Steam Integration Questions

[beckmd]

I'm still pretty new to GameEx, but I've had good success getting things setup. I'm looking for some direction on accomplishing the following two items regarding Steam integration:

• Filtering games in the Steam list
• Displaying a custom control panel pic before launching Steam game (like with MAME)

For the filtering, I would like to be able to filter out games that don't work well with arcade controls (Tankstick) without uninstalling them. Is there something in GameEx or Steam that would let me accomplish this? If there's no good way to filter, are there any good workarounds?

Regarding the control panel display, I've had good success using the wrappers and AutoHotkey to remap keys on a per-game basis, but there's a lot of variability in how the controls are setup, so I would like to display a control panel before launching the game (for guests, mostly). Is there someway to use the wrappers or the "Launch Before" configuration to delay the launching of the Steam game and show a per-game control panel pic?

What is the difference between Steam wrappers and wrappers2 directories?

Thanks kindly for the help. I really like everything GameEx does to make a good arcade cabinet experience.

[nullPointer]

Hi beckmd and Welcome to the GameEx forums!

I would like to be able to filter out games that don't work well with arcade controls (Tankstick) without uninstalling them. Is there something in GameEx or Steam that would let me accomplish this? If there's no good way to filter, are there any good workarounds?

At the current time GameEx does not support filtering of the the Steam Games list. What you have installed locally through the Steam client is what will be displayed in your list. There might be a workaround, but ugh ... it ain't pretty. In your \GameEx\DATA\ directory you will find a file called steamdata.ini. That's basically the file that is used to build your Steam game list. You could manually edit that file and then set the file permissions as read only, which would prevent GameEx from writing to the file. But ... it also won't allow GameEx to recognize newly installed games, and if you ever did install a new game you wanted to display, you would need to open up the file permissions again at which point GameEx would rewrite the entire game list again. I really recommend against this solution. Filtering the Steam List is actually a pretty popular feature request, and I imagine if you hang tight it may be supported in the future.

Regarding the control panel display, I've had good success using the wrappers and AutoHotkey to remap keys on a per-game basis, but there's a lot of variability in how the controls are setup, so I would like to display a control panel before launching the game (for guests, mostly). Is there someway to use the wrappers or the "Launch Before" configuration to delay the launching of the Steam game and show a per-game control panel pic?

Once again this is not something that's natively supported out of the box. I've been looking into options for this as well, particularly for those games that require the use of Xpadder and the like. It might be worth checking out Adultery's Game Info plugin for this purpose. It's mainly targeted at dual/multi monitor setups, but I think it could be a terrific solution to this issue.

What is the difference between Steam wrappers and wrappers2 directories?

The standard 'wrappers' directory is intended for use with the official Steam wrappers included with GameEx (optional component during installation). The 'wrappers2' directory is intended to house your own custom wrappers. If you put a custom wrapper in the 'wrappers' directory there is a danger that it might be overwritten at some point by GameEx. Wrappers2 is intended to solve this problem.