[GUIDE] Steam in GameEx

[LB11]

First, I dont mean to take anything away from your solution couslev as its brilliant in its own right. Had I read this post before making this I probably would have just done what you did and look for gameoverlayui.exe. But anyway, I finished my steam game loader. It should work with any steam game or regular pc game including ones that have their own launcher. The principal is similar to couslev's solution except it attempts to use the proper running process instead of steams gameoverlayui.exe. It also is able to click through launchers and stuff like that.

Heres the download:

http://www.mediafire...8v7dgjm7hvz4cvp

Basic instructions are included in the zip file or go to http://wp.me/p10EGr-S. but basically you set it up as if the program was an an emulator and then your game links were roms. That way when you get a new game all you have to do is drop the shortcut steam makes into your rom folder and your good to go.

Just use: ugl.exe "[rompath]\[romfile]" command line.

It will accept lnk, url and exe files.

If your using games with a launcher, it will automatically click the start buttons for you with minimal configuration. Use the included mouse position tool to get the info needed and then just enter it in the ini file.

I also included a tool that will close the Steam Offline popup if you are like me and use steam in offline mode on your htpc. Just put in your startup folder and it will wait 60 seconds for the window to appear and close it if it does. Otherwise it will just close itself after the times up.

I mostly use gamebrowser for my PC games and Gameex for roms, so it has a few other features which gameex has built in already. But everything is configurable from the ini file.

Anyways, if you use it, let me know how it works out for you.

[Tom Speirs]

Here is the file for the above for when it disappears from mediafire

UGL 1.0.zip

[T. Goodchild]

For anyone who wants a few header files to get started with, this 7zip has 54 jpeg pics tagged with the rom name from the url.

PC Steam.7z

[Dakota]

I just started using this UGL config today and I got it working fine except for one thing... if I happen to leave the GameEx menu up idle for about 10 or 15 minutes it randomly tries to launch a Steam game on it's own. Is there a way to turn that off?

It actually doesn't launch the game though. I just get a cmd window that looks like it's trying to launch showing a paused state and press any key to continue. Once I press a key it goes away and GameEx comes back up but it happens again if the GameEx menu stays idle.

[Tom Speirs]

Sounds like you just need to tell that emulator NOT to run in the screensaver. There should be a setting for that in the setup wizard (probably under advanced).

[Dakota]

Thanks for the help... that fixed the issue. It was throwing me off because it was in an emulator I didn't need. I managed to get the games working in the external applications area. But the emulator causing the problem was still active and pointing to the same location where I had UGL setup.

Working fine now....Thanks!

[myonions]

I recently got GameEx, and after setting up all my console emulators, I started looking for a way to integrate my library of Steam games into GameEx. The vast majority of my Steam titles have native controller support, so the ability to browse my Steam collection and start PC games from within GameEx using just my controller is VERY nice. I know there are a few other topics out there, but they are very dated and the solutions aren't as elegant as the one I finally game to, so I thought I would share, and hopefully someone finds this useful!

For starters, you just need to set up Steam as an emulator in GameEx using the Advanced Configuration utility:

• I attached a nice alpha blended Steam logo below that you can simply put in your current (or default) theme's ./MEDIA/LOGOS/ directory. In the emulator configuration you can set the Logo to this filename.
  
• Steam uses .url files as shortcuts to installed games, so set the Rom Filter to *.url
  
• From within steam you can right click a game in the Library and have it 'Create Desktop Shortcut'. Collect all the .url files for the games you want in GameEx from your desktop and place them into a folder somewhere. You can then specify this folder as the ROM Path in the emulator configuration
  
• The shortcuts can be launched directly, so for the Command Line you can just specify "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]"
  
• Set Map Keys to 'No', because you will likely want to press esc in game.
  

With these basic steps complete you can now browse and launch your Steam games from within GameEx, but the difficult part of this process is getting GameEx to recognize when you have quit the launched game so that it can return to the foreground. Using the Advanced Config editor on the second page of the emulator settings will allow you to set process names that GameEx waits to terminate before reappearing. The question is, what process should we use?

The older threads I saw suggested terminating the steam application itself in the Launch After and monitoring steam.exe in the Process Wait section of the Advanced Config editor. I didn't want to do this because I like to keep steam running to communicate with friends, and also because you can launch games much quicker when Steam is already running. Having to stop and restart Steam every time you run a game isn't efficient.

Setting up steam as an emulator with a list of games instead of setting up each Steam game individually is magnitudes more attractive, but it means the emulator config doesn't know what the launched game's executable is, so we can't just wait on that. Fortunately steam has added some features (I think since the most recent forum topic on the subject) that work perfectly for our purposes.

In Steam if you open the properties for a game, you see the option on the first tab to 'Enable Steam Community In-Game'. Enabling this option makes the game have an overlay where you can access your friends list, view CD keys or whatever. The process that provides this overlay starts and stops with each game run, so its a perfect target for monitoring when any launched game has finished. You can find this GameOverlayUI.exe right in the root of your Steam folder.

Unfortunately just specifying this process isn't enough, because the GameOverlayUI process takes a little while to start after launching the Steam game, and GameEx

will immediately check for this process after launching the shortcut .url, and not finding it running (yet) will return to the foreground. So we have to make GameEx wait a while before checking for this process. This can be accomplished by setting the Wait Before Keys value in the emulator configuration. Set it to something like 20000, and GameEx will wait for 20 seconds after running the Command Line even if you don't specify anything under Keys To Send.

So to finish up:

• Using the Advanced Configuration editor, create a new config ini that just specifies GameOverlayUI under Process Wait (I disabled pretty much everything else).
  
• Set Wait Before Keys in the emulator config to something like 20000 (depending on longest time it takes for the Shift+Tab Steam community thing to appear after launching the game).
  

I think this an elegant solution and I REALLY enjoy the results. Quite enjoyable to be able to sit with just my wireless 360 controller and browse and play any console game or Steam game with little to no keyboard/mouse input required. Oh, and for the icing on the cake, you can get the slick thumbnail images Steam uses for each game off their website if you know the appid of the game. If you open the properties of the shortcut .url for each game you'll find the appid at the end of the url. For example Crysis 2's shortcut url is steam://rungameid/99830, where 99830 is the appid for Crysis 2. You can then go to http://cdn.steampowe...9830/header.jpg, and you'll find a slick header image for Crysis 2 that you can convert to a .png and stick in the Snap/Video Path (as specified in the emulator config) with the same filename as the url shortcut to have it appear in GameEx.

Delicious. Thank you GameEx!

EDIT: I noticed the Steam icon below will appear with the bottom half transparent in any GameEx theme that uses color key transparency (which is the majority of them) because the bottom half of the logo is pure black. You can fix this by either using a theme that uses alpha channels (not sure how many are out there) or by increasing the brightness of the png just a hair so there isn't any true black into the logo.

Thanks - this works well for me.

[igotnothing123]

I've been looking for simple way to integrate Steam and GameEX this works well. Thanks for the info! I got the basics, now I just need to start doing snaps for my steam games.