Railworks America

Steam is now promoting Steam Machines, specified computers to play Steam games, much like XBOX's and other consoles.

Pros: small and tidy,
Cons: Steam user accounts allow only one game to be played on-line, no good for families with a number of kids with their own Machines sharing this one account.

Interesting development, but wether it will displace established consoles remains to be seen.

On a sideline, would Railworks stand a chance in such a competitive market, or is it an uncool game for old sods?

If I wanted to play games on my TV I'd use my Playstation, I hardly ever use my Playstation. I don't have a 4k TV yet but PC blows Playstation away.

I've been reading about the Steam Machines the last few months. I think they only play popular games that have been ported over to run on Linux.
You can run Wine but it takes a lot of fooling with settings to get a DX game to run halfway decent on Wine in Linux. It also taxes the CPU to the max compared to running the program in it's native operating system environment.

Ericmopar wrote:I've been reading about the Steam Machines the last few months. I think they only play popular games that have been ported over to run on Linux.
You can run Wine but it takes a lot of fooling with settings to get a DX game to run halfway decent on Wine in Linux. It also taxes the CPU to the max compared to running the program in it's native operating system environment.

I haven't progressed that far into the wondrous world of Steam Machines. So Linux and OpenGL it is, no Windows, no fees to MS or any other intellectual proprietor?
Theoretically, this means the OS is open source, but most of the games will be closed source and dependent on the Internet for authentication and/or a valid Steam account.
Anyway, hardly a chance of Railworks ever appearing on this platform, unless the UE4 can be easily ported to the Steam Machine. Even less is the chance because of the commitment of DTG to support Microsoft's XBOX for the next incarnation of Railworks/TS 2017.

That's the nice thing about UE4. Dovetail can make a Linux version without too much hassle if they choose. UE4 supports developing for all platforms except Nintendo's out of the box.

Not all of Steam OS is open source as it is part of Steam. Steam OS supports in-home streaming, so you are able to "play" Windows games on a Steam Machine. Your Windows PC would still be doing the work, but you would be able to play on your TV without having to connect your Windows PC to the TV.

If all you want to do is stream games to your TV, the Steam Link (http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/) is probably a better (and cheaper) choice.