New Steam UI

if your not using it I suggest you do. It is a little buggy but looks and runs much better. To use it go to settings and under beta participation click change. Then find the one that says UI update and click okay or apply. Then restart your steam and you will be good to go. Tell me hows you like it!

Knew about this from a few weeks ago. I tried it for a day, but.... It just does not appeal to me. The In-Game is abysmal, I don't want to click more than 0 times to view my friends, and I hate that thing in the bottom middle of the screen.

The Games section is awesome, though, and I like how I can make my own categories.

Now, the huge improvement from the original to the beta is the lack of Internet Explorer... Oh my word, is this note worthy. Internet Explorer is just horrible, and it pains me that the other features of the Beta are so killing, because I can't stand IE.

ninji wrote:Knew about this from a few weeks ago. I tried it for a day, but.... It just does not appeal to me. The In-Game is abysmal, I don't want to click more than 0 times to view my friends, and I hate that thing in the bottom middle of the screen.

The Games section is awesome, though, and I like how I can make my own categories.

Now, the huge improvement from the original to the beta is the lack of Internet Explorer... Oh my word, is this note worthy. Internet Explorer is just horrible, and it pains me that the other features of the Beta are so killing, because I can't stand IE.

The in game isn't bad it is just a lot more complicated, and my friends list is on top whenever i bring it up, so their might be a setting to change that

Yea, the new UI is awesome, from the browser to the games list.

Notes:
-All images are JPG files around 90kb and have been ‘spoilered’ for those with slower internet.
-I have too much spare time.
-Screw rules, I have money!

We all know that Steam looks like crap. In fact I can tell by the way it looks that it was made for windows 98 even though it’s 2010. Luckily enough for us those lazy bastards at Valve that we all love decided that it is time to release Half-Life 2 Episode 3. Just kidding, they decided to postpone it even further and do an update to the Steam User Interface!

Store screenshot:

Spoiler:

‘Ow wow, eyecandy!’ was my first thought when the Steam Beta started. I checked my resources and noticed it was only taking a minor 38.512kB with the window opened. Now unless you have a shitty computer that can’t even spare such little memory you won’t have any real problems with running the new UI. If you do then I highly doubt you are even capable of running a Steam in the first place. So with that being said let’s go on the new features.

Like I already mentioned it’s mostly eyecandy but in a good way. I mean, the old UI looked like some Windows 1998 program. There are however some real changes with the most important one being that Internet Exploder, erm Internet Explorer is no longer required to run Steam.
The first thing you see after you installed the beta UI is the Store. It got a nice remake which now shows all kinds of cool stuff such as the sales, the special deals which Steam is famous for, the total amount of users online and even what games your friends have recently purchased!

Game library screenshots:

Spoiler:

Moving on the most important part of Steam, the game library. This feature has gotten a major improvement. It provides you with three different ways to view your games as you can see on the image. A is the default method and my most preferred one. It shows you a list off all your games and if you select one it shows all kinds of stats. Playtime, friends who are playing and achievements are just a few of them. B is the second way of showing your list. This one is more like the list in the current UI. Main difference is that it shows an image with the game title along with the basic information. Finally there is C. It shows big ass buttons of your games and if you select one you can choose to either play it or show your stats (which puts you back into the A list). Kinda useless if you ask me and only good for making it look as if you have more games then you actually have.
Next in the library we have Media, a list of all downloaded content from the store such as trailers. They haven’t changed a thing about this so there’s no real point to go in on it any further. The same goes for Tools which leaves us with the new submenu named Downloads.
Downloads is a nice list of all the games you are downloading along with the download speed, ETA, amount of MB left to download and a graph that shows you how the speed has changed in the past X minutes. It sure is a nice improvement for those who want to know everything.

News screenshot:

Spoiler:

Community screenshot:

Spoiler:

Next to the game library we have the News section. Here you view all game and Steam related news (updates, etc) by browsing through them all or by game. You can also find urls to various blogs here such as the TF2blog and Kotaku.
The last thing remaining in the main menu’s is the Community Section. There is no real change for it is just the steam browser using the online steam community. My guess is that they will update the site as soon as the new UI get’s its official release.

Friends list and chat screenshot:

Spoiler:

So now that I have done the menu’s lets move on the second most important thing, the friends list. First thing you need to know that the old button with Friends on it has changed into the text VIEW FRIENDS on the bottom-right. Some people are actually complaining about how they can’t find it. But seriously, how can you miss a clear text next to your bloody avatar?! Anyway, when you open up the friend list you will notice that the only change here is the skin. Everything is still where it always have been. The same goes for the chat window although there is a small bug in it. The language setting square thingy floats on top of the text which means that all the lines you write near it will be hidden underneath it. No real problem unless you’re afraid of making one typo.

Now I could go on about the other things in the UI but most of the things stayed the same except for the style. Two final things worth mentioning however are the Small mode which will turn steam just 300 pixels wide and shows your friendslist. Ideal for those who have 2 monitors plugged in or want to keep Steam open all the time. The second thing is when you right-click the steam icon in the taskbar it will show a list of the games you recently played. Selecting one will open it just like that which comes in handy if you don’t want to go through menu’s.

So that wraps up this review. With just under 1000 words it is as long as most my blog entries are. Hope you guys enjoyed reading this and if you didn’t then I can’t help you with getting back thise 5 minutes you just lost.

Nice review peppers

Its old now, Chuck! I think nearly everyone has it. I have it. It looks better!

I still have the old one. Just waiting for all the bugs to disappear.

Eraserhead wrote:I still have the old one. Just waiting for all the bugs to disappear.

The only real bugs I have seen is that it crashes from time to time. Besides that I have no problem with it what so ever. And when it crashes I'm never in game, but just looking at the community tab.

i like the old one......

Does the new steam have an option for chat history? I think that is one of the lamest things about current steamclient. If you close a chatwindow you lose everything!

Eraserhead wrote:Does the new steam have an option for chat history? I think that is one of the lamest things about current steamclient. If you close a chatwindow you lose everything!

I just checked the settings for you, still no chat history. On a ever darker note, there also still isn't a wishlist in the store TT.TT

You can modify the new Steam UI to use the TF2 fonts. :3

Lord Zurkov wrote:You can modify the new Steam UI to use the TF2 fonts. :3

I have all of the TF2 fonts. I need only know how to make it work with Steam. Please, enlighten me.

How can they not have made chat history, it's really unbelievable. I've seen that requested in the steam forums before.

ninji wrote:

Lord Zurkov wrote:You can modify the new Steam UI to use the TF2 fonts. :3

I have all of the TF2 fonts. I need only know how to make it work with Steam. Please, enlighten me.

Everyone has them since they can be found in the resources map of TF2; Drive:Steam\steamapps\username\team fortress2\tf\resource\

Also, I have a modifed UI in TF2 so it uses TF2 resources and fonts instead of default Steam stuff

ninji wrote:

Lord Zurkov wrote:You can modify the new Steam UI to use the TF2 fonts. :3

I have all of the TF2 fonts. I need only know how to make it work with Steam. Please, enlighten me.

Go to "...\Steam\resource\styles" and open "steam.styles" (you can use notepad or any other text editor). Once it's open, search for:

Code:

basefont="Arial"
basefontbold="Arial Bold"

and change it to:

Code:

basefont="TF2 Secondary"
basefontbold="TF2 Build"

Lord Zurkov wrote:

ninji wrote:

Lord Zurkov wrote:You can modify the new Steam UI to use the TF2 fonts. :3

I have all of the TF2 fonts. I need only know how to make it work with Steam. Please, enlighten me.

Go to "...\Steam\resource\styles" and open "steam.styles" (you can use notepad or any other text editor). Once it's open, search for:

Code:

basefont="Arial"
basefontbold="Arial Bold"

and change it to:

Code:

basefont="TF2 Secondary"
basefontbold="TF2 Build"

Thanks, I will try that when it leaves beta.

Well I didn't know about it. lol I don't look at the steam updates. That much.

Here's a quick heads up for you guys:
The new UI will be released next monday!

So for those with a crappy computer that doesn't even match the minimal requirements on TF2, prepare for a laggy interface
Anyway, the requirements aren't anything special, if you can run Word 2007 then you can run the new Steam UI.

This message will self-destruct in 3... 2... 1...

PS: I wonder why they never integrated a webcam feature. Or is this because most players would like to remain 'invisible'?

Well just ask yourself this: would you use the webcam feature if there was one? I dont think so. Most people only have strangers/playmates on Steam instead of friends only and with all other popular messangers allready having a webcam feature it is kinda useless...
Anyway, things I still wonder are why there still is no chat history, a wishlist for games in the steamstore, why they removed the battery meter from the in-game overlay and why they added the win7 snap feature wrong (snaps to 65%~70% of the screen instead of 50%). Ow well, no program is ever finished and I'm sure they'll add it somewhere in the near future.

Anyone else loving the in-game clock?

i would also like to point out that the new steam removed IE dependency. mostly for the mac transition i'm thinking, but it also makes a crapload faster.

UberLord wrote:Anyone else loving the in-game clock?

Not me: I press the Windows key and just look. Then again, my TF2 client runs in pseudo-windowed mode, so that doesn't cause any problems compared to most people.