by Eamo
To use this feature you need to do the following.
1. Install Steam. You can download it for free from www.steampowered.com.
2. Add a shortcut to WoW to your steam My Games tab. (Click Games->Add a non-Steam Game to My Games List, then wait for WoW to show up in the Choose Application dialog and add it).
3. Launch WoW through Steam, click the My Games tab and launch WoW. You must launch through here or the steam functionality will not be available in game.
While in game you can now press Shift-Tab to go to the steam menu within WoW, from here click web and it will open a web-browser, just enter the wow-pro url and go to the guide you want. I find if you go to the print friendly version it works much better as you probably wont want to stretch the browser to cover the whole screen.
Voila you can now view a web-browser while playing the game which makes using the guides here incredibly easy. It is also very handy for wowhead, wowwiki pages etc while playing as you can still see your game as you look these up.
Some notes:
The Shift-Tab key combo to bring up the Steam UI causes some issues. Firstly, it is used for a couple of things within WoW, namely switching to previous target and going to previous text edit box (if typing in prices at the AH for example). It also seems to sometimes leave WoW thinking that the shift key is held down after you go back to the game requiring you to tap shift to clear it. Not serious but annoying and would probably drive you nuts if you are tanking. To change the key that is used click File->Settings and change it from the In-Game tab in Steam. I use the Pause/Break key which I never use for anything else and is far away from any keys I do use and it seems to work perfectly).
The browser does seem to freeze every now and then, it seems to work but the view doesn’t update when you scroll up and down. Just close the in-game browser and start it again seems to fix this.
Guide has been updatedThe guide has been updated to reflect the fact you no longer need to opt into the client test beta and should work fine as written again.
Yes they didYeah, the beta is gone. The functionality is builtin to steam now, I will get this updated to reflect that.
steam add-onDid they get rid of that beta? I can’t see it on my list.
That works tooYeah, I sometimes do that and it works fine. I find the steam browser works better at times I may actually want to alt-tab out of WoW and do something else too though. While WoW is running windowed + maximised it is always chewing up CPU time and graphics resources which makes anything else I do at the same time a lot slower.
Just running WoW through steam in normal fullscreen mode seems to make my PC a lot more responsive at times I actually do want to alt-tab out of WoW.
While this is nice, I haveWhile this is nice, I have found that it causes my WoW to be very jumpy, as if the FPS had dropped (though it supposedly hadn’t).
I never thought about doingI never thought about doing that before. If they can get the twitches worked out it could be a pretty cool way of browsing to the guide.
It’s nice, but…It’s nice, but I prefer using the tip that Jame proposed: Change WoW to work in maximized window mode (looks absolutely the same), and Alt+Tab to your browser. With this, the alt-tabbing will work instantly, and if your browser is not maximized- you’ll still see the WoW window in the background 🙂