No doubt many of you Steam gamers have noticed the new feature available on Steam:  In-Home Steaming - The ability to stream games between computers on your home network, a feature that I've been waiting for.  Sure it has been available for a while (through Steam Beta opt in), but it just wasn't viable until now.  But now we can play our Steam libraries remotely, provided your home network isn't a stinker.  Also, those of us who choose a non-Windows OS can finally play all of our Steam games without the need for often messy compatibility layer software (Wine, PlayOnLinux/PlayOnMac, etc.).  A dream come true.  There are some bugs, but the overall goal of the project has certainly realized.





So I won't go into too deep into the details, as there are currently plenty of sources that go over how to set up the service.  There are three steps that I followed:  Have a fast home network (either partially wired or all "N"), make to to opt-in both computers into the Steam beta, and make sure the two computers are in the same subnet.  That is all.

The Steam In-Home Streaming service works good, but initially I had hoped to also get some sort of remote desktop support as well.  Why waste all that wonderful potential on just your Steam games?  After all, my whole interest in this project was to effectively create a mobile gaming platform in my house, a la streaming Windows machine secreted away somewhere and Linux client laptop out in the open.  I wasn't totally surprised to see the lack of remote desktop, so I decided to start thinking around the box.


My first thought was to try the "add a non-Steam game" option.  My guinea pigs were I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (downloaded GoG version) and Maelstrom (installed game that requires a disc in the optical drive).  I add the games and went to my client computer, a HP Elitebook 6930p running Linux Mint 17.  IHNMaIMS appears to start, but fails and drops me back to the Mint desktop.  Something to do with DOSbox?  Not sure.  Next is Maelstrom.  Maelstrom immediately goes to a black screen and make me wait for about three minutes.  Hmm.  Something familiar about that mouse icon...  Well, the game ended up working, although it started skipping music on a loading screen while "slow network, decode" popped up on the bottom left part of the screen.  Due to my network setup, then.  A little research shows that using non-steam games in this manner are hit or miss (more than often miss, I imagine).  Time for another approach.

After that experiment I got an idea.  I fired up Maelstrom again, waited for it to get to the title screen, and hit "ctrl+shift+esc."  Sure enough, it brought up the Task Manager as well as the desktop of host computer.  Scaled to my screen, as well.  Very interesting.  The "slow network" text was flashing again, but my kids are also watching Paw Patrol on the iMac in the next room.  I must admit, seeing and then navigating the desktop had me quite excited.  I wonder...


I decided to try again, this time using an actual Steam game, specifically Fez.  I fired up the game and at the title screen evoked the Task Manager again.  This time I started IHNMaIMS from Program Files and it worked!  I played for about ten minutes (man, that is a messed up game) and ended it. 


Next came Maelstrom, but started getting the "slow network" message again.  I could plainly hear the music as well as move the cursor, but couldn't see anything outside of the mouse cursor.  Again, this could be indicative of my network topography (which is strange).  I would like to do some more tests soon, this time with the host computer hooked up to a drop instead of where it is now (it only has about half the available bandwidth of the other computers).  I've actually thinking of designing it in a way that the host and client computer are on a separate subnet altogether from the rest of the network, but we will see.  I imagine that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks for reading!

Permalink | Comments [1] | Digg This Article | Tweet