

- Steam desktop activator movie#
- Steam desktop activator 720p#
- Steam desktop activator update#
- Steam desktop activator full#
- Steam desktop activator software#

While, for Vive-specific games, physical space is a bit of an issue for anyone with a small house, the opposite is true when it comes to playing sat-down games.
Steam desktop activator movie#
I want to play games like this: the intimacy of a monitor but the scale of a movie theatre. Making up for this somewhat is that, yeah, it's massive and cinematic.
Steam desktop activator 720p#
Basically, though, the effect is akin to running a game made for 720p minimum on a standard definition TV. we see more titles with resizable user interfaces - then it becomes more manageable. games with this kind of usage in mind - i.e.
Steam desktop activator software#
It's not necessarily fair to blame the Vive or SteamVR for this, of course: it's running software it wasn't really designed for. The Tides Of Numenera beta was unplayable because of this, for instance, but Hitman's relatively low-text and biggish font approach got around it. Games with scaleable UI options get around this to some degree, as does fiddling with the overall display resolution, but it's a lottery.

Until now, I'd been exclusively been playing VR-specific games on the Vive, whose menus and dialogue boxes were either dispensed with entirely or displayed in big, chunky fonts.įor a game not made with VR in mind, its standard-size text may well cross the line into unreadable. It's no different in desktop theater: even the sides of the virtual screen have jaggies, you could count the pixels if you had a couple of hours free, and then once a game loads there are brand new issues to contend with. As I said in my extensive breakdown of what it's like to use one in your home, the real-world experience is akin to pushing your face right up against a 720p screen, so it's jagged edges and screendoor effect galore despite an on-paper res of 2560x1200. The Vive's limited resolution hampers it a little, though. It's big enough, though, and it looks good. Pitching it relatively safe for now only makes sense. After all, we're simply not accustomed to panning our gaze across a big screen when playing a game. It's pretty obvious that, for the current default, they've settled on the largest size at which you can still take in the whole screen without having to turn your head too much. I'd say it's a 'respectable independent cinema-sized screen', not IMAX or anything like that, but I'm sure resizing options will arrive later. If a given game does work, you'll soon find yourself sat or stood within a reasonably-sized screening room, at the front of which is a large screen. I'm not 100% clear whether Theater is using Broadcasting's on-the-fly encoding tech or if it's just a comparison, but a bit more on that later. The rule of thumb is that, if it works with Steam Broadcasting, it'll work in theatre. Not everything works, I should say right off the bat, but most things I've tried do in some capacity. Find any old game, rather than the specific VR-enabled ones, and the UI will display 'Play In Theatre' rather than simply Play. You enter Desktop Theatre by firing up SteamVR, strapping on your facebox then launching a game from the specially-modified version of Steam Big Picture that acts as SteamVR's default menu system. That's partly because it's theoretically epic, partly because the jury's still out on the walky-wavy VR experiments and partly because Desktop Theatre might mean I never need to find the money and desk-space for one of those ultra-wide, curved, high-refresh monitors I spent half of last year unhappily price-checking.ĭesktop Theater isn't the only tool aiming to offer this kind of functionality on the coming wave of VR headsets, but it is the first official one and also the only one that, so far, is integrated into Steam itself rather than requiring external jiggery-pokery. Something I've almost been more excited about than full-on 3D, 360, sensory-overload VR is playing games and watching movies on a virtual giant screen. The bad news: I'm now more certain than ever that the hardware needs another generation or two before it's truly ready for the world.
Steam desktop activator update#
Turns out that Valve snuck out a beta update to Steam over the weekend, part of which was an early version of Desktop Theater.
Steam desktop activator full#
We already knew that Valve was planning something called Steam Desktop Theater, in which non-VR games could be used within their Vive headset (and, indeed, any other headsets which end up supporting the SteamVR APIs), but I wasn't expecting to see it until the first giant boxes full of matte-black hardware arrived at pre-orderers' houses.
