The most interesting part of that article for me is the "lotus" approach to using a controller to map to a full keyboard. Event at first glance is looks incredibly elegant and indicates that they have some serious thinking talent in there which bodes well for the bigger picture (if I can use such a pun).
1) At first I thought it was like SMS numberpad entry, but it looks like they're chorded - with the combination of the directional and number you could enter keys pretty fast.
2) It's geared to gamers and anyone comfortable with a console gamepad will pick this up quickly.
3) Strategically, it could push consoles (specifically Steam-powered ones) as the best interface with which to enter text in a TV environment. In particular, it seems potentially better than Boxee's controller keyboard or the iOS Remote app's soft-keyboard, leave alone any console key-entry system to date.
If they haven''t patented this method, it'd be nice to see some implementation of it show up in XBMC / Plex / etc.
elinks (or whatever that port was called) on first xbox had something similar - and while it very well might be faster than qwerty - learning curve is HUGE and it was extremely frustrating experience.
To be honest, letters on that keyboard were on the border of screen, putting all of them together may help this, but I'm not sure.
(I would link to screenshots of said browser, but I can't find any.)
Homebrew apps on the PSP had a similar thing. The d-pad selected a letter group, and the circle, square, etc. buttons selected the letter within that group.
This was done a few times in XBMC & a few homebrew dashboards for the original XBox. The current iteration in Steam Big Picture is cleaner and benefits greatly from a high-resolution screen and the increased real-estate that brings.
It's not a new idea by any means, but it may be the best execution of that idea so far.
I can't find a reference, but there was a PSP homebrew app that had a keyboard very similar to this. In addition, I saw a similar keyboard at a CS fair at my university last year. It's not new, just not particularly widely used.
I love this idea, and it is definitely the right way to go. Unlocking the TV-playing audience is something that made Microsoft and Sony a lot of money over the years. It will put Valve miles ahead of any other competitor out there (though, the competitors will just copy the idea -- which is fine). The next hurdle for Valve is how to get their Big Picture service to the customer on their TV.
One way to do that is a game streaming service, but OnLive is floundering and Ouya is too far away for that. If Valve goes the other way and ships a set-top computer, that might help but now they're in the same race that MS and Sony are in with their console lifecycle.
A small note about Ouya: it isn't a game streaming service. You will be able to run OnLive on it - no different to how you can run OnLive on a PC right now (maybe slightly different if OnLive is installed by default, but still..) - other than that, Ouya has nothing to do with game streaming.
Would you mind sharing why you think of Ouya as related to streaming? It's not an uncommon thought, I know plenty of people who work in the games industry who have the same misconception about it, so I presume something sometime caused this?
Sure thing. And thanks for calling me on that, because I was completely wrong about the Ouya for some reason.
I think of Ouya as a game streaming device because:
(a) this seems to be the direction a lot of companies are headed in;
(b) the device itself is so small[1] that it seems like it can't run a powerful game, so I just mentally jumped to the conclusion that it is a streaming device; and
(c) the pictures I keep seeing on news websites and such are of the game controller, not the device itself, so I assumed that it was similar to the OnLive service (I recall their ads only showing the game controller as well).
[1] It has the same footprint of an Apple TV or Roku box.
Thanks - I wonder if this was cleverly misleading marketing or accidental, whether many people thought the same as you or just a small minority, and if many whether that will help / has helped or hinder/ed Ouya sales...
I'm probably going to show my ignorance here, but if OnLive can stream a game to you through the internet, is it feasible for Steam to stream a game from your PC through your home network to your TV?
Not to the satisfaction of current PC gamers. PC gamers are shifting to 120Hz monitors to reduce lag (the shorter the brain->hand->mouse->game->gpu->monitor->eye->brain feedback cycle, the better a gamer can react to changes in the game). Network play with current PCs would introduce at minimum two full frames of lag (one buffered on the PC after rendering, before compression; one buffered on the receiver during compression, before display).
The timing of this information is very interesting. Tomorrow is the Cloud Gaming Summit.
Sony bought Gaikai, Onlive never had a way of controlling costs, but those two weren't the only players here. Agawi (a startup I joined a few months back) is making a big push into cloud gaming.
This looks good. So, what's the status quo on capable living room PCs? I have been using Macs and a PS3 for years now, but if there was a small and good looking box that could handle modern games this might be an option for me. Any recommendations?
I recently built a few living-room/gaming PCs which was pretty cheap, and a great learning experience for my 10-year-old son, who is delighted to talk about building his own computer. Most gaming graphics cards these days have HDMI out, which is all you really need.
The folks at Dell/Alienware have made a small box to fit exactly the need you're thinking about, I decided not to go with it because it wasn't available with an SSD, but it's an impressive little bundle. http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx
Thanks - I would probably put something together with individual parts, as I already did back when we needed to connect PCs to our not so flat TVs via VGA, Component or SCART Adapters. However that box you linked to has a nice form factor and price tag. Not a fan of the Sci-Fi design though, but I just looked for some cases and there's some good stuff available - seems like a performant and A/V-receiver-seized PC is easy to pull off.
I used this case for my buildout. It's small, but supports full-size graphics cards and multiple internal hard drive bays. It's more or-less invisible on my bookshelf next to other components. It also doesn't have any drive bays, which looks very sleek and I just download everything from Steam (or similar) these days anyway.
Yes, that's exactly what I already had in mind. To be honest until yesterday I didn't even realize that Mini-ITX could handle the newer sockels and a decent PCIe graphic card. But with knowing that, this is a very good alternative to a console.
Sounds interesting, I just wish I had an adapter for my 360 controller so I could test it out on my TV. I'll play with it on my PC for now.
I'd definitely be interested in building a PC that's small enough to fit under my TV, but powerful enough to run any of my steam games. I wonder if there might be a market in producing those for people. I assume that's what the steam-box is going to be, but apart from this I don't see any hints of that coming out soon.
Small computer under your TV depends on the games you play. If like to play Valve's games then it's a tough call because most likely that little box will have fan noise you may not care for. You can make such a box that can play most of the games on Steam just fine without requiring a robust cooling system. You just may not be playing the latest and greatest high-end 3D games; based solely on how much fan noise you are willing to accept.
If you look around there's already a somewhat healthy market of pre-built computers for that purpose. Most of them are HTPC types but some of them can be upgraded enough that will play games nicely.
> If like to play Valve's games then it's a tough call because most likely that little box will have fan noise you may not care for.
I think a lot of gamers including myself can tolerate the fan noise, especially if you have a good sound system. The earlier generations of Xbox 360 were really horrible for fan noise, and most people needed an extra 3rd party fan to keep it from becoming defective; which adds another level of noise (it took me four years before I had a red ring problem). I don't think this was even fixed until the latest gen in 2010.
Oh, it's quite true we can tolerate it when more than likely your setup involves your speakers being closer to your ear than the fans in your box. I'd have to imagine most PC gamer's setups are like this. But for a PC hooked up to a TV is not the same unless you are using a surround sound system of some type.
Plus, depending on the games, many PC gamers use headphones.
But that's PC gamers though, I see your point about your 360. Your example is basically what I'm saying, I don't think many people would care for that very much. When it comes to electronics connected to the TV the most common experience is that they produce no noise.
Most HTPCs are built to perform their duty with little to no fan noise but putting in a proper discrete video card can ruin that. You can get accustomed to it over time but you have to get over that initial unfamiliar white noise coming from the general direction of your TV.
The reason I feel that this is important is that if Steam were to start being used on a typical TV environment it will expand beyond games. They've already tested the waters with one movie, granted it was very relevant to their market. Steam is already well suited to be an iTunes and/or Netflix type service.
> I'd have to imagine most PC gamer's setups are like this. But for a PC hooked up to a TV is not the same unless you are using a surround sound system of some type.
My Xbox 360 along with the 3rd party fans sounded like a leaf blower. You don't need a good surround system, you just need to turn the volume up on your TV or get a cheap sound bar. With PC's it's even cheaper to get a 2.1 speaker system that does the job for like $20.
> But that's PC gamers though, I see your point about your 360. Your example is basically what I'm saying, I don't think many people would care for that very much.
People still care but many either tolerate it or work around it based on the games.
Turning up the volume to cover up the white noise is not an ideal solution and in many cases not a solution at all. A neighbor in an apartment building may not care for the extra noise coming through the wall. I feel your 360 example is supporting my thought, fan noise is an issue that different people handle differently. You accepted the additional level of white noise in the situation but it's not reasonable to assume every else will too.
> People still care but many either tolerate it or work around it based on the games.
Of which I totally agreed with. My point is that it's an issue because I expect Steam to expand beyond games. If the box is not built with this in mind then it's a potential issue. To expand into the TV audience market you'll need a box that won't make noise that people who are not accustomed to may not like.
> If the box is not built with this in mind then it's a potential issue. To expand into the TV audience market you'll need a box that won't make noise that people who are not accustomed to may not like.
I think there's a bigger problem than noise if they want to expand beyond techies and gamers. Ease of installation comes to mind. It's hard to compete against the Apple TVs, Rokus, PS3's and Xbox 360s on that end.
If you don't mind doing some of the work yourself, Silent PC Review [1] has a lot of information on building computers with low noise profiles. I had an a GPU a few years ago (GeForce 8600) with a passive heatsink that performed better than the stock blower did, without sounding like a jet engine.
It won't save you any money, but quiet gaming PCs are doable if you're willing to invest a bit more time.
Really, the only reason why fan noise is ever a problem is because GPUs got the short end of the stick with ATX form factor - two or three expansion slots doesn't really give enough volume or cross-sectional area to hold the kind of heatsink and quiet fan that CPUs get. Since high-end GPUs are 250+ watts and high-end CPUs are only 130W, we ought to be giving the GPUs the wind-tunnel treatment and use the smaller down-blowing fans on the CPU.
Well, to be fair, when ATX first came out video cards didn't require two or three slots. Most of them were single cards with passive heatsinks. I don't recall video cards having fans at the time but it's possible.
Actually, if you bought a Voodoo then you needed two slots; three if you did SLI.
The setup you describe is done now, more or less. My case has the video card at the bottom directly in front of a large fan that blows outside air across it. The card itself has two fans that suck that air in and partially blows it out the back. At the top the CPU has a small attached fan with a large fan on the upper rear of the case sucking hot air out. Some cases also have an extra fan on the side of the case directly above the CPU.
The only thing missing is the tunnel as you describe. But I have seen people do that with custom SLI rigs. I think that the problem isn't necessarily the ATX form factor, meaning the motherboard, but the case design itself. I've seen some creative case designs from pre-built computer manufacturers but it makes it difficult to service yourself.
Mobile. This is just screaming for mobile. Please let me dock my 2013 mobile phone with 4 GB RAM and 4 Kepler-PhysX cores with my HDTV and let me play Crysis on it.
You dont even need to port Crysis to be a "mobile" game (touchscreen, etc.). You just need to make it run on the hardware using Android/ios.
>let me dock my 2013 mobile phone with 4 GB RAM and 4 Kepler-PhysX cores with my HDTV and let me play Crysis on it.
Hahahaha, no. (I love the non-gamers on HN. So optimistic. Go look at the current state of emulation and hardware power, it's a bleak situation.) Current desktop graphics technology is still only sorta able to run the Cryengine at full speed, and they're pumping out on the order of 1000(mid-grade)-2500(high-end) GFLOPS.
An iPhone is somewhere between 5 and 15 GFLOPS. So unless we're going to have a 100x leap in graphics bandwidth, I wouldn't expect to be able to play desktop quality PC games off of a mobile phone anytime soon.
Even my CPU (2500k) has higher throughput than the iPhone GPU, at 50-100 depending on the benchmark.
Should be able to run a poker game or Farmville though.
I think your definition of "gamer" is different from mine. We don't all play the AAA titles.
I write 3D code for mobile devices, and I'm continually astonished by what these things are capable of, i.e. your comment about poker and Farmville is a bit too much snark. Besides, it seems you're equating game quality with poly count. There are a lot of visually stunning, intelligent games that run great on phones that would be perfect on a larger screen.
Otherwise, what you say is perfectly reasonable and quite true. But comparing a phone with a computer running Crysis doesn't seem quite right.
What I want to know is what's stopping people from doing this now? Wouldn't most tablets, and probably phones, have something in place to connect video to a TV? HDMI would be nice but I'd imagine a proprietary cable of some sort?
Not really. A Python port, PyGG2, is currently in development, and that might have a chance of mobile support, but I don't expect so. The current GG2 is written in Game Maker. While GM has cross-platform Mac/HTML5/iOS/Android support, we use a custom-built windows-only networking library, so this isn't really an option. Also, we've been meaning to migrate away from GM for quite some time, due to its performance and limitations.
> Besides, it seems you're equating game quality with poly count.
As someone who, in terms of raw gaming time, spends more time beating Ninja Gaiden on the NES than playing the favorite FPS of your average 11 year old, that seems dubious at best.
The original Ninja Gaiden series is the Liszt of gaming.
I don't necessarily agree with your Crysis evaluation but I agree with your point.
It's interesting to see people who think their phone somehow equals the abilities of a console or PC. I can see comparing gameplay experiences but not hardware capabilities.
If he had only stated "let me play games on it" then it wouldn't matter. At the same time I don't see what's stopping him from doing that today, assuming his phone has some sort of video out support.
Maybe one day we'll have that super computer in our pockets we all dream of but then our birth rates will likely decline.
> It's interesting to see people who think their phone somehow equals the abilities of a console or PC.
I don't know of anyone who thinks that, and I don't read the above post that way. It's almost a pointless discussion, though, because the three year old phone in my pocket is more powerful than most of the desktop computers I've owned in my life. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect mobile devices a couple of cycles hence to be able to match 90% of what's on people's desks right now.
Well, I took it that when someone says they want to play Crysis on their phone they mean they want to play Crysis on their phone. If he was speaking about a phone in the future then I see your point.
I don't think it's unreasonable either. I would agree that to compare today's tech with yesterday's or today's with tomorrow's is sometimes pointless. I didn't realize that's what we were doing.
There aren't any mobile GPUs that support cuda-style parallel programming yet. Even if a phone did launch with 4 stream processors/cuda cores it would still need another 1300 cores before it could compete with my desktop graphics card in terms of power.
I think one big reason we're seeing comparable graphics on mobile devices now is that they are just now getting close to the capabilities of the 5 year old console hardware. Most dev studios need to target this old hardware and make their games scale to it.
When the new consoles come out the gulf between mobile and console gaming will again be huge and the consoles will immediately begin to lag behind PC hardware as usual.
Maybe game companies will continue to make an effort to scale their engines to mobile hardware as well but I doubt it as the architecture is fundamentally shifting to make use of massive parallelism.
Desktop quality gaming is already here on your mobile. Yes, I do understand that it is not Crysis quality, but it is a superb indicator of where its heading.
It was not my intention to devolve this discussion in this direction. My excitement stems from Valve's innovative new keyboard that reduces dependence on a keyboard paradigm as well as its recent leanings towards Linux ( ~ Android).
That's nifty looking alright until you compare it to the current high end graphics hardware which has around 1500 of those cores (my gtx670 has 1300). Once more games really start using all those cores for things like physics and interactivity you will see that phones have nowhere close the ability of modern PC HW.
With that many cores you can do some things orders of magnitude faster. Take this Nbody sim my friend and I wrote for example.
And massive heat dissipation. Imho that's the real killer. Its going to be a while before we start seeing passively cooled SoCs with Crysis level graphics. Some day, yes. Next year? No way.
I can't even imagine how ridiculous a phone with active cooling would be. I've seen a few wintel tablets with active cooling and they look/feel like garbage compared to their thinner lighter ARM based android/iPad counterparts. The extra size would be way even pronounced on a phone.
This is something that Zynga should be concerned about. It could be very disruptive to their model. When I saw Gregoire's 'HDMI Dongle' [1] I thought, hmm, here is a way to add value to a TV in a way that doesn't require getting permission from TV makers first. All you need is a decent UI and a social network and all sorts of things are possible.
No idea how Valve is implementing their vision but the idea of having casual games be available like this on a subscription service can be really nice if done well.
Many people already have HTPC's with Steam to run games on their TV. The only thing this enables (or simplifies) is the use of a gamepad. It still requires an HTPC physically connected to your TV .
What I'd like to see now is an integrated XPadder-style system to allow for playing games.
XPadder works OK, but it's kind of a pain to use. It would be nice if you could set up a configuration for a game once, and Steam would remember it every time you played the game.
It would also be nice if people could share their configurations, and maybe when you buy a new game, it would default to the highest rated game-pad configuration.
Time to see how well this will work on my tiny diy Llano-based HTPC. I can play Portal smoothly via Steam on my 5-year old Opteron desktop running Ubuntu so I hope I will have no problems with the A6.
This has to be one of the biggest mistakes MS has made with Windows 8. They've added the store to (theoretically) make it simple to purchase and play games (and apps), but left out support that many people would prefer when playing these games.
Why? From what I can tell it's just a 10-foot interface shoehorned into the existing version of Steam. I don't think anyone was waiting for this. Why would they be? It doesn't solve the principal issues, like why would I game at a crappier second PC that I have to separately maintain just to have the benefit of the couch?
Why would I put my good desktop in the living room just so I can use a controller in a more traditional environment? I can use a KB/mouse and a controller at my desk or in bed. Steam isn't going to magically be able to bring the graphical quality and versatility of the PC (which are it's primary benefits) to the living room without being forced to sacrifice most of it.
The dev time spent on this would have been much better used as an investment towards a home streaming technology. The Steam box should be an OnLive mircoconsole that uses your desktop PC running Steam as the server. It's perfectly possible, Apple does that exact thing via AirPlay except it uses your iPhone as the server. Try Real Racing 2 on a 1080p AppleTV, your doubts about the technology should vanish.
As it stands, this isn't notable news for anyone unless you're the type to be willing to build and maintain two gaming PCs just so you can play in two different rooms. If you are that type, something tells me lack of a 10-foot interface wasn't the obstacle in your way.
Either that, or be willing to compromise on graphical quality and versatility pretty heavily to get a cut down PC with standardized specs that you can put in the living room for cheaper...
Did you mean to say "This doesn't fit my particular use case."? I can name a dozen people off the top of my head that will be excited about this.
General purpose computers are general purpose enough that your attempts to predict the shapes people have their setups arranged in falls flat on its face.
As it stands, this isn't notable news for anyone unless you're the type to be willing to build and maintain two gaming PCs just so you can play in two different rooms.
Or keep the beefy computer in the living room as thats the only place they play PC games (as I do).
Or have a TV in their bedroom / want to point their monitor towards the bed and lay back to play (think kids living at home/dorms).
Or don't completely shit their pants over the idea of moving a box from one room to another.
Or are OK with using this box for some not-top-of-the-line games on the couch. The exciting indie titles don't have the budget necessary to make graphically demanding titles. And No, that isn't just a console. Releasing onto a console (even to XBLA) has monetary and certification requirements some developers can't meet or are unwilling to compromise their game to meet.
For me, this is exciting because it is the excuse I've been waiting for to move my desktop into my living room. I already have a laptop for my day to day. The only reason I really own a desktop anymore is for server type operations (which can be ran through SSH or VNC), media streaming, and gaming.
I will be buying a wireless Xbox 360 USB receiver and giving this a whirl.
I'm always confused about Steam news from Valve. In this case it seems to actually be what I expect when I read something about Steam: the clientside application of their game distribution tech.
So many times people talk about Steam when it seems they are really talking about the Source Engine. It's almost a shock to see an article about Steam that really is about the client app.
I personally envisioned this to come with hardware (wireless HDMI) [http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-the-steam-cons...] so that you wouldn't have to have another box next to the TV but instead could keep your PC in your room and just transmit it's audio/video/controller input over to your living room.
From what I've heard wireless HDMI is not at that level of stability and reliability yet.
