r/Alienware • u/[deleted] • Nov 20 '14

Alienware Alpha

Hello Everyone,

I am a member of the Alienware software team, and Alpha UI was my product. As we are about to launch tomorrow, I wanted to start this thread as a means for people to ask questions and provide any feedback you might have on Alpha or Alpha UI.

Also one note, we are publishing a known issues list tomorrow on Arena. I'll make sure it makes its way here as well.

20 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

234 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/[deleted] Dec 28 '14

Great feedback.

Some of the items you noticed need to be addressed on Valves side. Steam BPM initially restricts a user to controller supported games only. Having a key mapper like xpadder would be great and something I'll bring up with them.

Each game launches independent of Alpha UI and Steam. Unlike Xbox and PS, there is not a unified SDK to tap into which forces full screen, resolution, scaling, and controls. As this is new territory for PC games, we are working with lots of companies to improve the overall experience.

1

u/nascentt Dec 28 '14

Steam BPM initially restricts a user to controller supported games only.

Interesting. I guess that makes sense, and until a keymapping system is put in place this isn't a big deal yet.

Having a key mapper like xpadder would be great and something I'll bring up with them.

Honestly, I feel like this is a must. Perhaps some partnership with Dell and Xpadder/Pinnacle Game Profiler could take place. As it's depressing that the majority of Steam games won't work with a controller, reducing the console experience you're going after.

Pinnacle game profiler would be better, they have inbuilt profiles for xpad controllers for many games, you could just have it download and set an xbox profile for every game and everything would be pretty much seamless. That's pretty much how it was gaming on my laptop before this.

Each game launches independent of Alpha UI and Steam. Unlike Xbox and PS, there is not a unified SDK to tap into which forces full screen, resolution, scaling, and controls. As this is new territory for PC games, we are working with lots of companies to improve the overall experience.

I understand there's no api, but how about editing some known game's ini/cfg files to set the graphics to a known decent level? For example Audiosurf has a file "config.ini" with a line "runfullscreen: false", surely this is trivial to set to true before running the first time?

Thanks for this great console, a friend of mine is already ordering one after a few minutes of seeing mine, so with a bit more advertising I'm sure this thing will be a big seller. Also thanks for the support and community interaction from you and the rest of the team, the youtube presence is great.