It's been a while since I've tried Steam Chat, so we had a close look.
First of all: Steam chat = great idea.
Putting chat into the application that you use to communicate and play with friends with - sensible. Implementation is not so great though.
The voice chat is flaky. It works when there's very stable connections, but everyone's voice is pitched... lower. I've tried this on two systems running different operating systems in two countries. That would be Germany and the United States.
The WebRTC connection does cope well with packet loss of any kind. Connections will break and never recover. Most of the time we just cannot hear each other. Element Call (different product, but also uses WebRTC) suffers from the same problem. Discord (also WebRTC) does not.
Often the calls only work one-way. With me being audible to the other people, but not the other way around.
Trying to join a voice channel in a web-browser via the steamcommunity slash chat page will not work while the Steam Client is open. I instantly get kicked out of the voice channel.
Trying to join a voice channel in the client while you have a web-browser open on any steam chat page, will not work either. Joining might succeed but nobody may be able to hear you.
And finally, when creating a group chat (that is not associated with a Steam Community Group) there is no way to upload group images.
I've seen threads from a few years ago on the Steam forums reported all of the above issues, some going as far back as 2018.
It's evident that people don't really use the chat.
"Just use Discord" is not a valid reply, this is about Steam and not Discord.
I just wish things would work.
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Nuclide/FreeHL game tat:
- Gunman weapons still need more work!
- Team Fortress support is laughable in the weapons department, core ents
needs more testing (2fort works perfectly last time I tried)
- Poke646 is practically on halt until the other two are done
Counter-Strike still has animation oddities I need to look at with Spoike.
It's related to how we compose the animation blends in-engine. The basebone
field manipulation crap kinda sucks. You shoot a gun while crouch and your legs
which are _NOT_ supposed to move, bob back and forth. What's going on there?