Steam Soon to Allow Users to Specify Hard Drives for Game Installs

[Tharic-Nar]

Ever have a friend, that during your big announcement, can't shut up about their own happenings? Well, Valve is kind of like that friend this week. While Intel, Apple, and other major players are in San Francisco unveiling their latest innovations this week, Valve keeps on giving us reason to talk about it. We've already covered Steam's "Big Picture" mode and the first Greenlight-approved games to hit the service, so what possibly could we be writing about now?

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

 

[madmat]

That's a feature they've needed to implement for a while now.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

While this is a very long overdue addition, there is still one CRITICAL thing missing from Steam. Proper download management.

You can not limit download or upload speeds. In fact, you have no control over upload at all (apart from disabling cloud saves), so there is no way to limit Steam while it downloads so you can do other things online (apart from pause and forget to unpause later). Downloads being paused while a game is active is infuriating. I know you can work around it with an alt-tab and resume, but even that is unreliable. (and I thought this was 'fixed' a while ago). Finally, there is the small issue of downloading multiple things - there is no queue system either, it's all or nothing.

No small number of people also have these things called usage caps (myself included), so auto-updating games are a pain to deal with, especially when there are a lot of games installed and the downloads are hundreds of MB each. Those few extra MB on a cap is the difference between a normal connection, or being charged $1 per GB or speeds cut to 128kbps.

The thing is, technically, choosing an install location is such a trivial thing, why did it take Valve 8 years to figure it out? Download management is not so trivial however, but come on... 8 years and nothing?

Yes, I just turned a positive (new feature) into a negative. I'm good at that.

 

[Rob Williams]

I couldn't agree more on all those points, Thar. What's driven me nuts is when I go to play a SP game and Steam would halt the current DLs, requiring me to alt-tab to fix it. Just a pain in the ass. And for a program that relies entirely on downloading content, why it doesn't have more robust control is beyond me.

 

[Kayden]

I totally agree about the download management. I was just about to make the same comment about it.

In fact, they have said it will come but they have been promising the multiple install locations for a lot longer and considering the limited funtionallity of the Steam client, I believe we will see it soon. I think there are just more technical issues to over come then what they expected. I hope to see at the same time the ability to verify the integrity of the game cache and still be able chat!

 

[madmat]

While this is a very long overdue addition, there is still one CRITICAL thing missing from Steam. Proper download management.

You can not limit download or upload speeds. In fact, you have no control over upload at all (apart from disabling cloud saves), so there is no way to limit Steam while it downloads so you can do other things online (apart from pause and forget to unpause later). Downloads being paused while a game is active is infuriating. I know you can work around it with an alt-tab and resume, but even that is unreliable. (and I thought this was 'fixed' a while ago). Finally, there is the small issue of downloading multiple things - there is no queue system either, it's all or nothing.

No small number of people also have these things called usage caps (myself included), so auto-updating games are a pain to deal with, especially when there are a lot of games installed and the downloads are hundreds of MB each. Those few extra MB on a cap is the difference between a normal connection, or being charged $1 per GB or speeds cut to 128kbps.

The thing is, technically, choosing an install location is such a trivial thing, why did it take Valve 8 years to figure it out? Download management is not so trivial however, but come on... 8 years and nothing?

Yes, I just turned a positive (new feature) into a negative. I'm good at that.

Auto update is changeable. Right click the game in question, left click properties and in the properties box go to the update tab and choose "Do not automatically update this game". Yeah, they're turned on by default but you're not stuck with it.

 

[Kayden]

Auto update is changeable. Right click the game in question, left click properties and in the properties box go to the update tab and choose "Do not automatically update this game". Yeah, they're turned on by default but you're not stuck with it.

That is debatable. I know for Skyrim I told it not to auto update because of Surround support, and the thing would still update even when I told it not to. This happened to several people at WSGF and I know I've heard about it happening with TF2 as well, my bro has a download cap and he had set TF2 to never update and it still happened.

 

[madmat]

That is debatable. I know for Skyrim I told it not to auto update because of Surround support, and the thing would still update even when I told it not to. This happened to several people at WSGF and I know I've heard about it happening with TF2 as well, my bro has a download cap and he had set TF2 to never update and it still happened.

Odd. I haven't run into that with Skyrim but I don't have TF2 on here so I can't comment.

Has anyone complained to Steam about it not doing as it is supposed to?

 

[Tharic-Nar]

The problem with that method is you have to disable it on EVERY single game... there is no global option for it, and yes, Steam forum is littered with complaints about the feature not working. There are some updates that seem to bypass the setting completely. Requiring people to do it on a per game basis is a bit silly.

 

[Rob Williams]

I've had games auto-update that I set to not to as well. It's plagued me on the benchmarking PCs.