Using steams ingame chat overlay

Although some might argue against steam it does have some useful features. One of them is its ingame chat overlay. Basically in any game you launch from steam (it doesn’t have to be bought from steam itself, you can as I have done with ETQW add it into your steam list after installing it from the DVD) you can add the ‘steam chat overlay’.

If you want a bit of a run down of how the ‘steam overlay’ works checkout http://www.tech2.com/india/topstuff/pc-gaming/steam-community-beta-explo...

What your doing by running ETQW through steam is basically giving ETQW chat client features. Although at the moment ETQW supports instant messaging, it’s pretty annoying having to jump totally out of a game to read a message. With the messaging features in steams chat overlay we can communicate pretty effectively when were in different servers and if we wish run voice over the chat client itself (By-passing etqw). I’m not sure if any IPX members are interested in trying this out, who knows we may find it totally not useful…worth a shot I say.

Another neat feature steam launched was the steam ‘community’. An area where you could create a community group. I’ve nabbed IPX there own portion of this community group right here

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/ipx – I’ve made the group private so we don’t get randoms adding themselves. I’m more than happy to give admin powers etc to Fuzz and other senior IPX members so they can add updates to etc if we decide to use it (again…we might choose not too..thats fine as well:))

Finally in trying to convince you some more:)…My favourite feature of this would be our ability to communicate to IPX members from windows straight into the game they are playing. As steam is basically a chat client in some regard, you can view what game a member is playing and send them a message straight from windows. All they have to do is quickly activate the steam chat overlay from inside the game (hitting ‘shift+tab’ and communicate straight back to you. No more needing to alt-tab out of the game (and often crashing it..).

Anyway I’m happy to start adding IPX members into my steam list who want to try this out.

To reaffirm…you DO NOT have to buy or pay for anything extra to get steam. All you need to do is download the client

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=getsteamnow (ignore the recommended 1 gig of free hard drive space it suggests…thats only if you were to start downloading games etc through steam. because all your doing is adding a shortcut to ETQW through steam, the client itself in total shouldn’t be more than 10 megs)

And then add ETQW into the game list by
1)Load up steam
2)Go to “Games – Add a non-steam game to my game list”
3)Wait for steam to load up the list and select ETQW
4)Load up ETQW through the steam client
5)Once in-game press “shift+TAB” and presto the steam ingame chat overlay appears.

Considering this is a public msg board perhaps we might just private message each other through the forum, email or IRC to get each other’s steam ID’s ?