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Future Steam to look a lot nicer

A new look has been rolled out to the latest Steam client beta. As of last week, if you opted into Valve’s beta programme, your Steam client will have a new font, a slight blue glow around the edges, and it should run somewhat smoother than before. The Steam icon that appears in your taskbar has also changed to be a little more colourful.

And you will now also have the ability to hide games in your library.

While hiding games isn’t for everyone, it’s a nice-to-have feature for games you might be embarrassed to own, games you don’t want to see in your library anymore because you’ve either finished them or don’t want to remember them or you picked them up in a sale ages ago and don’t want to be reminded that you haven’t even launched them yet. Or you could do it just to keep your list of games neat.

(Me, I organised my games into categories years ago, and not seeing the ones I don’t want is already but a click away, but it’s nice to see Valve letting people hide stuff completely. Something I’d like to see some day is the option to categorise games in our libraries automatically according to genre, like the store does.)

To opt into the Steam client beta programme, open Steam and click Steam, Settings and under Beta Participation click Change, and choose Steam Beta Update from the dropdown menu you’ll see. Steam will restart, download some data (around 100MB or so) and restart with its new look. This is what you can expect to see once it restarts:

Steam_Font_After
See the pretty new font and the slight blue glow?
Steam_Font_Before
And that’s what it looked like before.
Steam_LIbrary_After
New Steam Library look.
Steam_Library_Before
Old Steam Library look.
Steam_Main_After
That blue tinge is rather subtle, isn’t it?
Steam_Main_Before
Old (boring) main page.

It’s not just the eye-pleasing stuff that Valve has changed: they’ve also given access to alpha versions of their new Source 2 tools. For those not in the know, Source is Valve’s proprietary game engine, and is what they built Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead and Half-Life 2 on. Since those aren’t new games, it’s high time for a new engine, which the alpha tools have essentially confirmed is a happening thing. Not only does it mean better graphics that use DirectX 11, but also improved sound and network code.

For the moment, however, the new tools are only for the DOTA 2 Workshop, which is an optional download that lets people create and play their own custom DOTA 2 maps. To get them, open Steam (it must be in beta mode) and click on Library, then Tools, then search for DOTA 2 and you’ll see it. Right click on it and click Install Game, and voila you have access to the latest build of Valve’s Source 2 alpha toolset for DOTA 2.

Just bear in mind, though, that all of these changes are only being tested; what makes it into the final version of Valve’s new-look Steam has yet to be finalised, so if there are things you like or don’t like about Steam’s beta looks, be sure to lodge your complaints/pay your compliments on Steam’s beta client feedback forum.

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