Steam Deck @sopuli.xyz vala @lemmy.world 4 mo. ago

I'm worried that the next stable client update will break remote play.

Remote play is already semi-broken on stable. In the sense that the video renders super dark unless you disable hardware decoding.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1246

The beta and preview channels are even worse. The remote play session will just never load at all.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/1/3757725080156008363/?l=czech

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10461

It seems like this is slipping through the cracks. I'm making this post to raise some awareness on the issue. Not sure what we can really do though.

Edit: God damn it valve.

22 comments

Use sunshine plus moonlight, it's a much better solution. You can make it even better on deck with Moondeck plugin.

I've had issues with remote play for years and it never gets any better nor do they really add any new features to it.
- I'm planning to give that system a shot but this is more a "WTF is going on with Valve's QA process?" kind of thing.
- Annoying thing about moonlight and sunshine is that you can't use your existing controller configs easily.
  
  If you set up the moondeck decky plugin you can use your configurations without any hassle.
- So its not just me? My deck hard resets trying to stream to my HTPC, and has been for a while now, can't tell if its their software causing the crash, or I have a hardware issue and need to RMA
  
  Definitely not just you. Steam remote play just displays a green screen for me whenever I connect. I can't get it to work without compromising quality.
- @Jz5678910 How is sunshine and moonlight a better solution? There is no NAT traversal, no remote install, and you have to manually add all of your games.
  
  Is there some magic moonlight version that fixes this that I am unaware of?
  
  For one, the streaming actually works, that's an immediate win. HDR is also present. Image quality is better at the same bitrate.
  
  But to your other points,
  
  Remote install I was not aware that steam remote play could do, that's a pretty nice feature! Streaming big picture mode and choosing a game to download is easy enough though.
  
  Steam big picture is there by default, and your whole steam library is there. You can add games manually too, but personally I use big picture for my steam library and playnite for everything else. Plus the games that were scanned through GeForce experience were automatically imported, not sure if that'll be the case going forward though. But they do have an import script.
  
  Edit: not sure how it appears to others, on my device it just shows a picture and not the text I input, it's my phone on cellular showing you can connect outside the same LAN.
it worked amazing the first time i tried back at release it was astonishing. it has only gotten more buggy since.
- Yeah it used to work really great. Almost flawlessly.
  
  I'm using moonlight now and it works really well once you have it set up. Still really hoping this doesn't make it into stable though.
Have you raised a bug report?
- Exists on GH. They clearly don't care though...
Your fears were right, looks like this just got pushed to stable unfortunately.

Edit: They've pushed an update to fix this
- Nice! Anyone confirmed that this works?
  
  I was able to start a stream session and it did come up, although it kept reporting connectivity quality issues and it seemed like it was streaming at really low-bandwidth.
  
  However, I normally stream via Sunshine/Moonlight and haven't tried the native Steam version in a while since it normally doesn't work well for me, so I think that's something on my end rather than it being a bug (and the fact that it displayed the game to me indicates its no longer this bug, since it initialized and was at regular brightness).
I don’t think they care about this feature. Presumably, they don’t see enough people using it to justify properly maintaining it, much less improving it.

As others have said, Moonlight + Sunshine works much better. Add Moonlight as a non-Steam game on your Deck and set it to launch Big Picture directly on your host. That’s my setup and it’s pretty seamless. Ever since the Big Picture update for the desktop client, I forget I’m even streaming sometimes because the interface is the same.
- To add to this, there's also a decky plugin called MoonDeck which, once set up, allows you to launch a stream for any game from the game itself rather than from the moonlight client. Really useful if you're someone that likes to customize your controller configuration for each game.
  
  Is there still an advantage to doing it this way after the desktop Big Picture update? Is it different than using the controller configuration menu on the host PC?
I don’t think it can get any worse (it’s practically unusable)

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