[elmuerte]

I don't have to wait because I leave Steam running while I'm at work. Everything is usually patched and ready for me when I get home unless I have to pull in something new.

So I have to waste resources constantly just so that I don't have to wait for steam to update itself or the game when I want to play it.
No dice.

~50 Mb is a drop in the ocean when you're running 4 GB system.

You sure this isn't Vista/7 doing a disk defrag when system is idle?

Clean start, no downloads going on:

It only gets worse when I click the "Store" button, whent back to "games" and minimized to tray. After a bunch of minutes:

Hasn't affected me personally in 7 years.

Me neither. But I don't like the idea of being subjected to the whims of a commercial entity.

 

[Teridax]

Not really - Steam actually works, whereas much of the time GFWL doesn't, making your purchases unplayable.

Steam does that too. If I go on Steam and my internet gets disconnected, I can't go into offline mode, because Steam says I need to be online for it to actually work.

 

[Plumb_Drumb]

Steam does that too. If I go on Steam and my internet gets disconnected, I can't go into offline mode, because Steam says I need to be online for it to actually work.

Well, I'm talking about the software itself not working, because it's a flaky, broken piece of crap.

Clean start, no downloads going on:

It only gets worse when I click the "Store" button, whent back to "games" and minimized to tray. After a bunch of minutes:

The usage definitely starts to creep up.

Upon start it only uses around 15, but ten minutes later of doing NOTHING with it (sitting in the tray, all social features turned off), it will be at 100.
After using it to look at my library, or after shutting down a Steam game, it will go to around 150 and stay there.

Not too bad, I guess, but I wonder if they could trim it down some.

(actually Firefox is using 200mb right now with only one tab open )

 

[Sir_Brizz]

Clean start, no downloads going on:

It only gets worse when I click the "Store" button, whent back to "games" and minimized to tray. After a bunch of minutes:

It's pretty obvious that Steam hardly uses any RAM, but it does reserve quite a bit for seemingly no reason. I've brought that up to Valve before, and their answer is always that Steam releases reserved memory whenever it is requested.

 

[Ignotium]

Awww fuck you Epic, fuck you.

 

[elmuerte]

It's pretty obvious that Steam hardly uses any RAM, but it does reserve quite a bit for seemingly no reason. I've brought that up to Valve before, and their answer is always that Steam releases reserved memory whenever it is requested.

I think 150MB RAM is a shit load of RAM needed for DRM.
Also, private bytes are there to stay until the application release it. There is no such thing as an OS requesting applications to use less memory. Sure, the 150MB might be swapped to disk instead of RAM, but that's not really more desirable.

 

[CyMek]

Hey, alright! Epic is coming back to the PC, at least until they decide somewhere else is more profitable again and throw the PC gamers back under the bus again. Whew, what good news.

 

[Plumb_Drumb]

Hey, alright! Epic is coming back to the PC, at least until they decide somewhere else is more profitable again and throw the PC gamers back under the bus again. Whew, what good news.

watch it happen before they even get a game out for us!

Hey, it's the thought that counts, right?

 

[Kyllian]

Almost constant disk activity even when you're not doing anything (I'm pretty sure it's caused by the half shitty browser)?
Sure, the in-game browser is nice (specially to look up a walkthrough to get past that impossible part in the game).

Last I knew Steam just links up to InternetExplorer for the net browsing

 

[MÆST]

I think we can expect PC development to come in waves based on how long a generation of consoles has been on the market. The 360 and PS3 are significantly behind the latest gaming PCs in performance and I expect PC games to get more attention at least until the next generation of consoles are released.

 

[Vaginal Epiphany]

Steam does that too. If I go on Steam and my internet gets disconnected, I can't go into offline mode, because Steam says I need to be online for it to actually work.

That's odd. Whenever Steam is unable to go online (due to me being late on my internet payments) it always gives me an option to start in offline mode. Haven't noticed any loss of functionality in any of my single player games.

 

[Plumb_Drumb]

That's odd. Whenever Steam is unable to go online (due to me being late on my internet payments) it always gives me an option to start in offline mode. Haven't noticed any loss of functionality in any of my single player games.

really? That hasn't happened to me yet (losing connection while gaming on Steam), but now I have hope if it does.
Actually, it's pretty darned awesome.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

Last I knew Steam just links up to InternetExplorer for the net browsing

It's actually just using WebKit now.

 

[Plumb_Drumb]

whatever that is. It just opens up Firefox over here.

er, by "net browsing", you are referring to browsing the net, right? Yeah, that's what it does, er, what it doesn't do actually.

edit
huh?

 

[Kyllian]

It's actually just using WebKit now.

Yea, found that out after I'd posted, didn't feel like going back to edit

Kinda wish there was an option to link it to Firefox

 

[xMurphyx]

I think it's just using your system's default browser, whichever that happens to be. Used to be Opera on my old PC where I couldn't use Firefox because it crashes with bluescreens. Now I have a new one, am back to Firefox, so Steam is using that if I click a link leading somewhere outside of steam.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I think it's just using your system's default browser, whichever that happens to be. Used to be Opera on my old PC where I couldn't use Firefox because it crashes with bluescreens. Now I have a new one, am back to Firefox, so Steam is using that if I click a link leading somewhere outside of steam.

That's for external links from the client, we're talking about the browser used within the client and in the overlay.