Steam updated, adds screen capture and improved voice chat

Steam

Valve updated the Steam client yesterday with quite a few new features and improvements. First off it’s now possible to take screenshots while in any game that uses the Steam Overlay. After pressing F12 you can upload screenshots to your Steam profile (or anywhere you like). Valve has allocated a generous 1Gb of data storage per user for screen captures alone.

One of the biggest improvements is a complete upgrade to the Steam voice chat. Take a look below at some of the changes made.

Voice quality improvements

Changed microphone voice input from 11 kHz to 16 kHz
Changed voice output from 8 kHz to 16 kHz
Fixed the settings-dialog microphone test to correctly re-init the calibration client if the active voice device changes
Reduced voice prefix buffer size from 200 to 100 ms, but increased trailing from 200 to 400 ms – reduces latency when transitioning from silence to active voice, but still should keep it from sounding like chat is cutting out mid-sentence
Increased thresholds for voice activity detection, making it less sensitive
Increased amount of gain applied to voice
Changed disconnect message when a friend ends a voice call to ‘ has ended the call’
Windows: Fixed microphone to reinitialize correctly if Windows signals that a device in the system has changed
Windows: Changed voice output device for Steam to be the default communication device

They’ve also beefed up password security by adding a password strength meter, and prompting users to change their password after a generic temp password is issued. For a list of all the changes head on over to the news post.