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What GUI toolkit does Valve use for Steam? Is it Qt? I am interested in using the same toolkit for a project.

Jake Wilson
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4 Answers4

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According to Valve itself:

"VGUI is Valve's proprietary Graphical User Interface. All Source and Steam applications use VGUI to draw windows, dialogs and menus. It also handles localization: the displaying of text in the user's preferred language. "

That's interesting, maybe if you guys do some research you can have it working in your programming language. I'll download the SDK to see if I can make it work with Java :)

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VGUI_Documentation

leinadster
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  • So it's basically a complete, cross-platform UI rendering engine? Does it use OpenGL for drawing? – Violet Giraffe Mar 18 '14 at 08:48
  • Is this for drawing everything like the friends list, game browser, etc.? – Ari Seyhun Feb 14 '18 at 20:13
  • Want to add that things changed. Seems like the 'base' interface of Steam (i.e. library, menu, settings, game servers) are using VGUI but "Friends & chat" is now built using web-technologies using Chromium. Also want to clarify that Store and everything profile-related is basically a webpage inside Steam. – user0103 Jun 23 '19 at 09:19
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Having had experience with the Source engine I know that Valve have an library called VGUI which they use for all their games and many of their tools (when in game the library sits on top of the Source renderer, when in tools it sits on top of the Windows API I believe). Although I can’t answer the question with 100% certainty I suspect that this is what they use for Steam as well (I seem to recall some Steam updates that mentioned VGUI) – I would be surprised if the new beta uses a different library.

Even if it is not using VGUI, given what I know of Valve I would think they will have written something else entirely in-house.

So, it is (almost certainly) proprietary and highly unlikely to ever be available for third party use (unless you have the funds to buy a Source engine license).

0

Steam only runs on Windows and predates QT for Windows, so I'd have to guess something else.

Since Steam has had the same GUI since 2003, chances are it uses some variant of MFC. It also uses an embedded Internet Explorer web browser for its Store and Community sections.

However, I can't give any guarantees about what the version currently in Beta uses. It looks quite a bit different and includs the Webkit rendering engine instead of using IE. It may use Webkit for everything rather than drawing their own GUIs.

Powerlord
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  • I tried the beta, it is pretty sick, glad they are ditching IE (cause they are possibly adding Mac support)! – Dr Hydralisk Mar 05 '10 at 20:59
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    This information is out of date now. Steam is now released on Mac, and coming very soon on Linux. – Warren P Jun 14 '10 at 14:49
  • Wow. How things change. I switched over to gaming purely on Linux using Steam back in 2013 and have never looked back. I just bought Monster Hunter World this weekend and was enjoying that. I've enjoyed the Portals, Borderlands 2, Deus X, X-COM, Shadows of Mordor, the new Tomb Raiders... It seems like the distant past when I couldn't play a game because it didn't work on Linux. – labyrinth Nov 16 '22 at 03:22
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Does this answer the question?

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/02/25/0640233/Steam-UI-Update-Beta-Drops-IE-Rendering-For-WebKit

SF.
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    Sorry no, that only says that they replaced the embedded web rendering engine in Steam to use Webkit instead of IE. – Jake Wilson Mar 09 '10 at 20:56
  • The Steam store is now webkit based. Nothing in the Source engine uses Webkit, unless the in-game-community plugins do. – Warren P Jun 14 '10 at 14:50