News Valve launches revamped Steam chat system

Didn't even realise I wanted this, but it seems so obvious now. A good way to manage my disparate friends list (mix of CSGO friends and old clan mates) whilst providing voice chat. Good stuff.

 

Shame about Opus, none of us on teamspeak like Opus and we much prefer Speex, everyone sounds 'odd' with Opus.

 

Thank God for "-nochatui -nofriendsui" because the new UI is appalling.

 

This is different, therefor I don't like it.

/old

 

I go on my pc to escape people! Damn you!

 

I've been using the new Steam Chat in beta for a while now. They've made a few tweaks here and there in that time, but on the whole it's been a big, shiny, disappointment. I run a 1920x1200 display and the chat windows take up an awful amount of space. Ok, so you shrink the window size down.... but the buttons don't scale! Do I really need a carriage-return, emoticon and attachment button to be SO big?

On the voice chat functionality, the first thing a mate and I did was an A-B with Teamspeak. Steam voice chat is awful in comparison - and that was that - we'd rather pay for TS than use Steam voice chat for free.

This isn't a case of change == bad. This almost feels like it was done by committee.

 

Do you use Opus on teamspeak?

 

In recent years it has become fashionable to crap on steam, so they probably changed it for the sake of being seen doing something.

Which is rather ironic since not having social functions shoved down your throat was the best thing about steam, if they would have wanted to do something useful they could have booted all the crappy asset flips or cleaned out all the fake screenshots that have nothing to do with the game they are tagged as.

 

How Valve released this thinking it was finished is beneath my comprehension. It's less user friendly and and is such a visual eye sore that the Friends and Chat windows don't even look like they're part of Steam. Also why is the music player still not intergrated into the main Steam window? I might as well just use any old media player if it's going to be it's own seperate window.

 

I just can't see why it needs to pop up on startup (or login). It is just unwelcome. Well a quick regedit to add -nofriendsui to the startup call and it is gone.

Can't say myself or anyone I game with used it much anyway, and the few that have, all disabled the new "features". So no major loss.

To win back users it needed to be slick and fully featured (and tested) from the start, which after release we all know it is not. In fact redit has examples of mics being left open in chat after you have left.........

There was no need to rush out this release in the state it is. So God knows why they did.

 

What's cheaper:
- Hire a permanent cadre of QC staff (whoops, 'flat management structure', all your QC staff got bored and wheeled their desks elsewhere)
- Hire a bunch of QC contractors train them up, let them go at the end of a project, then hire and train a new bunch for the next project
- Release it, whack-a-mole the bugs that get the most complaints, and spin it as "listening to the community"

 

I'm guessing this is more of a Unity's "feature" than anything else, works fine on Windows and Gnome3.

 

Just to be clear and avoid miscommunication - we are talking about friends/chat window?
if yes, then yes, can resize it to whatever i want, go full screen/halfsceen/quadscreen, minimize/maximize/close icons are showing. The only problem is that if you go fullscreen/halfscreen it show chat half of the interface regardless if you have any chats open. Running steam 1532458786.

---edit---
Apparently I'm running steam beta (can't even remember switching to it). That might explain why its ok for me.

---edit2---
Just reread your post, you are talking about main steam window, so no. Because news were about chat revamp my mind fixated on it. Carry on...

 

Just tried it, 1000x600 seems to be the minimum now

 

Windows seems to resize second program to the area available, IMO way better implementation than just forcing everything to half screen (maybe that's why it never bothered me). One point for M$ I guess.