Steam

I myself was strongly against Steam but Ive found it VERY useful, and now that NS and SvenCOOP will be made official on the list I will like it even more. Its a good idea, a bit dodgy betas but now its great.

Opinions?

The only thing I don't like about it is that you can't use it 'offline' - so now I have two big-arse installations of HL with multiple mods :sad:

I have to keep the old-style HL otherwise I can't test my maps without connecting to the internet (i'm on dail-up).

And is it just me or does it seem to take an age to load?

Ive always been against Steam, ever since i heard about it. Because:

1. Theres 3 puters, 1 on the net and 2 on a lan. The lan ones are not connected to the net, so how can i play games like CS1.6?

2. The net puter has adsl, but that connection has a bandwidth limit per month. Steam would prolly exceed that limit, without me knowing, meaning ill have to pay for extra mb.

Hopefully valve will realise there are ppl like me & Adam out there, who are pretty much unable to use Steam to its full steamyness, and stop trying to force us to use steam. I for one will try to hold out as long as possible, hl 1.1.1.0 is still good enough, and its easier to map w/o steam (or so ive heard).

/me has always been anti steam. I just hate the whole concept of being expected to have broadband, just because I play online.

I'm sure they'll fix the offline map playing for HL2; perhaps even they'll include some kind of "Steam Map Testing" centre type doowhalley?

It would be very handy as the next version of FLF is Steam-only, and the only way I can test my maps is by connecting to the internet just to get Steam to load. Stupid really :sad:

Steam is fine, The only thing left to do tbh is make it offline & add NS..

I think theyre adding offline features to the next mayor update, or so Ive heard.

Ever since VALVe implemented their "VALVe Content Server" #1-9, i am getting kicked from all the games, which is odd.

I have steam but it's a seperate installation so i still have WON and WON will remain until everything is sorted out with steam.

Steam is going to pretty handy for those mods comin' out ...

But that night they released the first installer ... teh horror !

• You almost needed a second CPU to launch it. (System Requirements at that moment: Pentium 1 ghz ... for a couple of ugly green windows that usually don't show up at all ?)
• Converting of the old HL-installation went terribly wrong ("bug" ... don't they test their own software ? This feature was bloody vital in the get-steam-running process ... ), and uninstalling steam would definitely kill your PC, so you had to find a way to get those darn *gcf's.
• All updates were downloaded again ... and again ... and again. No way out, and the "Limit steam bandwith" option didn't work ... and still doesn't, tbh.
• Steam site went down a billion times, and so did the content servers, the auth servers, the status page and the forum.
• Huge resource hog, due to uncountable memory leaks.
• You had to auth about 7 times before you could even try to launch your favourite game.
• Random logouts
• Random crashes
• Took about 20 minutes to get the game window on-screen.
• That "No children registerd error". Wth ?
• "Steam user ticket expired !"
• TFC & CS 1.6 ... teh horror !

But now ... Steam's OK ... but somehow ... I still prefer the WON-system ... connecting and downloading maps still takes waaay too long.

But, positive points at the moment:

• Friends list + Buddy tracker
• Automatic updates
• Steam Skins

Steam is a godsend. Half-Life had been basically broken on this computer, crashing randomly and having major issues with my desktop resolution. Whenever I would try and load a map through the console there would be a 50/50 chance it would glitch and only display 600x400 of the screen in the upper left hand corner. Singleplayer no longer worked...it was bad. But then Steam fixed all of that. :smile: ...plus it fixed the loss of sound upon minimizing bug, which is sweet.

I used Steam. It was relatively stable, but took up huge amounts of space and was very slow. Plus I couldn't access any of the resources in the cache for mapping. It also deleted all of my maps along with my HL directory. So I uninstall it, install HL again....only to find that a damn cache explorer has been released!

The universe hates me.

one of the updates in the most recent release of steam (10th of this month i think), was for mod makers not to need to use the steam.dll in debugging.

i dont have a problem with a connection for testing(touch wood) so i didn't look any deeper into whether the steam update was much help.

valve did say they were going to address the map testing problem when most of the other steam issues were sorted. maybe they're about there now. here's hoping.

Yak_Fighter said:
Steam is a godsend. Half-Life had been basically broken on this computer, crashing randomly and having major issues with my desktop resolution. Whenever I would try and load a map through the console there would be a 50/50 chance it would glitch and only display 600x400 of the screen in the upper left hand corner. Singleplayer no longer worked...it was bad. But then Steam fixed all of that. :smile: ...plus it fixed the loss of sound upon minimizing bug, which is sweet.

worked the other way 'round here :razz: