Software :: Valve Accepting Applications For Steam For Beta Program Can Work?
Mar 26, 2010
Valve Software this week quietly began accepting applications for a forthcoming beta program aimed at testing its highly-anticipated Steam for Mac online gaming service, several AppleInsider readers have discovered."We are going to conduct a closed beta for testing of the Mac client and Mac versions of Valve games," the company wrote on its website. "Participants will be selected to provide broad coverage of testing criteria. Please be honest in your answers as we need to test all types of users, systems, and software configurations."
Was just thinking to myself, it's almost May and Steam is still Window-only. Didn't seem to get into Valve's Mac beta program either.But there's news says their WebKit update is coming out Monday, at least for PC-users. Think we'll see the OS X version then?
Valve officially revealed Monday that its Steam online gaming service, along with the Source engine that powers titles such as Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, is coming to the Mac in April.
Valve's library of games will be making the jump from Windows Machines, including Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series.
"As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."
Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve, said the partners who sell games through the Steam online service, are "very excited" about embracing the Mac platform. The statement would imply that developers other than Valve intend to make their titles compatible with the Mac.
"Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge," Holtman said. "For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."
In addition, Valve confirmed that the forthcoming Portal 2 game will be the company's first simultaneous release for both Mac and Windows.
"Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, project lead for Portal 2. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac."
"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, director of Steam development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360.
Does anyone know how to fix this issue? I boot up steam and i go into preferences and test the mic it works perfectly then when i boot a game like team fortress the mic works for like 30 mins and stops, people have been saying that its a buzzing noise
I was very excited like everyone to install new Safari 4 and the excitement sustained for a while. Ubiquitously, it is visually delightful meeting Apple Standards. However, I lost lot of plugins that I had for earlier Safari version. Plugins like: DivX player, Real player are gone after I installed the new version. It is not recognizing by itself if there are missing plugins and neither I see an option where I can install by myself.
My add-ons are all installed, and enabled, but most are not working. The plugins are all just gone, such as flash. I installed flash again, restarted, and it still doesn't have flash.
I like Safari's U.I. very much, but, everytime I load around 5 pages at the same time it starts to freeze and give me the rainbow circle on the mouse pointer. If I open the same sites with Camino everything works great and even faster than Safari.
I do not want to quite switch to Camino, because its UI is ugly, but its really superior to Safari on speed terms and has the same compatibility as Firefox, because its Gecko engine (?). I will miss Top Sites and Safari's UI so much
How your Safari works? Is it fast and freeze free?
I just recently got a MacBook - I'm new to the Mac world, but so far I love it and its worlds better then Windows 7 or anything else I've used. I'm picking up everything ok, except for a few little things. My biggest problem is in the "Numbers" spreadsheet program. I've searched the help topics and cant figure out how to make the numbers in my budget add up.
For example: Paycheck- $500 Rent-$100 Food-$50 Car-$25 Total Expenses- $175
Difference between income and expenses: I cant get it to fill in the gap between the income and expenses so I know how much I have left over without having to do all the math myslef. Excel used to do this, is there a way to make Numbers do it too?
I found a free way to use hotmail email address on Mail and its worked very well EXCEPT my last software update. Now, it will send emails happily, but it refuses to receive emails. The program I use is HttpMail Plugin Version Leopard 1.53 (by daniel parnell). Its worked up till this last update on software. Any solutions?
I have some contacts in my Address book that won't save any changes I make to them.
For example: Address book shows for a contact name. when I replace it with their real name and de-press the edit button, close out of the application and restart, none of my changes are saved.
Has anyone played Team Fortress 2 on Steam for Mac? I just installed it today on my MBP (config is in my siggy), but I'm pretty disappointed because it's obviously not as smooth and fast as in my Bootcamp.I turned most of my settings to at least Med (and some to Low), turned off Antialiasing, but kept resolution of 1440x900, yet it's still laggy/choppy esp. when there's more people involved... (it was fine in Bootcamp on even better settings).I get like 20-25 fps in OS X, which pretty much sucks
Whit all the Steam talk going on, I was thinking why don't I try it. What would be the best pay/free program to use for the Steam app? Cross over? Or maybe Virtualbox?
After my experience with the Starcraft II demo I have to say I'm hesitant to use the Mac Steam and just stick with bootcamp. Because of DirectX, games just seem to run better on my Windows side. Anyone planning on scrapping Windows for the Mac Steam client? It's nice to see more games coming to Mac but they still seem crippled by OpenGL.
I am trying to install steam onto crossover.I download the steaminstall.msi file that downloads off of steam, but crossover will not let me open the file to get to the .exe what do I do from there?I think the rest of the process is self explanatory, but if you could post a step-by-step, it would be awesome
I know you can transfer games from PC to PC, but I downloaded Portal on my Mac. I don't have constant internet access on my PC, so I don't want to download it there, but I can at least log in long enough to get it set to offline mode.
Question is, can I transfer the Mac version of Portal to the PC version of Steam?
Hope so. I'd like to play it with everything maxed out.
Just a couple of Q's regarding the Mac App store-1) Can you redownload software and unlimited number of times, like Steam?2) Do you have to log in to run your software but have the ability to run them on as many machines as you want (like Steam again) or is it more like iOS where you can only install to 5 machines at a time?3) Can you have multiple accounts? Say if I have numerous personal computers and 1 shared one with others who have bought MAS apps, can they all run simultaneously?
Whenever I restart my computer, both Steam and Skype immediately and automatically start up, on their own. How do I turn that off? How do I set things up so they only start up when I click on them, to purposely choose to start them?
With the recent release of Steam for Mac, and the countdown to the release of Starcraft 2, I've been thinking that Blizzard and Valve should (or current are) actively pursuing Apple to make OS X more compliant with OpenGL, and at the same time increase effieciency of their graphics card drivers. Both of these companies are having the potential market for Mac gaming grow every day, and need their clients to run as smooth on a Mac as they would on a PC. I followed the dev builds of 10.6.3 somewhat closely, and remember seeing the builds add in compliance with OpenGL 3(?), so my question I'm asking is: Do you think Blizzard and Valve are actively working with Apple to increase performance for their games?
I've recently installed the Orange Box on my Aluminium 13" Macbook (2.4Ghz).
At first, the games ran fine, but soon I started experiencing a lot of crashes (happened with HL2, HL2 Episode 1, Team Fortress 2, (haven't tried the others)). Sometimes the game just freezes (i hear a repeating sound), then quits. I get different error messages every time:
"The instruction at '0x0######' referenced memory at '0x#####'. The memory could not be 'written'"
I want to capture selections on my screen and add comments. Is there a program out there that will allow me to do that? I don't like the "grab it" program because it saves the captured file in a Tiff format instead of a Jpeg format.
these are the games i plan on playing when i purchase my new macbook i5 15inch. i know the processor difference between the i5 and i7 is barely noticeable especially for someone like me who doesnt do all that high-end rendering stuff. the only thing thats freaking me out is the difference in quality between these games with the nvidia 330m 256 mb vs 512 mb. some have said it'll make no difference as most games these days just use the speed of the card and not the space, and that the 330m is not even fast enough to take advantage of the 512mb....what would the quality difference be between the two for these games? i plan on getting the high-res screen, does that change anything?
Firefox Sync is now integrated into the browser A new tab overview feature has been added New API for accelerated JavaScript animations Buffered property in HTML5 video supported
There have also been a bunch of other changes that affect add-on developers, detailed here.
I accidentally updated MacFuse from 2.0.3 to 2.1.5 beta (was checking if there was a new beta version, went to uncheck "Show Beta Version" and stupidly clicked "install" instead). I can't remember if 2.1.5 beta was a "safe" release of MacFuse. I was checking for updates as I am going to rebuild the Windows install on my MBP and am now worried that 2.1.5 might cause issues. Is 2.1.5 beta "stable"? If not, is it possible to downgrade back to 2.0.3? I've read in a few random posts around the internets that say its not a good idea to do this.If I uncheck the "Show Beta Version" box, MacFuse wants to "update" from 2.1.5 to 2.0.3. Guessing that would be a very bad idea?
Seems Glimmerblocker isn't working with the beta release of Safari 4. Anyone have any luck blocking ads? Also, I'd love to block flash. The inability to block flash is probably the main reason I could never use Safari full time. The browser looks amazing and is very snappy, but alas.... I need plugin support.
I'm using Safari 4 beta and it keeps crashing after no longer than one minute of use. I have deleted the plist, reset Safari, uninstalled and reinstalled, used multiple users, and no luck. I've been using it since it first came out with no problems until now. I did a search but all the threads I saw were about Safari 3 and none of them had a solution that worked yet.
I'm running 10.4.11, and each time I run the software updater, go through all the stages...download, install, restart etc... I open the software updater again, and the update is there again waiting to be installed! This update is that recent Safari 4 one. I've repaired permissions and tried again, but had the same result. Any ideas for a perplexed mac user?
