Couple of interesting things in the latest Steam client beta.
1. LAN peer downloading.
There's some initial work there on what looks like a LAN downloading feature. There's now an extra field in the message sent to other Steam clients on the local network (previously used for in-home streaming):
optional uint32 download_lan_peer_group = 16;
Two new console variables and their default values:
@nDownloadLANChunkCacheSizeMB = "128"
@nDownloadLANPeerGroup = "0"
2. Game details page moving to HTML
Currently the game details in the library detail view are rendered by Steam's VGUI system. The layout of that page is specified by the file resource/steamrootdialog_gamespage_details.layout. In the beta, there's a new file steamrootdialog_gamespage_details2.layout which replaces all the VGUI controls with a single web view. There's a new file of localisation strings public/steamhtml_english.txt which contains strings like: "appdetails_tab_friends" "FRIENDS"
My guess would be that the Steam client will now locally generate HTML pages to replace the existing VGUI; if they were generated on the server, there'd be no need to keep the localisation strings in the client. They'd also have to be locally generated so that they'll work properly in offline mode.
I'm a bit puzzled as to what the point of doing this is, though.[
(Thanks to the SteamDB guys for making it easy to look at upcoming stuff in Steam:
https://github.com/SteamDatabase/SteamTracking/commit/b726f2036a9a83a14b7e02796366fee6b683ab32 )