Big Picture "Shell"

[Ar7ific1al]

A sort of startup shell for Big Picture would be awesome. Big Picture would make a great home entertainment system/media center replacement for gamers. Just imagine turning on your TV and powering on your custom-built gaming PC dedicated to Steam's Big Picture, and you are instantly greeted with Steam's Big Picture. Maybe not instantly; it will still have to boot past the bios screen and "select your OS" screen if running multiboot, and it will still have to completely initialize the OS, etc. first, as well. Either way, it would be cool to have Steam automatically start and load up Big Picture mode when you turn on your computer, for those who wish to build a PC dedicated to this purpose.

[Philipp]

Create a shortcut to Steam.exe in Startup Folder. Ad -bigpicture as parameter
Like X:\Games\Steam\Steam.exe -bigpicture

It should theoretically be possible to go even further and replace the shell.
Ad Explorer and other Software u need as non Steam game to your library. Because after this u have no longer access to Windows Startmenu.

Make a System Restore Point before this! If this is wrong u are in serious trouble!

Edit following Registry Value
Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Name: Shell
Type: REG_SZ
Value: Explorer.exe

Replace Exporer.exe with the path to and Steam.exe with -bigpicture as parameter

[ACEp*JCade/Sim7447 #ValCore]

"Ad Explorer and other Software u need as non Steam game to your library. Because after this u have no longer access to Windows Startmenu.

Make a System Restore Point before this! If this is wrong u are in serious trouble!"

Not really. You can always use the "Start New Process" function within task manager to run explorer.exe.

[[ITA] D4rkTee]

In detail, what ui elements belong to explorer.exe?
Would be alt+tab and alt+ctrl+del still usable?

[ACEp*JCade/Sim7447 #ValCore]

Yes.

[月読]

Everything in general would still be usable without explorer opened as your shell, if you want to test it, open your task manager and end the explorer.exe process, that will be what you get. Essentially, the only thing explorer does is provide the desktop, and the taskbar. If you're using purely big picture, you would never see those anyway.

[Connor17]

I've been seeing this requested a lot lately so now I'm kind of scared of developers actually considering it, so if a developer is reading this and they are considering it........Keep it Optional! I use my pc for more then just gaming, but I enjoy that I can now chill with my controller on the couch and not get up when I do want to game. I can't imagine trying to use zbrush or 3ds max with out a tablet and I can't imagine the wasted memory that BP would be hogging if I was to use those programs with BP.

[i00]

I wanted to do this too ... so I made an application that does it the proper way :)
By this I mean you run it ... and it creates a steam Windows account for you automatically. Log into that account to finish setting it up....

... simply run this and follow the instructions

You can download it from this thread:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bigpicture/discussions/1/846941710487298691/

You can run it from there and it will do the rest ... the file that you downloaded is not needed after it has been run

Let me know what you think :)
Kris