New Steam Beta GUI - Awesome

Well, they fixed the only big issue I had with Steam, and that's the text size. I sit about three feet from my monitors and have weak vision, so when I'm operating at native resolution (1680x1050 or 1080p) text is always too small until I zoom it a bit, which didn't seem to happen in Steam unless you were willing to go to the hassle of modding the UI yourself. Instead, I just never opened Steam and had a desktop full of game icons. Now I can clean up my desktop and enjoy. And, much as I think the current version of IE is a very acceptable browser (though I still use Firefox), switching to a more portable platform is a great move. In short, I love it.
 
No more IE to render pages - now uses webkit \o/!

http://store.steampowered.com/uiupdate/

holy crap, this is like the best thing that has ever happened to steam. so far my biggest gripe about the whole thing.

Huge bug..... It deletes half of your games folder and then redownloads the half it kept. I had to opt out of the beta then delete all files related to MW2. I am not redownloading the full version from the non-beta.

ah that's a shame... I was gonna try it but not if it's going to redownload all my games. 3rd party drm problem maybe? is that the other half you guys are seeing, or does it make a difference.

I really hope they don't bloat this thing up, those other comments about lag are really discouraging. one of the things I liked the most about steam ui is minimalist design and (relatively) low resource usage.
 
Fail. We can still play single player after the connection is gone.

Well, actually, two minutes ago, in order to get Napoleon Total War to run, I had to roll back my video drivers, and right away Steam wanted me to go back online and re-enter my password.

I have no idea why Steam does this, but every now and then it does - it just won't allow me to play in offline mode. So what happens if I'm unable to go online to re-authenticate my password? What happens if Steam is simply unavailable? What happens if Valve Software itself goes out of business! - then I'll have lost every game I ever purchased from them and all that I'll have left on my hard drive will be vast amounts of data that will be meaningless junk!

Oh, I kid the forum members, I kid...
 
Store doesn't work for me in the new UI.

Guess they don't want my money.
Found a fix
The problem is caused by a setting in Internet Explorer's connection settings. Under "LAN Settings" in the Internet Options, if the box "Automatically detect settings" is checked, the Steam browser will not function. Once the box is unchecked, and Steam restarted (note I do not use a proxy) the browser works properly. So to fix the problem, open IE, go to Tools -> Internet Options ->Connections -> LAN Settings, and uncheck "Automatically detect settings," then close and re-open Steam.

From here: http://www.facepunch.com/showpost.php?p=20393441&postcount=22
 
Just a warning to all who want to try this update.

It may cause one or more of your games to break. The most commonly affected games are MW2 and Borderlands, but many others are at risk.

Basically, Steam thinks that you are missing game files, and deletes/updates random stuff trying to "update" the game, leaving you with a game that doesn't work. I personally am reinstalling MW2 from scratch right now.
 
Good thing I had an older version of MW2 on another computer.
Just had to:
-stop update
-delete local content
-opt out of beta
-login to other computer with older MW2 version and update it
-make steam backup of updated MW2
-copy over MW2 update and log back into affected computer
-reinstall MW2 backup
 
^^^^ sounds like a pain in the ass.

Looking at my friends list, the all text looks like a faded green, it's kinda hard for me to read. Anyone else see this?

Also, my dpi settings cause the text to be clipped out.
 
Just a warning to all who want to try this update.

It may cause one or more of your games to break. The most commonly affected games are MW2 and Borderlands, but many others are at risk.

Basically, Steam thinks that you are missing game files, and deletes/updates random stuff trying to "update" the game, leaving you with a game that doesn't work. I personally am reinstalling MW2 from scratch right now.

I'm not surprised. For some reason every time I've ever reinstalled STEAM it says my CoH games are ready but I always need to "Verify integrity of game files" at which point it will download them again. Also, many of my games show "download paused" yet if I right click them and choose resume update it'll go to instantly.
 
I personally like how it is now. Since you can individually tag each game with multiple categories, you can easily list your games by genre, developer, etc. The nice thing is that these settings are stored to the Steam cloud and I don't have to reset them for a new Steam install. (tested on my laptop to be sure!) :)

Absolutely, but it should also allow you to sort from the main game browser itself. I dunno, digging all the way down into individual game pages, only in one of three view options no less, shouldn't be the only way you can do it, that's my only beef. Otherwise I'm cool.

Oh, that and trying to redownload multiple games, that's also kind of a drag. :)
 
i hope they add back the small list menu or make the small icons a single list
 
Hmm just started trying it out. So far 2 crashes within the first 2 minutes. I clicked the games tab and went to view my game library. That went fine, I saw I was updating mw2 - multiplayer and was trying to click on the games I owned to see some stats and I couldnt. It just froze up when I tried to select something and was forced to exit. Its been fine since the 2nd time but it was annoying.
 
well had some speed problems with it at first but working great so far.

For the first 5 minutes after downloading the beat and starting steam with the beta GUI is was locking up every 20 seconds or so, and would stay locked for about 10 more seconds.

After a few min it stopped.

I was also getting the problem where the store page wouldn't load (tried refreshing, waiting, nothing), I went to my games tab then back to th store page and it started working 100%
 
I had the same problem many users over on the Steam forums were having: Deletion of game files.

I was able to restore my game without re-downloading in Windows 7 by right clicking the partition where Steam was installed, clicking the Previous Versions tab, and opening a version Win7 had saved yesterday. I navigated to the Steam folder, copied it from the Previous Version directory into the current directory and restarted Steam. At first when I saw that it was updating back to the new UI I thought it hadn't worked, because Steam popped up with a message saying that some files conflicted. It gave me the option to download from the cloud, and I did so, and everything worked fine after that.

Thought I'd give a heads up for Windows 7 users.
 
Sweet, love the UI update. Great job Valve, was wondering if they were going to ever revamp the whole UI.

Ugh, my MW2 files were deleted as well. Thanks to the previous posters suggestion I was able to restore the deleted files using Win7's "Previous Version" function.
 
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Just a warning to all who want to try this update.

It may cause one or more of your games to break. The most commonly affected games are MW2 and Borderlands, but many others are at risk.

Basically, Steam thinks that you are missing game files, and deletes/updates random stuff trying to "update" the game, leaving you with a game that doesn't work. I personally am reinstalling MW2 from scratch right now.

I must've been lucky. No deletes/redownloads and just finished playing some Borderlands too.

Liking the new UI for the most part. Seems a tad on the dark side though.
 
I must've been lucky. No deletes/redownloads and just finished playing some Borderlands too.

Liking the new UI for the most part. Seems a tad on the dark side though.

I had to download a gig of TF2. A couple games had to download 1-200mb, and a handful of other games said they had to download something, but as soon as I clicked download, they changed to "ready to play". Quite odd.

Other than that, I like the new UI
 
Seems to be a bit laggy for me (UI etc..) I'll reboot after MW2 download finishes and see if it's any better.

But I like the new thinking, making it *prettier* so to speak.

Running on a Mac Pro (late 09) with 12gb ram, 5870 radeon.


Just noticed - "testshell-error:" on the main page


EDIT2 - rebooted, opened steam and MW2 multiplayer started over ? i'm gonna pause it instead
 
Thanks for the heads up but I'll avoid it until the missing game files issue is sorted (especially MW2). I can't be bothered to tinker around with settings to get it to work again. If it ain't broke....
 
Hmm, it's re-downloading my MW2, hope this don't screw my profile.

BTW, I agree with muzzle79, feels laggy as heck, choppy scrolling. Overall design doesn't help usability at all, it now takes up even more space to view game lists, such as "Top Sellers" , "Specials" , etc.

edit: Just crashed trying to view achievements for Torchlight
 
Dunno if it is just me or what, but the second i switched over, it redownloaded my Company of Heroes games for no reason at all.

Yeah same, the expansions re-downloaded, not too fussed since i've not had time to play them yet, still a pretty significant bug. It did mean i get to see the peak value for download speed in their traffic monitor thing, 5.9MB/sec, sweet :)

Well the thing is Steam has so many different windows, chats, friends list, games list, settings, and server list, that the X's have to be used to close individual windows rather than close the entire program.

I only use 1, the main steam window, I'm old school I guess, when I click the close button I expect the application to close and close all of it's own subwindows if it has any, like steam friends for example.

Hey wabes trolling knows no bounds, oh wait...

I kid, I kiiiiiiiid, see that makes it all better, can't touch me now :rolleyes:
 
After letting it re-download MW2 everything seems to be fine. My profile is intact.
 
I had to download a gig of TF2. A couple games had to download 1-200mb, and a handful of other games said they had to download something, but as soon as I clicked download, they changed to "ready to play". Quite odd.

Other than that, I like the new UI

Sounds like what happens when you transfer games to a new steam install. If you hadn't updated the games on the old steam install, then backup your games into a new steam install, it'll want to update them all before it lets you play. The ones which want to download but immediately flick to "ready to play" are the ones that were already up to date.
 
wow.

i just finished updating it, literally it finished installing the new UI seconds ago, and my first impressions are: Zune-Steam.

I mean, I suppose thats good because Zune is becoming microsofts consumer front --Windows phone 7 is zune, its just they figured they name Windows carried more weight with consumers, so thats the name they chose, but the UI is very zune ish.

So the fact that Steams UI is moving in the same direction that the code giant has chosen to move in is a complement I suppose, but yeah this, I mean it really is zune like, for those that haven't used the zune software before. Its almost uncanny.
 
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If only the SC2 beta opt-in let you in this fast.

My first impression is meh... You either get to see a wall of text or giant thumbnails when you go to view your games...
 
I wonder if they could integrate it with WMC? It would be awesome for all the indie games....
 
My take on why they are switching is a bit more pragmatic. The EU has forced Microsoft to give users other options besides IE via a browser election. Steam relying on IE would ensure that some people wouldn't be able to play their games.

Their main concern is keeping their customer base active. Secondary to that is supporting other platforms.

That said if I could run Steam under Linux and have at least a few Linux compatible games that would go a long way towards making me a very happy guy.
 
I gotta say, after MW2 re-downloaded and I verified that my Profile was still intact I'm in love with the new client. So slick. Reminds me alot of the Zune software which I use for my music.
 
I just played with it for a little while and thus far I really like it. I have to re-download CoH for some reason but that's why I go to work and let it download while I'm away! :)
 
Does anyone know if non-Steam games added to Steam are succeptible to screwups from the update?

I would assume not since Steam just manages the link and has an overlay running over the game, but I thought I'd ask to make sure.

I use Steam to manage all games (and some applications) on my PC, and don't want to risk breaking anything.
 
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