Just thought I'd ask, and I haven't had a lot of time to look into this presently, so maybe the fix is simple, but maybe someone would know offhand.
I currently have my main desktop in an office, and I use Steam Remote Play to stream those games to my laptop. It works very well for me, and generally don't have many issues with it (save sometimes the game not opening on first click, but that's minor). My issue comes when I want to try using Big Picture Mode on the client (my laptop).
I'd like to plug it into my tv (well really it'll be a small mini-pc that I don't have right now) that just boots up into Big Picture Mode, then I can play from there. But the Remote Play games don't show up in the "Installed" games tab in the BPM UI. So, anyone got any ideas for that? Again, I haven't been able to dive into it too much, but the cursory glance I've done has told me it doesn't seem to be all too common (or just no one does it).
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Ok so I've found a little way of getting it to work, but I don't think it's ideal personally.
First you make sure "Ready to Play should include streamable titles" is enabled
That's just to make sure streamable games will show up.
Next we go to Big Picture Mode and go to our library
You can hit Filters (or X on controller) to open filters
Then filter by "Ready to Play"
That will then have your Streamable games show up in your "All Games" tab.
The reason I don't love this is that I would want them to show up in the "Installed" tab, along with locally installed options. Yes, I could filter this part to that, but it's just annoying. Why it just doesn't work by default like it does in the desktop Library is another annoyance. I swear Old Big Picture Mode didn't have this problem, but it must've been at least 10 years ago at this point.
Anyway, I'm going to mark this as solved for now. Maybe this helps one other person, or maybe there's a cleaner way. For now, this works for me.
There are significant functional differences between installed and streaming, so I understand why they did this, but I agree that a "ready to play" tab would've been nice.
By functional difference, I mean losing access to a streamed game due to network conditions, a powered off host, a logged out host, someone else playing that game either on the host or on another machine, etc. Calling those installed invites troubleshooting headaches if you're not the one who set it up, don't remember what's local and what's not, and so on. Probably doesn't make you like the situation any better, of course.
(I almost included that Steam Deck is now the primary use case for big picture mode, and not being always on that network invites trouble when you pick up and go only to find your games not installed, but the Deck's Steam client isn't exactly the same, so they could've accommodated it on its own. It already has a tab not on the desktop version after all.)
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I don't disagree, however they treat them as "installed" in the desktop non-BPM, they just change the "Play" button to a "Stream" button. In my eyes they could just translate the same thing over and be in the same predicament, but I do also understand like you said, the other uses for BPM may be causing more changes than I personally like.
That being said, I also found that you can go in the settings, and just click "Connect" on the remote Host PC, and immediately stream that PCs desktop to the remote machine. You used to have to have a hacky workaround for this years back, so it's nice to see that at least you don't have to do anything funky for that to work anymore. So that's a step in the positive.
I'll probably be one of the only ones, but I do feel like I liked the old BPM more. That does NOT mean I like everything it did, but it just felt a bit more straightforward to me. Albeit DEFINITELY uglier. Although I always had hoped Valve would open it up and allow people to create custom themes for it, similar to say a few older consoles (not many, but a couple). I always felt like that was a huge missed opportunity.
I honestly can't argue how the old big picture mode worked or looked--I've ONLY used it more recently. I saw the old one a few times when I entered it by accident and had to find some way to get out of it. My use of the new one is limited to Steam Deck and Windows. Not that it's applicable to you, but did you know a registry hack can change Windows' shell from explorer.exe to steam? Before I dropped Windows completely I had a mini-PC run Steam in big picture without ever actually running a Windows UI. <_<
(...of course this meant that if I needed one I had to launch it from Task Manager...)
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I honestly didn't know that, but I'm also not too surprised lol. It was be a fun little trick for getting the most of a little pc, that's for sure. Avoid as much windows as possible. I like it
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