It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work
It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work
Huh? That is kind of just how window managers work. The game launches so it is on top. It may or may not be exclusive fullscreen these days. The game spawns up another window as part of a social media thing or because you typed
/wiki jennah's feetand then that is on top until you close it. That is, mostly, OS agnostic these days.Big Picture 100% makes you do that if there is a text input. You can choose to use your controller to navigate the keyboard and… that is a love it or hate it. From a quick google, the asus equivalent (as of 2 years ago) is that you can switch your input to desktop mode to use the joysticks as a mouse. And while that is a step down from automagically “just working”… the fact that I know that it is steam+square kinda sums up just how automagic it is with Big Picture.
My understanding, heavily tainted by Dan Ryckert’s stupidity, is that the big problem the xbox decks have is the OS login window. Yes, Microsoft need to get off their fucking asses and make that work consistently. But Valve mostly bypasses that by having a shitty pin login. That is a “I left my SteamOS laptop on my bed and someone from a dorm down the hallway stole all my money” story away from being a debacle.
Background processes can spawn pop-ups, update reminders, notifications, etc. If you listen to Dan and Bakalar’s chat on the Bombcast, even with Bakalar on the proper FSE like he’s supposed to be, you’ll hear examples of the controller inputs just not working the way they’re supposed to, often because something else spawned on top of it. You can hear the same in this GameSpot review of the Xbox Ally X from Tamoor Hussain. And I can tell you from experience, this happens on desktop Linux distros on handhelds as well.
If you shut off most of your other apps (like fucking discord) you don’t have the popups from that.
As for OS level shenanigans? Steam Big Picture alone can’t stop the mess that is KDE (Wayland?) whinging that steam input looks like a remote desktop session as far as inputs are concerned (although I finally found the setting for that after like 55 hours of Pillars 1). SteamOS/Bazzite “solve” that by having a ridiculously stripped down mode… which is not dissimilar from what MS is arguing as their “gaming mode” that will probably still not work but is conceivably that.
To be clear. Fuck ASUS. Their ROG Armory Crate shit is god damned malware.
But for a “new xbox” that is the “PC with gaming mode” that MS have been alluding to over the past few months? That is effectively what Valve are doing with SteamOS (and same with the Bazzite devs).
If you’re fine with just Big Picture Mode rather than what SteamOS or Bazzite are doing at a lower level, more power to you, but for a lot of us, it makes a huge difference in the experience, and it sounds like Microsoft’s FSE hasn’t gotten all the way there yet.
That isn’t the point.
I was more just pointing out that most (all?) of what you said is… not anything special. In fact, the big advantage seems to just be that SteamOS closes your windows for you rather than expecting you to care about going through your systray to see if you actually need banzai buddy running while you play WoW.
When Microsoft can’t do it on their FSE, it certainly feels special. But no, it’s a bit more than deciding to close something or not. Do you have a Steam Deck or a machine running Bazzite? In gaming mode, check out a game that has one of those stupid pre-launch launchers on it, like most of 2K’s games, and note how it handles that differently from a desktop OS.
Yes. I have a Steam Deck and an HTPC running bazzite. I am aware of what it does. I like what it does.
But what you are now describing is just defaulting all windows to launch in fullscreen. The rest is just the natural stack and focusing. if I double click Warframe in desktop and don’t immediately go off to do other stuff while it launches, it defaults to the launcher in focus. Just like if I launch it in big picture mode it defaults to the launcher in focus.
And you continue to assume that the asus xbox deck is the new xbox. Whereas this lines up with what MS have been saying since the last time they pivoted their entire division a few months back: the next xbox is what is going to do this and it is going to be heavily dependent on windows gaming mode. Which isn’t out yet.
I’ll grant you that there’s room to interpret this paragraph another way, but it certainly reads to me as though this is it. It can get improvements between now and then for sure, but I think it’s out.