Community MetaSteam | March 2020 - Rise and Shine, Ms. Vance, Until It Is Done!

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madjoki

👀 I see you
Sep 19, 2018
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Chrono Shop: Added Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic - 7500 Chrono Coins, HERO DEFENSE - 7500 Chrono Coins.



Never tell me again that preloading is quicker than downloading.

It didn't auto unlock? Did for me.

Looks like latest steam client now reports preload unpack ("StageFromChuckStores") decrypt, disk read, disk write times to Valve for some reason.



Maybe so they can optimize it?
 
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Joe Spangle

Playing....
Apr 17, 2019
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Making progress in Black Mesa. I love the more explorey bits but am finding the combat heavy bits a chore. Im using a joypad and dont like the suggested config so have set up my own but i havent got it quite right and so aiming quickly is difficult. The surface tension chapter was rough to get through and now im stuck trying to kill a tank and about 50 dudes.
 
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Line

meh
Dec 21, 2018
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Tried a bunch of the demos from the Steam Game Festival:

Batbarian: interesting, half way between the old Castlevania in feeling, and the new one in more exploration with light RPG elements... but quite puzzle focused.
It's used as a game mechanic, but it's way, way too dark. Sure sending your light bat to activate buttons is interesting, but it just hurts to look at the rest of the screen.
Maybe?

Eldest Souls: it's 2D Dark Souls, big surprise huh? Decent pixel art, but it feels sluggish and unresponsive, worse than DS1. Bleh, but with some potential...

Evan's Remains: oops, this is a puzzle game :fearful-face:. I should have looked beyond the pretty pixels. Alt+F4, nothing to say about it.

Garden Story: a mix between Zelda and.. Animal Crossing? Or Zelda with fetch quests, pretty much. Thing is, I don't think the combat is even decent, it's like a worse Secret of Mana, with extra activities that are... a bit boring. And the dungeons are overly simplistic.
First deception, a game that feels weaker than the sum of its mediocre parts.
Also the pastel tone is cute... but makes visibility a pain, in particular in regards to heights.

Going Under: The Binding of Isaac brawler-style (how imaginative...), but you play as an intern protecting your company from monsters? Weird setting, and it looks like an interactive Kurzgesagt video.
It's just my jam, but the little problem is that it's physics based... so as cool as it is to throw everything around and break office material on the heads of goblins... it also makes the entire game slippery. It's like your character is covered in butter, and it's very easy to just be flung around by a hit (and to receive more in the process) or just slip backward while you just attacked an enemy.
Seems cool, but it really needs some tightening up.

Recompile: can"t say, the controls don't work. Steam forums are filled with people with the same issue, so, good job, your demo is broken within the first five seconds. :rolleyes:
 

Aaron D.

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Jul 10, 2019
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Console gamers fighting over their PS5s and Xbox Series Xs over power and backwards compatibility and Im here like



I've been skimming some of those threads and the first thing that sprung to my mind was this one.

Made me realize how being tied to a hardware specs ceiling you have no control over is damn lame. And how it forces some into 'Lord of the Flies mode' in defending their plastic box of choice (Sure the specs are worse on paper, but it's actually better in real life!!1!).

It's kinda sad, tbh.
 

AHA-Lambda

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Oct 9, 2018
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I don't get it.

Looking at the speeds on my current Doom download the thing throttling it is my write speeds, which I suppose explains the slow unpacking too.

I'm only getting about ~40MB/s but I just tested my drive with crystaldiskmark and it was ~300 MB/s which is what I would expect.
So is it something with Steam or my SSD?
 

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
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Dec 5, 2018
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IT'S THAT TIME OF THE MONTH AGAIN!!!! YAY,

Really happy to see there games such as Azur Lane, Daemon x Machina, Metro or World of Horror. :cat-heart-blob: :cat-heart-blob: :cat-heart-blob:

Wait a moment, when steam showed the top selling new releases of 2019 (during the winter seal) I remember that Metro was in the February top new releases.
So metro was both in the top 20 of February 2019 and 2020 (yes I know it's a weird case, but now I wonder how many copies I had sold before it was removed).
 

Amzin

No one beats me 17 times in a row!
Dec 5, 2018
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All you who have switches over to Edge(the browser) and thus might be using Bing, look into the rewards thing, you can redeem xbox ultimate but it takes alot alot alot of points, but nontheless, free is free.:D (well except you give your search history)
Worth noting you can use Bing as your search engine anywhere and honestly, I can't really tell the difference between it and Google after using it for a bit. If anything Bing seems a little better for my technical searches. The Bing rewards also got me $25 of credit for Forza 4 when I bought it so hey :p I tend to go back and forth between the two since I juggle two browsers anyway, I might try replacing Google with one of the more privacy-friendly search engines though.

I'm wondering what the target audience is. Is it so big it's going to not be what previous Artifact fans like? Is it largely going to be the same game, but the whole market thing is removed? That's my biggest issue - the CCG model is terrible, and now that I'm not a teenager anymore I want nothing to do with any game that uses it. LCG is the way to go. I like Riot's new one, Legends of Runeterra, but they are basing off the CCG model as well (which is hard to push past for a F2P game of course, but doable).

In other news, I 100% Ori 2 and it's certainly going to be near the top of my GOTY list even considering the weight of this years' releases.

I'm a little underwhelmed by my first half hour of Doom Eternal, the glory-kill to gun-kill ratio is like 9 to 1 and they shouldn't be making you tired of executions in the first few minutes of the game like that. Maybe it gets better but if it doesn't pick up after the next hour I'll just refund it and wait for a good sale on Steam key.
 
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Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
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Death's Gambit is nice.
Really pretty, great music, very cool bosses (which is good, because the game is much more focused on boss fights than exploration - not that I mind).
 
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derExperte

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Dec 9, 2018
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I don't get it.

Looking at the speeds on my current Doom download the thing throttling it is my write speeds, which I suppose explains the slow unpacking too.

I'm only getting about ~40MB/s but I just tested my drive with crystaldiskmark and it was ~300 MB/s which is what I would expect.
So is it something with Steam or my SSD?
I'm confused, are you downloading or unpacking the pre-load? SATA SSDs can be too slow to unpack games fast enough if there are a lot of tiny files and your internet is plenty fast, thus throttling the download, that benchmarked speed is only for writing big chuncks of data.







 
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Mivey

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Sep 20, 2018
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Having played the Resident Evil 3 demo (which is quite amazing btw, and ran great), I must say the most unrealistic thing to me, is that there's a store in here with toilet paper left around. If my experience these lays few days in Austria has taught me anything, than it's that with first signs of any kind of infection, people will empty all the shelves of all things paper.
And thinking about it, in games like Fallout, the currency shouldn't be bottle caps, it should be fresh toilet paper
 
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AHA-Lambda

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Oct 9, 2018
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I'm confused, are you downloading or unpacking the pre-load? SATA SSDs can be too slow to unpack games fast enough if there are a lot of tiny files and your internet is plenty fast, thus throttling the download, that benchmarked speed is only for writing big chuncks of data.
I was unpacking it but it was so slow I decided to delete it and download it again (thinking it would be faster).

Then I saw in the download graph that periodically the download would stop but the dick usage would still be going; which seems to fit in with your suggestion of the download being throttled.
So I guess at some point down the road I should get a new non-SATA SSD? I need to really refresh my rig at some point in general I think, still on an i7 4790k as well.
 

fantomena

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Dec 17, 2018
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Almost 100kccu on Doom Eternal. Nice. Also grabbed Death's Gambit. Couldn't resist at 80% off.
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
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i se alot of people are rippin and tearin today
Hmm, mixed feelings about Doom 2020 for now. I take back what I said, it's hard as fuck even in Normal. Did I mention that I love to be stuck for several minutes on a light puzzle in a FUCKING DOOM ?
I just finished a level, they are longgg, but I think I'm basically dividing my time between being rolled over and stuck in empty rooms.
Some encounters are ri-di-cu-lous.

I've been skimming some of those threads and the first thing that sprung to my mind was this one.

Made me realize how being tied to a hardware specs ceiling you have no control over is damn lame. And how it forces some into 'Lord of the Flies mode' in defending their plastic box of choice (Sure the specs are worse on paper, but it's actually better in real life!!1!).

It's kinda sad, tbh.
I don't exactly know what's wrong with me, surely several factors at play, but I didn't even really read about the new consoles specs or anything. I don't give a fuck. Now granted I can be a graphic whore so maybe the song would be different with trailers, but platform warring around spec sheets look super unattractive to me.
Give me a date, a price, some bullshot, and we will speak. And even then, as others have pointed out, the state of console exclusivity make these cheap hardware with horribly priced games more and more irrelevant.

I asked you to have patience and things would come, here's your reward LittleDinamit eonden
I would try Artifact but it's never discounted.
 
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Knurek

OG old coot
Oct 16, 2018
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Durante Why only FXAA for CSIII? No love for SMAA? Or do you just feel if anyone cares for that, they can just inject with Reshade or similar..
 

Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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the wait is killing me
Thanks for posting that! I don't know how many people on Steam will really care about the finer points of asset compression but I enjoyed writing it ;)

Durante Why only FXAA for CSIII? No love for SMAA? Or do you just feel if anyone cares for that, they can just inject with Reshade or similar..
I think SMAA is only really significantly better if you either have fine texture detail, or if you are injecting it and therefore can't make sure that it doesn't affect UI and 2D stuff. With ToCS3, I'm obviously doing FXAA only on the bare opaque geometry rendertarget, and the game doesn't really have high-frequency detail / "noisy" textures.

And people who really care are probably going to use MSAA ;)
 
OP
lashman

lashman

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In the latest issue of Edge magazine, Valve's CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell shares his thoughts on the Epic Games Store.

In issue 334, Newell sat down to talk to Edge magazine's Alex Spencer about Half-Life: Alyx, the future of VR, and Valve's approach to Steam. During the interview the topic of one of Steam's biggest and newest competitors Epic Games Store lead to Newell sharing his thoughts on whether the competitor affects Valve's approach to Steam and its relationship with developers:

"Competition in game stores is awesome for everybody. It keeps us honest, it keeps everybody else honest," Newell says, "But it's ugly in the short term. You're like, 'Argh, they're yelling, they're making us look bad' - but in the long term, everybody benefits from the discipline and the thoughtfulness it means you have to have about your business by having people come in and challenge you."

"We get a lot more freaked out not by competition, but by people trying to preclude competition," Newell continues, "If you ask us which is scarier, it's people falling in love with Apple's model of controlling everything and having faceless bureaucrats who get to keep your product from entering the market if they don't want it to, or designing a store in a way that minimises software's value-add to experience and stuff like that."
 

Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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Durante What do you recommend in general? SMAA or FXAA?
As an image quality snob, the first thought is of course "neither" ;)

But jokes aside, these days I actually find more use for FXAA than SMAA (1x). I don't want to depend on either of them as my sole source of AA (in which case SMAA might do a bit better), but as a pre-smoothing step before DSR FXAA is very good. Since it's less "careful" than SMAA, you get a more temporally stable image, and at high source resolutions the reduction in detail isn't really a big deal. This is particularly true if it's integrated in the right place in the render pipeline (before e.g. high-frequency effects like rain or noise).
 

Line

meh
Dec 21, 2018
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In other news, demo of Vigil: The Longest Night.
More 2D Dark Souls.
It's a much, much, shoddier Salt&Sanctuary with much more limited character development, way too zoomed in on the action, crappy animations that do no favor to the general movement of the game, which is fairly slow but does not feel weighty in the least, thanks to a disgusting playable character made in 3D where everything else (including NPCs) is 2D, I assume rotoscoped from 3D... bits and bobs, as some things like trees are just missing chunks of their models. Who the fuck said "yup it's ok" when branches are not even attached to the trunk?

It looks dreadful in movement, it's one of the ugliest commercial games I have ever seen.
Terrible case of a floaty model on flat surfaces, vastly different art styles meshed together, and blurry elements in random places... if you want to to simulate DOF, you'd better apply it evenly, not on one tree but not the other, one house but not the church, and not a bit in front of the camera, a bit in the distance and the planks on the road in the middle.

It plays just okay, but it's awful to look at.
 
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Hektor

Autobahnraser
Nov 1, 2018
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HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT

DOOM MOTHERFUCKING ETERNAL!!

I AM SWEATING!!

I, as it begets, picked the highest difficulty right away and spent 6 hours on the first three missions probably dying about 200 times already, BUT HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO MUCH FOON

THEY TOOK EVERYTHING AND MADE IT BETTER

YOU CAN COLLECT DOOM PARODY VINYLS OF METAL MUSIC

GIANT DOOMSLAYER MECHS AND GIANT DEMONS

YOU HAVE A SPACEBASE

HOLY SHIT
 

Aaron D.

MetaMember
Jul 10, 2019
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As an image quality snob, the first thought is of course "neither" ;)

But jokes aside, these days I actually find more use for FXAA than SMAA (1x). I don't want to depend on either of them as my sole source of AA (in which case SMAA might do a bit better), but as a pre-smoothing step before DSR FXAA is very good. Since it's less "careful" than SMAA, you get a more temporally stable image, and at high source resolutions the reduction in detail isn't really a big deal. This is particularly true if it's integrated in the right place in the render pipeline (before e.g. high-frequency effects like rain or noise).
Yup, those are some words alright. :p
 
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TioChuck

More Yellow 🤷‍♂️
Dec 31, 2018
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Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
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Dear Diary,

Day 6 of the quarantine. Watched the Martian, found a brother in arms who is in the same situation as me. My supply of Ketchup is dwindling, can sympathize with the martian there, Aldi has no ketchup anymore.

Day 7 of the quarantine. Watched The Cloverfield Paradox, don't know if it was a comedy or horror film. Saw a strange shadow outside the window right now, hopefully, those monsters didn't make it here.
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,867
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HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT

DOOM MOTHERFUCKING ETERNAL!!

I AM SWEATING!!

I, as it begets, picked the highest difficulty right away and spent 6 hours on the first three missions probably dying about 200 times already, BUT HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO MUCH FOON

THEY TOOK EVERYTHING AND MADE IT BETTER

YOU CAN COLLECT DOOM PARODY VINYLS OF METAL MUSIC

GIANT DOOMSLAYER MECHS AND GIANT DEMONS

YOU HAVE A SPACEBASE

HOLY SHIT
I personally have bowling PTSD :fearful-face:
 
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LEANIJA

MetaMember
May 5, 2019
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Austria
Having played the Resident Evil 3 demo (which is quite amazing btw, and ran great), I must say the most unrealistic thing to me, is that there's a store in here with toilet paper left around. If my experience these lays few days in Austria has taught me anything, than it's that with first signs of any kind of infection, people will empty all the shelves of all things paper.
And thinking about it, in games like Fallout, the currency shouldn't be bottle caps, it should be fresh toilet paper
Ah, another fellow Austrian. Youre of course absolutely right. But the toilet paper thing is worldwide, and I've only saw this video trying to shed some light on it, so far (in German):

 
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Tizoc

Retired, but still Enabling
Oct 11, 2018
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Oman
ko-fi.com

May be of interest to some of you here.

Doom eternal's stages remind me of Dishonored. In the first game, you can either go straight away and complete main objective or put time into exploring the entirety of the level to find upgrades and complete various side stuff.
Oh and if you buy this game, you'll get a free copy of Shadows of Adam
 

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
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WELL WELL WELL

 
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BlueOdin

Dec 3, 2018
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WELL WELL WELL

I never stopped believing
 
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