Steam Client Beta update for March 11, 2016, out now

Mar 12, 2016 03:25 GMT  ·  By

On March 12, 2016, Valve pushed a new Beta build of its Steam Client to public Beta testers marked as "Steam Client Beta update for March 11," bringing a significant amount of updates to the Steam Controller device.

Today's Steam Client Beta build is the first one after the launch of the major stable Steam Client update on March 8, 2016, about which we wrote an in-depth article, and those who want to install it on either Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, need to switch to using the Beta channel under Settings -> Account -> Beta Participation.

Why is the Steam Client Beta update for March 11 newsworthy? Because there are lots of enhancements for Steam Controller devices, such as the ability to add user-definable action sets for legacy games, as well as extra action sets that include the user's set of bindings.

"Action sets can be added/deleted/named as appropriate and selected via a binding. Note that unlike mode-shifts, action sets completely replace all currently active bindings, and can have their own mode shifts and so forth," stated the Valve developers in today's announcement.

Valve engineers also added "New Controller Action" binding types, the "Change Action Set Binding" option for setting the action set to a specified one or to the next action set, along with the "Show Keyboard Binding" functionality for toggling the on-screen keyboard.

Furthermore, it's now possible to take screenshots using the new "Take Screenshot Binding" option. Several issues reported by Steam Controller users have been addressed as well in this Beta release of the Steam Client (for details check the changelog attached at the end of the article), and the hard coded desktop keyboard shortcuts have been replaced with controller action binding in the default config.

More SteamVR improvements

Besides all the cool new Steam Controller features listed above, the Steam Client Beta update for March 11 adds several improvements and new features to SteamVR. Among these, we can mention support for automatically launching the feature immediately after it was updated, and its addition to the jump list of options.

Moreover, the SteamVR tool can now be found in the Library view of the Steam Client, under the SteamVR section, and the scrolling has been greatly improved when using touchpads. Other than that, Valve devs fixed an issue with the URL entry in the Big Picture mode for the VR keyboard and added emoticons for the Friends view in Big Picture.

Steam Client Beta For March 11