Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

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jauntywundrkind

Absolutely super fire experience:

> Timeline and Event Markers. The Steam Timeline appears whenever you’re actively recording. Timeline-enhanced games generate event markers as relevant game events happen. Steam achievements and screenshots automatically create markers as well.

It's wild that games have done so so so little to expose the game to the world, to offer APIs. It's been Steam and a couple other major top-down drivers of yore (achievements) pushing games to think beyond the scope of the game window. Remarkable to me how close-minded & slow games have been, that they have to be pushed, to making the game relevant and interesting & enageable broadly.

And a bit sad there aren't open protocols for games play with. It's various intermedies (each tied to their own marketplaces) or bust.

Still, love to see it. And there's already a strong community of folks re-inplenting Steam SDK (ex: nucleus coop) at least, which is great.

Game devs are notoriously bad at integrating outside of the game loop. There's also the issue that there's over 15 years of games that support achievements and most of them will never be updated to a new API. The Steamworks API has been reverse engineered for a long time by pirates. People really don't realize how vendor locked in games are on Steam. It's convenient, but don't think for a second that you own the games.

I'm pretty sure as long as they are on my HDD, i can play them with an unconnected steam account. That's how we shared games 15 years ago, instead of trying to find keys or cracks, the person owning the game installed it on an external HDD, and with a few weird manipulations that was enough to play it with a disconnected steam account. Maybe that changed?

Anything that uses the steamworks SDK is going to require an active account to initialize properly. That may or may not be a fatal error, it's up to the devs to decide.

It varies wildly from game to game. It's very possible to use steam as simply a means to copy the game files onto your PC, or integrate with it so tightly it's 100% required to have an account in good standing (as well as one with the game publisher, or whatever), or anywhere in between (a lot of games make the integrations optional, which is the best solution IMO).

> It's wild that games have done so so so little to expose the game to the world, to offer APIs

Are you talking about steamworks SDK that help games be more "streamlined" (like those using steam Gameserver) should have been done by the industry without external (steam) push, or are you talking about allowing games to be contacted via API calls?

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