Here is what I have missed over the last few weeks:

• Half-Life 2 Named #1 game of all time
• Resistance and Liberation - Open Beta Test
• Dystopia - Effects videos
• Operation Black Mesa - May Media Release
• May Media Release
• PVK II - Update Released
• Firearms - 10th Birthday
• The Battle Grounds - Rolplaying time :)
• Engineer Update is coming soon
• Previous PC Owners of Civilization IV Games on Steam Get Mac Version
• Portal Update Released
• Team Fortress 2 Update Released
• Steam client update released
• Steam for the Mac Released
• Source SDK Update Released
• Counter-Strike: Source Update Now in Beta

The new Steam UI is here, which enhances the way you already buy and play games, adding more info about the things that matter — getting games, playing them with friends, and staying current in the gaming world.

If you haven't already updated, you can use the "Check for Steam client updates" option on the "File" menu to automatically update Steam to the new release. If you don't have Steam installed, download it today.

Read on to see the changes we've made.

Major features:

• Complete overhaul of Steam client UI design to improve discoverability of features and to better expose all the information related to games in your library
• Complete overhaul of in-game overlay UI design to create a richer in-game experience exposing context sensitive information related to the game you are currently playing
• New game details view, presenting a detailed view of all the information for a single game in your library
• New grid view, presenting a graphical view of your game library
• New news page in the store/client/overlay that aggregates Valve related news sites, official community groups, and third-party gaming news feeds
• New downloads view in the client, making it easier to track your progress downloading new games or game updates
• New Steam store design, including more integrated community features, improved recommendations, and improved video and screenshots viewing (and much more!)

Store details:

• New Steam store/community integration — see what your friends have been buying and playing as you browse the store
• Improved store layout, genre navigation, and genre pages, including more robust navigation per category
• Added Wishlists for tracking what games you want, and to see what games your friends want
• Improved game detail pages, including quick link to demos, inline display of higher resolution game trailers, improved screenshot browser, and improved game recommendations
• New game-specific video page, containing all of a game's trailers in one place, now in higher resolution Flash format
• Improved discoverability of sales and discounts, including prominent shortcuts and consistent store-wide visual presentation for price cuts
• New quick-info tooltips on store home page and genre pages which allow users to read about games before navigating to detail pages
• New search filtering options- search for packs or DLC, easier to use filters for searching by price and metascore, and sort by release date

Client feature details:

View of your most recently achieved achievements and likely next achievements in the client game details view and in the in-game overlay
• View of friends currently playing a game as well as all friends who sometimes play a game in the per-game details view
• View of related game news in the client game details view and in the in-game overlay
• Clock in the in-game overlay (!)
• User customizable categories assignable per-game
• Tracking of last played time for games to show in the client library views
• Sort your games by last date played
• Library list view displays larger graphic, and a new column displaying a game's Steam Cloud state
• New invites section in the friends list UI allowing you to accept or decline invites directly without going to your community control panel
• Cloud support for many non-machine specific local settings such as favorite servers
• Implemented new DirectWrite based font rendering for the client and in-game overlay on Windows 7 or Vista with both SP2 and the "Platform Update" installed. This offers improved pairwise kerning for text layout as well as better anti-aliasing of text on supported platforms.
• Display of total played time in the client game details view and the in-game overlay
• Type to jump support in the games list, grid, and game details views
• Better Steam cloud conflict resolution support, with the ability for users to choose how to resolve conflicts between machines
• Improved forward/backward navigation in the client UI, acting across various different view types (e.g., games list, to community, back to games list)
• New style and layout system for Steam's VGUI UI toolkit, enabling much more complicated flowing layouts. Skins will need major overhauls to be compatible with the new client, but will also have much more power and flexibility available to them via the new .style and .layout files used in the new VGUI code.
• Backup/restore wizard
• Community: all official game avatars in one place, linked from your edit profile page
• New outer glow effect supported when rendering text in VGUI
• Support for alpha blending of gradients and text in VGUI
• Support for many new layout and placement commands in VGUI
• Support for native drop shadow effect on primary Steam windows on Vista and Windows 7
• Support for Windows 7 snapping and shaking mouse commands
• Added per-game disable in game properties dialog for the in-game overlay
• Added most recently used games launch actions to tray icon in addition to Win7 jumplist
• Improved maximize support for Steam dialogs and added maximize icon to top level windows
• New sound effects for many notifications/actions
• Added auto-recovery of the in-game overlay so it will restart and resume functioning if the process crashes while a game is running

Bug fixes:

Improved reliability of auto-login to store and community when used in the Steam client
• Improved truncation of long text strings in many places
• Fixed the various UI states and settings to persist across client restart more reliably
• Fixed being unable to reliably delete previously added non-Steam shortcuts from your games list
• Fixed forward/backwards navigation on Community tab getting stuck on redirects
• Many small performance and memory usage improvements
• Improved sorting consistency between views
• Fixed hit areas on friend panel down-arrow affordances to make clicking on them more reliable
• You can now remove a blocked friend without having to unblock the friend first
• Fixed game preload to correctly download language-specific content
• Fixed a case where Steam windows could draw slightly grayed out while alt-tabbed out of a game or running over RDP
• Fixed a case where inviting an additional user to a single user chat could force acceptance of a previous voice chat request
• Fixed to display correct achievement localization when Steam and game language differ
• Fixed the overlay occasionally not restoring input on hide to some games utilizing buffered direct input
• Improved link detection in chat dialogs and other RichText controls
• Fixed the in-game overlay being overly bright in some D3D10/11 games using sRGB backbuffers
• Improved reliability of steam:// url handler registration
• Fixed tooltips sometimes not showing up on multi-monitor setups

General improvements:

Now using a WebKit based rendering engine for the client and in-game overlay web browsing components (replacing Internet Explorer)
• Improved speed of in-game overlay web browser
• Improved search functionality on the Steam news page
• Web pages which use confrm() or alert() calls in javascript no longer break the in-game overlay web browser

March 8, 2010 - Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

"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."

"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "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. 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."

"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. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."

Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for 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, Portal 2 Project Lead. "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."

Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately. Interested developers should contact Jason Holtman at jasonh@valvesoftware.com. 

About Steam

The leading online service for games and digital entertainment, Steam delivers new releases and online services to over 25 million gamers around the world. For more information, please visit www.steampowered.com

About Steamworks

The Steamworks suite of publishing and development tools include product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology, and more. The features and services available in Steamworks are offered free of charge and may be used for both electronic and tangible versions of games. For more information, please visit www.steampowered.com/steamworks

There has been a lot of speculation in the last few days on if Steam is going to OSX. There definitely seems to be some evidence to support this. According to Steam Friends there are over 100 games on Steam that have native mac support. Valve recently released a beta program for a new version of steam which uses WebKit instead of Internet Explorer. This is a rather bold move coming from a studio whose founders used to work for Microsoft.

Here is what has been found so far:

• OSX Window Graphics
• OSX Tray Icon
• AN OSX.menu file in the resources/menus/ folder

More information will follow as it is verified.

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Fixed not always decrypting a game on launch

• Really fixed offline mode not always working

• Fixed cases where a game would stop downloading for no reason
  

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Fixed issue with scroll bars on HTML pages not showing after javascript DOM modification changed page height


• Fixed issue where Steam can not be closed after playing Section 8


• Fixed Champions Online keys not always being available when Steam first starts

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Fixed retail installers not properly installing

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Added contact email account verification by request and on new account creation


• Improved account security with verified contact email to prevent phishing


• Added mod support for Killing Floor


• Fixed memory leak


• Added 'officers-only chat' mode to group chats

Updates to Team Fortress 2 and Day of Defeat: Source have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Day of Defeat: Source

• Fixed an engine crash


Team Fortress 2

• Updated PL_Hoodoo. Changes from community mapmaker Tim Johnson:


• "Added a balcony at 2-1 that I've rotated and cleaned up so it's a much better point, it attracts less sentry spam but is still holdable. 2-2 has a bit more breathing room and the one way route between BLU/RED spawn in stage 3 has gone and in its place some stairs up to the second level accessible from BLU's side."


• Added "tf_ctf_bonus_time" ConVar to set the CritBoost bonus time for capturing the intelligence (0 to disable it)


• Added "tf_arena_first_blood" ConVar to toggle the first blood feature in Arena mode (0 to disable it)


• Added missing snowpuff particles for DX8 players


• Fixed rocket jumping


• Fixed sticky bomb attachment to props. They will now only ignore the saws in sawmill


• Fixed Scouts going into reference pose in double jumps


• Fixed the Ubersaw not displaying team colors


• Fixed Spies disguised as RED Scouts not cloaking properly


• Removed two more text messages for TF_FLAGTYPE_ATTACK_DEFEND CTF game mode

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