Experimental Greenworks plugin

Ashley Yep, followed every step including the renaming to 'nw.exe.' Still not working.

Do you kneed to check if an achievement has been obtained before (with something like localstorage) or is that something automatically handled by Steam/greenworks?

I'm presuming you don't, and can just keep telling an achievement to activate and that it will only care the first time you do it?

Can someone list the exact steps for Mac, as it says for windows in the first post? Thanks!

— - Do you want mac steps from mac or mac steps from windows? From windows is easier for me since i keep everything for uploading to steam there too.

Amazing news! Does this help with missing Steam overlay or is that a separate node-webkit issue?

Edit:

For anyone else OCD about the plugin icons in C2, here's a temporary icon for you until it gets an official one.

Download here

I think it's a separate issue entirely. Overlay works on Mac for me, but not in windows. I've reported to rogerwang here: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/issues/2560 if you want to add any comments there..

— From Windows preferably, either way though, thanks.

Does anyone else have issues getting the Steam Overlay thing to work? I can get the achivement notification pop-up in the bottom right of the screen, but I can only see if it I do the fullscreen-blackbars setting (in which case I only see it pop-up under the game but above the blackbars.

I only see the notification window in the blackbars border area and not ontop of the game? That notification will also stay there in the blackbar forever, it won't minimize/clear.

—

Heres what I do from windows:

• rename the game.app file to nw.app - dont know if this is required, but i do it anyway.
• put steam_appid.txt file with the steam app id as the only contents into the folder with the nw.app
• Double click nw.app - should act as a folder. Navigate to: Contents/Resources/app.nw - this is essentially the same thing as the zip folder on the windows side of things.
• Copy the libsteam_api.dylib from the "osx32" folder of the "sdk/redistributable_bin" from the steam SDK into this folder.
• done! upload to steam as per usual.

Also, — - re: your other question - i just set the achievements not checking if they're already set - i think steam knows if its already 'achieved' it wont notify / unlock again, so no other effort required on your end. Just be sure you're triggering achievements and not accidentally putting them in a loop. It probably wont be obvious but just to be sure you're not sending the achievement if x=1 every tick or something like that.

Thanks! —

I think it's a separate issue entirely. Overlay works on Mac for me, but not in windows. I've reported to rogerwang here: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/issues/2560 if you want to add any comments there..

Thanks, I'll keep an eye on that issue post.

What's interesting is, I just discovered Game Dev Tycoon has working overlay on Windows, so the good news is it is possible somehow with node-webkit. Would love to hear from greenheartgames how they did it and if it translates into something that may be applicable for us as well.

Sorry for the annoying reminder, last time I promise, but their Pledgie is still very low.

If you plan to use Greenworks at some point, or want future updates, don't forget to read this page and maybe thank them : )

https://pledgie.com/campaigns/27218

Good news, everyone!: Screenshot on Steam

I'm incredibly excited about this in combination with the Greenworks plugin. Hopefully there's no side effects to using that argument.

Edit:

OK. Some basic testing done, not run into any problems so far. If anything, using the argument actually seems to increase performance slightly.

I went from reaching 30 fps ~8300 objects without it to 30 fps ~9600 objects with.

Very nice!

Thanks a lot for sharing, McKack!

McKack - I'm a bit dubious about solutions involving tweaking Chromium command line parameters. Since I don't think they're defaults, sometimes they are unmaintained codepaths, and if you run in to bugs in them Google may refuse to fix them since they're not intended to be used in production. They might also just rip out all the code and remove the option at some point, to keep their codebase simpler. Notice how chrome://flags warns you "These experimental features may change, break or disappear at any time. We make absolutely no guarantees about what may happen if you turn one of these experiments on".

The best solution would be to contact Steam and to figure out how to get their overlay to display correctly with the default settings.

Good thing we manually have control over what node-webkit version we use now, then

This is what a Steam rep has to say about it, btw (doesn't sound like they want to change anything on their side just yet):

[quote:cnqap37b]It looks like how they have things setup (maybe a giant canvas or webgl surface) does lead to consistent rendering, so that part actually may be working. Think the actual problem is that they are using the chrome multi-process model and the compositing and gpu rendering are each in a separate process from receiving input. So we inject the overlay hooks into all the processes, but we only find a 3d surface and try to run in the renderer or gpu process but some other process is doing input and we aren’t hooking it.

If they forced the single process model for their webkit/chrome stuff that might make things work without them having to heavily modify the chrome code.

Early on, in Game Dev Tycoon we had the issue that the steam overlay was unresponsive/didn't update properly. We eventually discovered that this happens when no drawing occurs. We never managed to get to the exact details of the issue but a simple workaround was to make that we redraw at least some part of the screen (a tiny canvas is enough) every x times per seconds. (we went with 15). Had absolutely no impact on performance but the steam overlay seemed to work correctly after that.

Not sure if the issues you are seeing are the same but I thought it's worth mentioning.