PLAY ON THE MOVE

Get up and running with Remotr

WE’RE NOT SHORT OF OPTIONS when it comes to streaming games. We’ve talked plenty in these pages about the immensely useful Steam In-Home Streaming, we’ve covered the likes of GameShow and XSplit, which send your games up to Twitch and other online streaming services, and we’ve even looked at ways you can beam console games through your network and play them on your PC. Well, add Remotr to the list. It’s immensely flexible, offering up client apps for smartphones, tablets, and other Windows PCs, happily streaming over cell phone networks if you have the data allocation for it, and it’s incredibly simple to set up and use.

Let’s preface this a little, though, with a couple of caveats. Point one: Don’t expect ultra performance or lag-free gaming. Remotr’s solution is quick and very well coded, but it’s not going to be suitable for the twitchiest games, particularly if you’re streaming outside of your local network. It also scales down the quality of streaming (though not the quality of the source game) to meet your network specifications, so if you’re obsessed with uncompressed graphical fidelity, you might be best staying at your home PC. 1 GET THE SERVER Remotr works on a client/server model, which means you first need to install its server app on your gaming PC. Head to http:// remotrapp.com, scroll down until you find the relevant option [ Image A], and download the Windows Streamer app. Run it to install Remotr, open up the app, and click the “New Account” button to set up an account. You may wish to sign up with a burner email account from the likes of http://guerrillamail.com for a couple of reasons: Perhaps you’re concerned about getting too much mail from Remotr or its friends (given that there’s no option to refuse it), and, if you want to play multiplayer games, everyone’s going to need to sign in with the same details. 2 ADD A GAME Remotr’s initial lineup may be a little sparse. It attempts to find games it knows on your hard drive and add them to its interface, and you’ll also see a big ad for the affiliated Vortex streaming service, which offers cloud-hosted gaming PCs for a fee. If the game you want to play isn’t listed, click “Add Game” in the bottom-left corner, and dig through your hard drive [ Image B] to find its executable. Steam games are generally added to the grid automatically, but if they’re not, they’re usually found in “Program Files (x86)\ Steam\steamapps\common.” Clicking games in this interface doesn’t do anything, but their presence means they’re available to any client apps. 3 GET THE CLIENT There are two varieties of client available: mobile and desktop. The desktop client is relatively easy, in that you simply need to download and install it, log in with the details we set earlier, and you should see your server active and ready. If you don’t, or if the client doesn’t seem to be able to connect, make sure your PC is awake—use “Power Options” in the Windows Control Panel to stop it sleeping, if need be—and try bringing the server app into the foreground. You may need to log into Steam, too.

Installing on mobile is just as straightforward. Find Remotr in your device’s app store—it’s available for both iOS and Android—and get the app installed. Log in, and you’ll see your server; tap it, select a game, and (after you’ve watched an ad) you should be up and running. If you hit any snags, head to your server, and check the graphics settings for individual games, to ensure they’re running in windowed or borderless full-screen mode. In general, proper full-screen mode doesn’t play nicely with any kind of streaming or screen capture, and Remotr is no exception. 4 CONFIGURE CONTROLS Playing on desktop is no trouble, as your controls are translated entirely. If you have a mouse and

keyboard, they work on a PC client exactly as they do on your server machine. Plug in a gamepad, and that should work perfectly, too. On mobile, though, things are a bit different. By default, Remotr uses your phone’s screen as a touchpad, translating swipes into mouse movement, and taps into left clicks. It may also, in some cases, presume you’d like to use a gamepad with your target game, and stick an overlay on your screen [ Image C]. This can be configured, and any additional controls added to the overlay, by tapping the Remotr icon in the top-right, and selecting “Edit Controls.” Thankfully, given that PC games are rarely built to have massive thumbs all over them, you’re also free to use Bluetooth controllers or, on Android, wired gamepads with a USB OTG connector. These can be configured in the “Settings” section [ Image D] . 5 BETTER SETTINGS The best results, naturally, come with higher network bandwidth. It’s possible to stream over Wi-Fi, though results are unpredictable, and you may experience some input or sound lag to go with the degraded picture. Hooking your server up to your router via Ethernet is the first step, and using a similar wired client is the second, though this obviously isn’t possible if you’re blasting games to a mobile device.

Check the “Settings” screen of the server app, too, for the switch that enables you to activate GPU acceleration. This aids the stream encoding by allowing your GPU to chip in a little processing time, but obviously strips a few cycles away from the game you’re trying to run. When streaming, this isn’t a huge problem, although you may need to dial back the rendering settings of your games to compensate.

If you’re using a high DPI display, we suggest you drop your screen resolution before streaming, for obvious reasons. There’s a switch in the “Settings” screen to automatically drop the resolution when using mobile devices—sending 4K to a 5-inch screen doesn’t make a huge amount of sense anyway—but no way to do this automatically when streaming to a PC client.