Fri 2 Nov, 2007
So, another entry for me.
I’ve been playing around on Windows (and I’ve been feeling the pain, trust me on that) lately, giving Steam a shot, and personally, I think its a rather interesting tool, and, I’d love to see an open-source program inspired by it.
The most brilliant part of it, to me, is not so much the content distribution system, really. Its the “community” aspect. It allows users to open an overlay when in a full-screen game, that can let them talk to people on an (sadly steam-only) instant messaging system. So, you can talk to people about things in-game, without them playing with you. It’d be nice to have a browser in this overlay, too, I might add, so, you can quickly open the overlay, and search for things relating to whatever you’re doing. On that note.. It doesn’t require special code in the game itself. (Which is a VERY good thing.) May I note, In an open source version, it could be good to use the XMPP/Jabber system, perhaps.
The content distribution is a good thing, sure, and may perhaps, be possible to do with something like APT, in a Free Software version.
I hear the OpenFrag project is working on something like the content distribution system, but, as I said above, that’s not the beauty of Steam. Here’s hoping that this might spark some interest to someone.
ghoulsblade says:
hmm, sounds interesting.
maybe a good idea would be to use the libpurple used by the pidgin messenger, afaik it supports most existing instant-messaging systems, and even irc.
It might be a good idea to realize the whole things as a pidgin plugin, e.g. adding support for a fullscreen overlay to the normal pidgin app.
Kaelis Ebonrai says:
I agree, a pidgin/kopete plugin sounds like a good way to do it, actually.
It’d be fairly good, indeed, to support various IM-systems, too.