Sins with the Steam overlay

Steam is not supported.

[crickets chirping can be heard from everywhere both close and far away]

Obviously, but I was wondering if this problem is specific to my computer or if others are having this problem too.

I am having this problem as well, and it's a real shame really. I love Steam and I use Steam frequently to keep in contact with my friends and let them know what games I'm playing currently.

Technically "steam not being supported" shouldn't really be a factor here, because all Steam technically does I think is launch the shortcut with a message that gets sent to steam saying what non steam game you're playing.

I mean, I make my own windows applications with Visual Studio, and steam can launch those easily with no problems.

You never know how a game will react to the overlay. For example, I bought CoD4 through Steam, however, I now have to have my Steam overlay disabled for all games, because CoD4's anti-cheat system detects the overlay as a cheat.

Don't count on the overlay to work with any non-valve game.

I hate to say this, but you should probably use Xfire for that. Steam is a bit of resource hog and does create some problems with software. I had some problems with it when I was using the Steam Interface and Hellgate. After that, I'll log into Steam grab some people, then log on. Xfire is a bit more friendly as far as the resources used and it's above the same to talk to people within game.

Hmm, that's weird. I've been using the Steam overlay with CoD4 for a while now and never had a problem with Punkbuster.

I've had far and away more issues with xfire than Steam. It's unfortunate that the overlay doesn't work, but that's no reason to install xfire. I still use Steam messenger, I just have to alt-tab to do it. Thankfully-- and there's no way I can thank IC and SD enough for this-- SSE alt-tabs VERY gracefully.

XFire was great a couple years ago; but now it's significantly buggier and honestly not much thinner than Steam, at least in my experience. I know there's xfire fanatics out there; but the application is quite frankly bad-- it's poorly written, and while it's functional and does some things Steam doesn't, it's clunky and the UI is exceptionally poor.

Heh, why would you want Steam eating up resources for a non-steam game?

Try Trillian for IM and Ventrilo for voice. Much, much lighter weight, and no intrusive overlay.

I have 3 gigs of ram in my computer, running steam doesn't really impact my performance of sins if I were actually able to run it and have everything displayed properly.

Raziaar, I'm in the same state. The reason I use steam in the background rather than Trillian is that the vast majority of my friends use Steam as well, so if they're in a game (particularly in the Source engine, which doesn't minimize well at all) Steam is the best way to chat with them.

Sadly some games just don't work with the overlay. I believe I had issues with Bioshock. Quake Wars works fine though.

-HM

im still waiting for xfire support from xfire

x fire crashes many games...

Steam really isn't that resource intensive.

When a game is run fullscreen, Direct3D operates in what is known as exclusive mode. Exclusive mode means that the program running fullscreen has direct and exclusive access to the video hardware.

Direct3D was never intended to allow two applications to share the screen in exclusive mode. As such, for non-Source games, Steam has to rely on a hack to allow it's overlay to work in games running in exclusive mode. More specifically, it has to intercept and modify DirectX calls by sitting in between the game and the DirectX libraries.

I didn't know that dcatz. Is there a document about that? I'm curious to learn more.

The Steam as a resource hog contention is way off base. With the Friends list open, Steam uses an average of 17MB. About 7MB with no windows open, idling in the system tray. Anyone who owns a rig that can play a modern PC game could run 20 instances of Steam and not notice a performance hit.