Get Steam friend list in Meebo, Digsby or Trillian

I always think about this whenever I get messages from my friends from Facebook when I am playing a game. And I always don’t have access to steam and because of this it becomes difficult to chat with friends when they are playing games. And I think it this is the problem with many users of Steam. I think it will be little difficult for steam to make a chat client that will have support for different protocols in Steam. Therefore, I think Steam should just release documentation on the protocol that Steam’s friends use. This will enable people to make plugins for Digsby, Meebo or Trillan etc. and then we will be able to talk with our friends on Steam also when they are playing game. What are your saying about this?

Yes, that will be really a good thing. There are many communities which will be happy to make a plugin for that. I was also searching a way for getting Meebo to interface with the Steam overlay. Therefore, I think this is a really good idea and Steam should do something like this.

I think there must be a way so that we can write a plugin for a messaging client, which is already there, so as to hook into Steam’s “GameOverlayRenderer.dll” and render IM client within the steam overlay. However, it will require a complete deconstruction of “GamOverlayRender.dll” and I don’t have any idea about how that can be done.

Yes, of course it will be very useful to have such thing. I will also like my friend’s list to be on Digsby, Meebo etc. But, I think they will take years to do such things. Also, I will like to add that it will be very successful if they make its essential parts open source. Because, in my knowledge, there are not too many successful chat protocols which are not open source.

I think it may break the end user license agreement and it may also result in triggering VAC. Therefore, I am up for it.

I am not able to understand why you are saying this. As far as I know, game overlay doesn’t have anything to do with VAC. I have joined VAC servers many times, at the time when the overlay didn’t start for me. However, it may break End user license agreement to reverse engineer it, but that is not a thing which is logical to implement.

Steam will never open up its chat protocol, because the same auth system rules the DRM (Digital Rights managements) which protects the game, to which you have rights. Leaving it behind, I will never mind to see support for Widows Live+ETC on steam overlay. I always find it tedious to alt-tab for each of the message, therefore, if it is possible then I normally direct them to Steam, however, that is not the case for most of the time. Actually we need a plug-in interface for the Steam Overlay. I want to say that we already have option to oen the browser and use Digsby at the same time as we are playing a game. But, of course, an extensible UI is required though.