Though the Steam Overlay offers its users the ability to check their achievements, browse the Internet and chat with other friends on the Steam client without tabbing out of the current game, it's known to cause problems in certain games and with lower-end computers. You can disable the Steam Overlay for all games directly from your Steam client; as of August 2014, it is not possible to disable the Steam Overlay for individual games.
Disabling the Overlay
Some games, such as 'PlanetSide 2,' 'Payday 2,' 'Kerbal Space Program' and 'Borderlands,' suffer from bugs caused by the Steam Overlay. Known issues involving the Steam Overlay include a drop in the game's performance or frequent crashing back to the desktop. Disabling the Steam Overlay will help alleviate this problem. In your Steam client, click 'Steam,' followed by 'Settings.' Navigate to the In-Game tab and uncheck 'Enable Steam Community In-Game.' Click 'OK' to save your changes.
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This is the code for SAM, originally released in 2008, last major release in 2011, and last updated in 2013 (a hotfix).
You kind of redeem them in GFWL, you just launch them through Steam. Also some games have their own steam Achievements which is a completely different system. They're valueless but have direct statistics, and are completely incompatible with any other shiny gold star system.
The code is being made available so that those interested can do as they like with it.
There are some changes to the code since the last closed-source release:
- General code maintenance to bring it into a more modern state.
- Icons have been replaced with ones from the Fugue Icons set.
- Version has been bumped to 7.0.x.x to indicate the open-source release.
Download latest release.
Attribution
Most (if not all) icons are from the Fugue Icons set.