Valve console? Created 12 years ago2012-03-05 03:30:46 UTC by Mcrich114

I'm surprised this hasn't been addressed: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/03/02/report-valve-developing-steam-box-console
Discuss

Big news indeed. I hope we aren't waiting until e3 for official details though. I hope this happens, and I hope its good. I have faith in valve as a company who hold their ideals close by. This console could have quite a serious edge over the playstation and the xbox as valve have the infrastructure to make it so.

I'd still rather hear something about Half Life 3, to be honest.

If it happens it's fairly likely that hl3 will be the title that launches it. Keep in mind this is all fairly speculative, mostly based on Gabe's admitted intention to travel down the hardware development path and a Valve employee's tweet of a micro-PC he built.

I've said this before, but I'm pretty sure it's just a small PC for carrying to conferences and demoing Source games on. That said, if they are making a console, I'll have to get it. And hope it's called "Pipe", as (I think it was) Daubster suggested.

I hope they call it "locomotive" or something like that actually, because "pipe" designates something static imo.

I read the news some time ago. I don't think I have a reaction. I mean, who cares... what's in the hand is not a lie, so we'll see about this when we actually have something to play with. Not words.

Calling it now: They'll call it Steam Machine, and they'll license Daft Punk's Steam Machine song and play the fuck out of it.

"We're prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we're building boxes to test that on. We're also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we've talked about a fair amount. Valve is always putting boxes together. Going all the way back to the Half-Life 1 days, we built special boxes to test our software render... it's just part of development."
Doug Lombardi

Rumours are false, guys.

Called it. Sorta. Didn't occur to me that it would be for testing the games on different systems, with different cards and OSes.

Not necessarily Archie, there's still hope!

I hope not, considering that what it would amount to is basically an off-the-shelf PC with Steam library access and nothing else, albeit optimized for a singular purpose. I don't see the advantage to that... like, at all. If I wanted to do that I could just plug an inexpensive computer into a TV. It's the kind of cheap corporate ploy that I don't associate with Valve, who have a pretty solid history of innovation.

Sure, there's advantages to a streamlined experience, but the end result is still nothing like a proprietary console - if they're going to adapt a store full of PC games, they're all going to be keyboard-mouse deals primarily. That doesn't really hold up on the couch,last I checked. Also, all the inconveniences of PC gaming, both perceived and real, would still manifest themselves in such a system if it were to play straight up PC games.

I knew years ago that Valve will look at the feedback stuff whether it's biometric or haptic or whatsoever. It's the first step to new era of games. Today's games are nothing more but pimped Wolf 3D's.

What I want is totally stereoscopic HMD with eye pupil and ciliary muscle tracking and UHDTV resolution. It would allow to use our eyes to focus and such things as anti-aliasing and texture filtering wouldn't be needed anymore. Also correct surround headphones plus realistic sound physics in game (which anyone haven't done yet).

It would cost quite a nasty amount probably... But now it's pretty realistic to expect a collector's edition box of HL3 with something like this inside.

plus realistic sound physics in game

Battlefield 3 (Frostbite 2) does a pretty sweet job there. There was also an independant research team that implemented some incredibly advanced sound physics into the Source engine. Can't seem to find their video with it though.

Cool. But Source engine? Never heard So sound waves actually bounce off and go through walls depending on material, thickness and so on? That's what I mean by sound physics.

Yeah, exactly. They modified the BSP format and embedded the sound physics stuff in a new compile stage. Much like VIS/RAD. Dynamic reverberation, etc. It was really cool.

Does Source output surround sound? Because two channels are probably not enough to represent the work done by those physics.

And when was that? Since the beginning or recently?

If the video I'm thinking of is the one Daubster's talking about, then it was a while ago. Definitely not recently, really.

Find it please!

Finally
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQt1jtDBNK4