Official Enhanced Steam Discussion Thread

jshackles

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Since the Steam Deals thread was being cluttered by talk of the Enhanced Steam extension for Google Chrome and Firefox, I decided to start a new thread in the PC Games Discussion forum to keep everyone updated on new developments, provide links to downloads, and more.

The official site of this plugin can be found at http://www.EnhancedSteam.com.

Download Links

Features

Known Bugs

  • Let me know!

Using the "Dev" Version in Chrome

This thread is for users to ask questions, (hopefully I have the answers!) as well as provide feedback, report bugs, and suggest new features!

 
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Awesome! Might I suggest adding a link to this thread under your cool looking Enhanced Steam banner? And I don't know if you plan to have a forum on the official site, but if not maybe this could become the official Enhanced Steam thread on the internets?
 
[quote name='CheapLikeAFox']Awesome! Might I suggest adding a link to this thread under your cool looking Enhanced Steam banner? And I don't know if you plan to have a forum on the official site, but if not maybe this could become the official Enhanced Steam thread on the internets?[/QUOTE]

Good idea! I probably won't be hosting my own forum, so for now - this is it! And thanks for the idea of making this it's own thread!
 
I have to say, I have been way to busy to be on steam this past week, but the few free moments I've had to look at this forum, your add on has excited me. Can't wait to get a chance to try it out for a bit.
 
I admit I never come into the PC Games Discussion forum because it's usually dead, but I'll try to check here regularly now.
 
[quote name='Motoki']I admit I never come into the PC Games Discussion forum because it's usually dead, but I'll try to check here regularly now.[/QUOTE]

Yeah I was the same way, but with all of the Enhanced Steam talk going on in the Steam deals thread, I could see why people might be upset that we would constantly be discussing this "non-deal".

Also I'm pretty sure it's easy to "subscribe" to this thread and see it somewhere or get email alerts or something. :whistle2:k
 
Yeah, I think you can subscribe by just posting. Or if that doesn't work it should be under the "Thread Tools" thing at the top right.

And I agree the PC section tends to be pretty dead. I have tried at times to be active in posting here, but the threads do not get a lot of traction.
 
[quote name='jshackles']Also I'm pretty sure it's easy to "subscribe" to this thread and see it somewhere or get email alerts or something. :whistle2:k[/QUOTE]

In addition to the "Subscribe to this Thread" under "Thread Tools", if you go to the User CP and select "List Subscriptions", you can select the threads you want and at the bottom use the "Selected Threads" drop down to Update Notification Type. If this is redundant info, than never mind me...
 
I'll be using this thread and the OP as my kind of "scratchpad" for feature ideas as well. Since Enhanced Steam now integrates with EnhancedSteam.com, we can do some really cool and unique things that weren't possible before (like DLC Categories).

Anyway, thanks to all for their support and ideas for this project!
 
Love it so far, though the reality is that without a big sale in progress, I'm only checking Steam once a day and often not bothering to click beyond the first page of the storefront. As such, I'm not really getting to see the extension in action.

Definitely served me well while buying Sleeping Dogs DLC during that one crazy half hour, though!
 
[quote name='DPsycho']Love it so far, though the reality is that without a big sale in progress, I'm only checking Steam once a day and often not bothering to click beyond the first page of the storefront. As such, I'm not really getting to see the extension in action.

Definitely served me well while buying Sleeping Dogs DLC during that one crazy half hour, though![/QUOTE]

Yeah that was a crazy sale! I didn't have ANY DLC for Sleeping Dogs at the time, so I just did an "Add all to cart" and removed the two that weren't on sale. :)

[quote name='mitch079']Great add on bro, thanks for putting this together.[/QUOTE]

No problem! I'm hoping to have v 1.9 up sometime soon that will replace the price history link to SteamGameSales.com and replace it with a custom call to EnhancedSteam.com
 
Does the Steam Client use your default browser?
More to the point, does this enhanced steam thing have any effect if I'm viewing the store through the Steam client rather than on the steam website via my "normal" browser (something I never do)?
 
Okay version 1.9 is live on Google and should be updating automatically. Hopefully, this will be the last time that the permissions on the plugin change at all. The new permissions remove www.SteamGameSales.com completely, so it just access store.steampowered.com, steamcommunity.com, and www.enhancedsteam.com

[quote name='crystalklear64']Does the Steam Client use your default browser?
More to the point, does this enhanced steam thing have any effect if I'm viewing the store through the Steam client rather than on the steam website via my "normal" browser (something I never do)?[/QUOTE]

Unfortunately, no it does not. Although the Steam client uses a Webkit based browser (like Chrome), the browser portion isn't open to any kind of user modification.
 
This is such an awesome extension for Chrome. Nice work jshackles! Makes sale time shopping on Steam much easier. You are just an unstoppable force at this point with the constant improvements. Thanks!
 
Found a bug

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I'm not sure if its possible but i want a way to hide software.
 
[quote name='viiral']Found a bug

TH89z.png

I'm not sure if its possible but i want a way to hide software.[/QUOTE]

Yeah I'm working on the international currencies bug. ;) I'm hoping it'll be fixed in version 2.0 which is coming soon.

As for hiding software, do you want to hide ALL software? Like, the tab at the top, search results, all that?
 
Will those "Chrome only" features get enabled on Firefox at a certain point? Or it can't happen?
 
[quote name='Zmaj']Will those "Chrome only" features get enabled on Firefox at a certain point? Or it can't happen?[/QUOTE]

It can happen, and I'm working on it. Almost all of the "Chrome only" features at this point have to do with Cross Domain scripting. This means that while you're on the store.steampowered.com page (like, the game's page) it has to pull information from another domain, such as steamcommunity.com or enhancedsteam.com, for things like sales history, metacritic scores, etc.

In Chrome, the permissions of the plugin allow for this. In Firefox addons, this seems to be a much more complicated problem. Once I figure it out, I should be able to put all of the current "Chrome only" features into the Firefox plugin. :D
 
Found an oddity in the Chrome version. When clicking through to the pages for the Free DLC items for Sanctum, the Price History ends up returning this: "/W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http:/"

Might need to do an internal check to see whether the item has a price before trying to grab history data.
 
[quote name='DPsycho']Found an oddity in the Chrome version. When clicking through to the pages for the Free DLC items for Sanctum, the Price History ends up returning this: "/W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http:/"

Might need to do an internal check to see whether the item has a price before trying to grab history data.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the heads up! I think it should be fixed now. (Nice when it's on the web-service side, and not in the extension code - makes it way easier and faster to update!)
 
I feel like this may have already been requested, but is an Empty Cart button feasible? It's a hassle to remove a cart full of DLC if you change your mind or accidentally click the add all button.
 
[quote name='Genocidal']I feel like this may have already been requested, but is an Empty Cart button feasible? It's a hassle to remove a cart full of DLC if you change your mind or accidentally click the add all button.[/QUOTE]

Actually, that's a great idea and hasn't been asked yet. :D I'll look into it!
 
[quote name='jshackles']Yeah I'm working on the international currencies bug. ;) I'm hoping it'll be fixed in version 2.0 which is coming soon.

As for hiding software, do you want to hide ALL software? Like, the tab at the top, search results, all that?[/QUOTE]

Like the official DLC filter, just have a button that hides the software from the front page. i dont mind the software tab it just annoying to see software on the new games list.
 
[quote name='viiral']Like the official DLC filter, just have a button that hides the software from the front page. i dont mind the software tab it just annoying to see software on the new games list.[/QUOTE]

I'll see what I can do, but the DLC filter is a function of their own Javascript, so I'm not sure if I'll be albe to override that or not. More on this soon.

Additionally, I've been working on the "International Currencies" bug. When I first developed this plugin, I wasn't exactly expecting people from around the world to use it! I think I've got all the code I need now to make this work with all of the currencies that Steam currently supports:

ACcDX.png
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That's pretty awesome with the currencies. I would also love an empty cart button. Would make turning away from those impulse purchases a little easier.
 
[quote name='CheapLikeAFox']That's pretty awesome with the currencies. I would also love an empty cart button. Would make turning away from those impulse purchases a little easier.[/QUOTE]

Been looking into adding an "Empty Cart" button, but it wont' be as easy as I originally thought. It seems that they don't have any back-end code to support this. Why? I guess they don't want you emptying your cart! So it looks like the "remove from cart" links are singular javascript form post calls. So any sort of "Empty Cart" button will likely require you to refresh the page x number of times, where x = the number of items in your cart.

:cry:

I'll keep looking into it though!
 
Okay so I've finally got a working "Empty Cart" button going. Rather than manipulating the code on Steam's back end, I've simply overwrote the the local browser cookie variable. So you press "Empty Cart" and BAM it goes away (it's still there on Steam's side, but considered "abandoned").

Additionally, "featured games" now highlight correctly.

Additionally, I'll be releasing the extension's source code as open source soon. More on this later!
 
How possible would it be to add some restrictions/options to searches? Because while I like searching for just games. I would love to search for everything but trailers, demos, etc. Also games not appearing outside of a certain price range or not appearing in the search results if I already own them.

Not sure if any of it is possible, but just a suggestion if your thinking what else you could try to implement.
 
[quote name='Kaltic']How possible would it be to add some restrictions/options to searches? Because while I like searching for just games. I would love to search for everything but trailers, demos, etc. Also games not appearing outside of a certain price range or not appearing in the search results if I already own them.

Not sure if any of it is possible, but just a suggestion if your thinking what else you could try to implement.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look at it. I think filtering the search results would end up with them merely hidden, meaning that if you own all of the games on that search result page it would simply be a blank page. And if you owned most, it would just be a short page of results (even if there was a page 2, etc).

Interesting idea though, especially with the price filtering. I'll keep you guys updated on what I find out. :cool:
 
I certainly appreciate all the effort poured into ES thus far, kudos.

Just thinking out loud here, but speaking of searches, would it be possible to implement a sort by largest discount similar to what GamersGate does? I know SteamGameSales does that, but SGS doesn't always seem up to date or just doesn't update some items sometimes (plus it's slow). It's just a handy feature to have available, especially during large sales where some items do not get featured.
 
[quote name='Neuro5i5']I certainly appreciate all the effort poured into ES thus far, kudos.

Just thinking out loud here, but speaking of searches, would it be possible to implement a sort by largest discount similar to what GamersGate does? I know SteamGameSales does that, but SGS doesn't always seem up to date or just doesn't update some items sometimes (plus it's slow). It's just a handy feature to have available, especially during large sales where some items do not get featured.[/QUOTE]

I thought I saw somewhere where someone was going to start a petition to get me hired at Valve. Short of that, there isn't too much that can be done with search results and how they're sorted. To do so would require the script to pull every page of results, run through the logic (such as "Sort by highest discount") then reassemble the results.

Obviously, this isn't the ideal way to handle it. It would probably take less than an hour to implement if I had access to their back-end code (see the "Valve please hire" me part), as I've done this same thing for other projects I've worked on in the past.

So while I might be able to do a few limited things with their search functionality, I'm not expecting much unfortunately.
 
Are you sure you really want to work under GabeN just for access to his back-end? :shock:

Seriously though, I wasn't aware that would require such access. Shows my lack of knowledge and why you're the better suited to this task. Heck, I've been banging my head trying to turn my game managing Excel ss into a game/purchase/key/gift managing/tracking/sorting/lookup Access db. :wall:
 
Meh, Steam needs to switch to HTML5 with some kind of efficiently scalable SQL back end. It would make the website run so much smoother and have less issues. I don't even want to imagine how out of date/old their shit is.
 
[quote name='Draekon']Meh, Steam needs to switch to HTML5 with some kind of efficiently scalable SQL back end. It would make the website run so much smoother and have less issues. I don't even want to imagine how out of date/old their shit is.[/QUOTE]

Pretty much this. As best I can tell, their code was probably constructed around 2006-2007 and probably hasn't been updated much since, other than to add on new features like the community pages, etc.

I could probably write a whole other thread on: "If I worked at Valve I would do...."
 
[quote name='jshackles']Pretty much this. As best I can tell, their code was probably constructed around 2006-2007 and probably hasn't been updated much since, other than to add on new features like the community pages, etc.

I could probably write a whole other thread on: "If I worked at Valve I would do...."[/QUOTE]

Do it. The worst that could happen is that you waste your time complaining. Better cases include them listening and implementing changes, or them hiring you to do it
 
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