Valve Will Delay Some Steam Auto-Updates To Preserve Bandwidth (theverge.com) 32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve announced today that it won't automatically update games in customers' libraries as regularly as before to help preserve bandwidth during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Starting this week, Valve says Steam will only immediately auto-update games you've played in the last three days. Otherwise, Valve says Steam will be spreading out updates over several days. Steam had already been scheduling game updates for "the next off-peak local time period," according to Valve, though if you want to update a game manually, you can still initiate that yourself. Valve already lets you schedule auto-update windows and even self-throttle your connection to Steam if you want to additionally optimize how much of your bandwidth Steam uses at any given time.
Always disliked that feature anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
The default should be to not auto-update a game unless it's been played in the past 24 hours.
I have games I go back to from time to time and having them update when I haven't played in a year is just a silly, abusive waste of bandwidth.
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So you know what the best idea would be - a clever bit of software that looks at the difference between the 1st 50GB file and the updated 50GB file and then patches your old file(s) with the differences since it's highly unlikely that every art asset has been redrawn so the real difference might easily only be a few megabytes or even less.
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So you know what the best idea would be - a clever bit of software that looks at the difference between the 1st 50GB file and the updated 50GB file and then patches your old file(s) with the differences since it's highly unlikely that every art asset has been redrawn so the real difference might easily only be a few megabytes or even less.
Wow, I wonder why nobody's thought of this before /s. The problem is the same reason why you have a 50GB file in the first place instead of a simple asset file hierarchy. You want them in some compressed, encrypted, obfuscated format with mangeled loading code to make altering the game hard. This means that if you try to do a naive patching of the file it won't work, it'll look completely different until the assets are loaded into memory in their native form. So you are dependent on that toolkit's support
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Forgot about DRM, the obvious solution would be to stop sticking everything in one big file, no reason why code and art can't be separated and broken into many smaller files before being encrypted. Developers seem to always go to the extremes, half of them stick everything in giant files and the other half go nuts and their games consist of literally tens of thousands of small files.
One thing I find baffling is slow loading times combined with low CPU usage and also drive bandwidth being no-where near satur
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It's more efficient to use one big file than many little files, especially on Windows where the creation/update on files is ex
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You can change it if you go to Properties for the game, then Updates tab, and change to "Only update this game when I launch it." You can't stop updates altogether, but you can stop automatic updates of games you don't play.
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You can disable autoupdates, the real problem is that Steam doesn't let you play games that aren't up to date. Right now you can get around that by disconnecting from the internet and playing in offline mode, which proves that there's no technical reason to do so. If Valve was serious about conserving bandwith they should stop forcing updates altogether.
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My point is: In most cases the game publisher is more interested in you running the latest version than Valve migh
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Well at least they're not being paid to shill about it...
I mean, this is a solved problem? (Score:2)
http://lancache.net/docs/conta... [lancache.net]
There's a Docker container that can do this; any ISP that wants to can nudge the needle in an afternoon. Why Valve has to change its behavior isn't clear to me.
Not good enough (Score:3)
This is the same Valve that completely ignores Windows settings for whether you're on a metered connection or not. It has been suggested to them that they use the Windows method to avoid big downloads whilst the bandwidth is being metered but they do nothing.
The company with the customer service department from hell can eat a bag of dicks, this is just a poor PR stunt so far as I am concerned.
Go one step further (Score:2)
Why auto-update at all? Valve force auto-updates on all their games. It shouldn't be up to them to force. It should be up to individual games to do a check if their updates are required for game play (think online games playing a common version), not Valve ensuring you always have "the latest".
2 games in my library are currently completely non-functional. Beat Saber and Cities Skylines. Both games have had updates recently. Both games now have a big list of broken mods applied for which I need to wait for s
The solution is simple (Score:1)
Steam and game auto updates are annoying (Score:2)
Other than putting steam into offline mode, I couldn't figure out how to prevent this behavior.
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Run steam when you don't want to play a game.
Yeah, it's a shitty solution, but it works. If I'm going away and want to play a game on my tablet, I'll switch the tablet on the day before, update Windows, update Steam, let Steam update the handful of games I have installed.
Even if it's just once every 3-4 days it'll still help you get up and running more quickly when you do want to play.
Just PR (Score:1)
The internet is fine! The capacity has not been reached. The backbones are not overwhelmed.
The whole throttling (especially by Akamai, who IS a CDN) is just PR.
The only thing that could be overwhelmed are the ISPs, who can have their own throttling in place if they want to.
For example, https://www.de-cix.net/en/news... [de-cix.net]
Here's a wild and crazy idea (Score:2)
Certain publishers follow this shitty practice more than others (e.g. Frontier Developments) but it is always annoying.
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That is a wild and crazy idea. It's not Steam's job to tell publishers what they deliver.
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While I agree with you in principal, I do think it is Valve's responsibility, as the company with which I have a direct relationship for their service, to provide some controls to prevent abusive behavior. Large swaths of data downloads for DLC(that I didn't purchase) for games I have not played in a year isn't a good use of bandwidth or storage.
Sure, bandwidth and storage have increased a lot, and to some it's a magical unlimited thing we can flood without concern. But that's not reality, and some folks
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Valve has a hard enough time keeping the big publishers on the platform, they can't dictate much.
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I bought some tables for Pinball Arcade but the thing insisted in downloading all available tables as soon as they were released although I hadn't bought any of them.That's a really stupid thing to do but I guess the developers are just lazy or incompetent.
Give us an Updates Feed (Score:1)
I'd be happy if most of my games didn't auto-update, as long as we have a feed of which games _do_ have updates available. Heck, the main reason I have so many old games installed is so I can see when they come out with a random update a few years later. The Activity feed is making progress, but it's not there yet.