Steam gets overhauled with new overlay, Steam Deck big stable update

WOW great news and WOW cassete beasts! the godot game got an free ad xD 0:24

anyway, i like and dont like this feature of anotations...
i mean, yeah its neat and if they didnt developed it thenselves someone else probably would with an worse implementation exclusive for windows (if that dont exists already)
but at the same time, as an artist i dont like it for the same reason im not a big fan of mods... it destroy the artistic vision.
and as a gamer, the last thing i want is to be constantly remined that im in an full screen game on a window-based desktop operating system in the real world... instead of... i dont know... inside an game...
that is imersion breaking and that could influence the way games are designed in the future, i mean, if your game makes the player confused you probably need to tweak it so the players dont get confused anymore instead of relying on then using an note taking overlay to keep track of their progress, this is usefull for old games that wont get new updates but it might encourage bad pratices on developers, especially the ones without much experience.

The hardware acceleration is nice and all, but the client is now tiny on my 4K screen (GNOME), and it takes 5 minutes for the "Processing Vulkan Shaders" prompt to appear when launching Halo: MCC, and even after explicitly skipping it, it says "Processing Vulkan Shaders (0%)" next to the Cancel button 5 minutes later. I assume it launches...at some point? I didn't bother waiting around after the first 10 minutes.

The hardware acceleration is nice and all, but the client is now tiny on my 4K screen (GNOME), and it takes 5 minutes for the "Processing Vulkan Shaders" prompt to appear when launching Halo: MCC, and even after explicitly skipping it, it says "Processing Vulkan Shaders (0%)" next to the Cancel button 5 minutes later. I assume it launches...at some point? I didn't bother waiting around after the first 10 minutes.

Here's a tip for scaling:

steam -forcedesktopscaling 2

Ah, I was hoping they'd have fixed the Store/Web view going black when switching windows, before labelling it as stable. Maybe next update.

The hardware acceleration is nice and all, but the client is now tiny on my 4K screen (GNOME), and it takes 5 minutes for the "Processing Vulkan Shaders" prompt to appear when launching Halo: MCC, and even after explicitly skipping it, it says "Processing Vulkan Shaders (0%)" next to the Cancel button 5 minutes later. I assume it launches...at some point? I didn't bother waiting around after the first 10 minutes.

Here's a tip for scaling:

steam -forcedesktopscaling 2

Thanks so much! This worked flawlessly. I couldn't figure out how to do this in the beta client I tried a month or so back. For everyone else's future reference, copy the .desktop Steam file from /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/steam.desktop, and add -forcedesktopscaling 2 to the Exec line.

About 10 minutes later, Steam started downloading a "shader pre-cache update" of 2GB for Halo: MCC, despite me explicitly skipping it. In total, it took about...25 minutes to launch? Rocket League did the same thing. What is the point of a Skip button if it doesn't work anymore?


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 15 June 2023 at 11:20 am UTC

Here's a tip for scaling:

steam -forcedesktopscaling 2

Sorry, I have to take it "working flawlessly" back. The Steam Overlay is HUGE when in-game. More like 4x, rather than 2x. I also can't drag windows around by clicking the top part of the window and trying to move it OR with SUPER+Left-Click, so I can't see the entire window.


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 15 June 2023 at 11:29 am UTC

Here's a tip for scaling:

steam -forcedesktopscaling 2

Sorry, I have to take it "working flawlessly" back. The Steam Overlay is HUGE when in-game. More like 4x, rather than 2x. I also can't drag windows around by clicking the top part of the window and trying to move it OR with SUPER+Left-Click, so I can't see the entire window.

Sounds like two options kicking in the in-game overlay? Maybe you can remove the old one?

I've been enjoying the new overlay since it was in beta.
One thing I like that seems a bit new is the achievement window now able to be pinned and organizing the order of achievements to put unfinished ones on top.
If you resize it to display only one or two achievements make it transparent and pin it, it makes a handy little reminder.

Do wish we could have a clock and timer widget too as I like to see a clock as I play my games so I don't play too long.

I'd say a widget workshop would be nice too but I think that's beyond the scope.
Though I suppose the browser could be pinned with a useful tool displayed on a page.

It's a big improvement so far and it's been a great bit of help in some games.

Looking forward to seeing how they implement these things on the Steam Deck as I'm getting a bit spoiled by them on PC now.

Here's a tip for scaling:

steam -forcedesktopscaling 2

Sorry, I have to take it "working flawlessly" back. The Steam Overlay is HUGE when in-game. More like 4x, rather than 2x. I also can't drag windows around by clicking the top part of the window and trying to move it OR with SUPER+Left-Click, so I can't see the entire window.

Sounds like two options kicking in the in-game overlay? Maybe you can remove the old one?

I tried toggling off "Scale text and icons to match monitor settings (requires restart)", but this didn't make a difference. I have no clue what might be affecting it. I've dug through all the likely settings, and all I can tell you is I have hardware acceleration/decoding/smooth scrolling on. Also, I have display scaling set to 200% on GNOME, but font scaling is 100%. There's nothing untoward in the .desktop file, and I can drag windows in normal Steam, just not the overlay. It's a mystery to me.

Here's a tip for scaling:

steam -forcedesktopscaling 2

Sorry, I have to take it "working flawlessly" back. The Steam Overlay is HUGE when in-game. More like 4x, rather than 2x. I also can't drag windows around by clicking the top part of the window and trying to move it OR with SUPER+Left-Click, so I can't see the entire window.

Sounds like two options kicking in the in-game overlay? Maybe you can remove the old one?

I tried toggling off "Scale text and icons to match monitor settings (requires restart)", but this didn't make a difference. I have no clue what might be affecting it. I've dug through all the likely settings, and all I can tell you is I have hardware acceleration/decoding/smooth scrolling on. Also, I have display scaling set to 200% on GNOME, but font scaling is 100%. There's nothing untoward in the .desktop file, and I can drag windows in normal Steam, just not the overlay. It's a mystery to me.

I'm totally speculating here, but maybe GNOME scaling works in overlay - and forcedesktopscaling too, so they get multiplied. You could give it a test by disabling GNOME scaling for a moment (if you still find your buttons then, that is ;) ).

Steam launches but the interface just shows a large black square in the middle of my screen for a second, disappears for a few, and then does that again. Repeatedly. I can launch recent games from the tray icon but that's it.

Wow, so happy to see Steam's new dress – and it already seems to run smoother on Linux

, if your game makes the player confused you probably need to tweak it so the players dont get confused anymore instead of relying on then using an note taking overlay to keep track of their progress

There are some games that have a huge amount of content and it's useful to have some notes, for example for what do you want to do first. I do that a lot in games like FFXIV, where I want to keep a track of what I'm missing here and there. Other times, I might just want to remember to come back some place later because I don't want to forget something.

The point I'm trying to make is that not because you can take notes to help you with the game it means the game is confusing or badly designed.

, if your game makes the player confused you probably need to tweak it so the players dont get confused anymore instead of relying on then using an note taking overlay to keep track of their progress

There are some games that have a huge amount of content and it's useful to have some notes, for example for what do you want to do first. I do that a lot in games like FFXIV, where I want to keep a track of what I'm missing here and there. Other times, I might just want to remember to come back some place later because I don't want to forget something.

The point I'm trying to make is that not because you can take notes to help you with the game it means the game is confusing or badly designed.

Yes! Good luck playing Hadean Lands without taking notes. I actually made Excel LibreOffice Calc tables for this one! And I'm sure this is part of the artistic vision of the developer.

Bah.

I know a lot of folks really like the new update, but for me it was the final straw which made me abandon the beta branch and try to avoid it for awhile. I know they've said they put a lot of work into making it fast/smooth/whatever, but it just *feels* dog-slow to me. Visible little flickers when a menu activates. Little rendering delays when a window closes so there's a black area visible on the main window until the client catches up. It's just so infuriating. I hate how every app nowadays is just some Electron-or-whatever webapp, and optimizing that kind of thing properly is nearly impossible. I really miss native widgets.

The whole shader-rendering thing is annoying as hell too; I know they'd theoretically put in some "fixes" for that but it still seems super sub-par. I was really hoping that this lousy update would've spent more time in beta to get more of this kind of stuff figured out.

Anyway, crotchety old-man talk here. Just venting, apparently. Alas!

Here's a tip for scaling:

steam -forcedesktopscaling 2

Sorry, I have to take it "working flawlessly" back. The Steam Overlay is HUGE when in-game. More like 4x, rather than 2x. I also can't drag windows around by clicking the top part of the window and trying to move it OR with SUPER+Left-Click, so I can't see the entire window.

Sounds like two options kicking in the in-game overlay? Maybe you can remove the old one?

I tried toggling off "Scale text and icons to match monitor settings (requires restart)", but this didn't make a difference. I have no clue what might be affecting it. I've dug through all the likely settings, and all I can tell you is I have hardware acceleration/decoding/smooth scrolling on. Also, I have display scaling set to 200% on GNOME, but font scaling is 100%. There's nothing untoward in the .desktop file, and I can drag windows in normal Steam, just not the overlay. It's a mystery to me.

I'm totally speculating here, but maybe GNOME scaling works in overlay - and forcedesktopscaling too, so they get multiplied. You could give it a test by disabling GNOME scaling for a moment (if you still find your buttons then, that is ;) ).

Nope, that's not it (I thought it would be too). I even logged out of the desktop session after changing it to 100%, logged back in, opened Steam, waited forever for Vulkan Shaders to process (apparently this is something that's going to happen on every launch now), and the overlay is still huge and immovable. It being huge wouldn't be such an issue if I could move the windows.

Thank you for your tech support :) I think it's time I find the official place to complain about the new Steam Client, wherever that is. Hopefully something in our discussion helps someone else.

Some more issues I've noticed:

• Steam gets unresponsive regularly (three times so far in the past three hours) and the only way to fix it is to kill it.


• I have my games on separate drives. Sometimes they aren't noticed by Steam on startup. The way to get it to recognise them in the old client was to click Install -> Click the dropdown and select the drive. That's it. The new way is to click install, click settings, click +, click the right drive, and click Ok. There are now far more steps for no reason.

Ah, I was hoping they'd have fixed the Store/Web view going black when switching windows, before labelling it as stable. Maybe next update.

I used to get this all the time on Gnome, but now that you mention it, Ive not had it at all since jumping over to KDE, so maybe it a compositor bug.

Thank you for your tech support :) I think it's time I find the official place to complain about the new Steam Client, wherever that is. Hopefully something in our discussion helps someone else.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues

Ah, I was hoping they'd have fixed the Store/Web view going black when switching windows, before labelling it as stable. Maybe next update.

I used to get this all the time on Gnome, but now that you mention it, Ive not had it at all since jumping over to KDE, so maybe it a compositor bug.

I've been using the beta of this for a few months now and can't recall seeing anything like that, what exactly did you do to trigger it?

This update adds fractional scaling (finally!!) but in the process they also added a load of bugs to the way scaling is handled in different parts of the UI (desktop, big picture, in-game overlay). Relevant Github issues for anyone interested: #5908 #9565

Also if you're on KDE Plasma X11, whenever you close Steam or open Big Picture mode there's a chance the entire desktop environment will crash and therefore all of your opened programs too. If there was any reason to keep this in the beta branch a bit longer it should've been that.