Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Steam
Any player of Half-Life based games must, by now, have heard of Steam. The old World Opponent Network or 'WON' servers were shut down last month and the only way to play games such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat is now through Valve Software's program. Pay a visit to the website (www.steampowered.com) and you can read the list of features, but they only give a brief insight. Even when you install it and create an account, there is still little clue as to what is really going on behind those beguiling green frames. You might, in a world filled with spyware, be justified in wondering exactly what it was that you were downloading to your computer.
The first question to be asked is why? Why take WON, a perfectly functional system, and replace it with another? Why force the suspicious public to install an addition program to their game? "A while back", as Valve founder Gabe Newell explains, "we were starting to have a lot of success with our games on the internet.
[But] the scale at which were developing was starting to give us a bunch of problems...we were releasing lots of content so whenever you installed one of our games it took forever with all the updating and patching and we came to the conclusion that we needed a better way of doing that". Seem fair? It isn't entirely that innocuous. Cheating and piracy abounded on the WON system and there was no realistic way for Valve to stop it. Anybody could enter in a valid CD Key (popular pirated keys were eventually blacklisted on the WON servers, but replacements were never hard to come by) and play to their heart's content. And cheating – well, with the intensely competitive play of Half-Life's greatest mod Counter-Strike, cheating was always going to be a problem. A large part of Steam is the increased security against both pirate copies of the games and online cheats. Although, of course, Steam also does what Newell describes. Not only is it a matter of just clicking a game to get the latest version, it's physically impossible to play any Steam game online without the latest patches, now sensibly known as 'updates', already downloaded and applied, entirely automatically. Valve are even offering to extend this service to the more popular community mods, and gamers can anticipate Natural Selection and Sven Co-op appearing for download and update in the near future.
"There are a couple of different pieces in Steam," Newell continues, "and probably the most important is the Distributed File System. It's job is to make sure content is delivered on a timely basis...so while I'm running through the first ten megabytes of content it's downloading everything that comes next". With games such as Half-Life 2 sizing up at around three and a half gigabytes, this content streaming functionality will prove to be vital for those opting to download the game.
Which brings us on to another feature: purchasing through Steam. When you buy a Valve game in a shop, most of the money goes to Vivendi Universal, the series' publishers, and the store. When you buy a game through Steam it all goes straight to Valve, cutting out both the middle men in one fell swoop. But you don't get a CD or box: you enter you credit card details into the program, the rights to the game are instantly added to your account (at least until your credit card is verified) and you then download the content from the internet and play. To avoid network congestion, new games are 'preloaded': a locked version of the game is downloaded and unlocked on the day of release. This allows content to be distributed over a longer period – so Half-Life 2's graphical assets began preloading on the 17th August, and as we write levels and code have yet to be made available. Login anywhere in the world (as long as you're not logged in elsewhere) and you can play your games almost immediately regardless of whether your host owns them or not. By separating the content from the ability to play, Valve deal another blow to piracy.
However, prices are steep. $35 on Steam for Half-Life and it's free mods, except Counter-Strike (which comes with Condition Zero, the other game package currently available) and including Opposing Force, when you could walk into a store and buy the same plus Counter-Strike and the second single-player expansion Blue Shift for as little as a fiver, entering the CD Key into Steam for the same effect as an online purchase. Presumably the prices are such because Valve do not want to compete, anywhere in the world – but if you can find a place selling Half-Life for that much, do give us a call.
When you buy through Steam you also skirt around one of the less popular aspects of the program: limiting one CD key to one account. Those who shared their copy of the game (which is in fact illegal) with friends soon found that they had missed out on using their key and needed to buy a new copy of the game. Many angry customers complained before things settled down, and the situation wasn't helped by Vivendi's accidental reprinting of a large batch of keys. Luckily a quick phone call to the group is all that is required to set the matter straight.
The other features of Steam are arguably smaller. Friends, an instant-messaging client, shows you what games your, well, friends are playing, the server they are playing on, and lets you join them. The biggest advantage it has over competitors such as X-Fire is it's ability to work in-game but although improvements have been made it still suffers from frequent downtime. The built-in server browser is a huge improvement over the old and makes a viable challenger to dedicated solutions such as Gamespy Arcade and The All-Seeing Eye. Both of these are built on Valve's VGUI2 system, which allows them to run both on the desktop and within games. Codename: Gordon, a small fan-made flash game based on what has so far been seen of Half-Life 2 was added to Steam and downloaded, at the last count, over 600,000 times: the sort of popularity most fan projects can only dream of.
Then there are other features, very much in the background. The use of single files for games, as opposed to the sprawling structures of the WON system, makes things a lot clearer and allows for custom content to be downloaded and stored away from the important parts of the program; but it can lead to problems for those with unreliable or seriously fragmented hard drives. The surprisingly successful Valve Anti-Cheat system was only made viable by Steam and has dramatically cut back on cheating. And Valve can now rest easy at night knowing that their gamers have the latest and greatest versions of all their games.
But it isn't all rosy. After the concept has been laid down and the theories made, there have been many problems implementing Steam. Updates have been released which send players straight back to the desktop on a Friday and which were not even started to be fixed until the following Monday, and updates have been released on major league nights sending the organised games tumbling into freefall. Friends and for a long time the entire Steam client have been horribly unreliable. People's favourite servers were forgotten, their hardware made incompatible, their third party server browser programs lost functionality. There have even been occasional reports of people losing access to their games after a format (the solution to which, for anyone panicking, appears to be to logout before you wipe the disk) although the official line is that they are logging back in with the wrong account. During these periods a lot of players became irate with not having their games on-demand and the hate spilled out, mostly across the official forums.
Luckily all that is now in the past. Steam's built-in update feature ensures that you can't have anything less than the latest version and today's Steam is not the monster it once was. Faster, more stable, more functional and with a great community behind it, already on the cutting edge Steam is really looking into the future. Because it is the future that Steam was made for: Half-Life based games have always had their quirks following their migration to the new platform but it is the astonishing Half-Life 2 engine Source that will really make Steam shine. By the time you install Steam from your Half-Life 2 CD it will be a force to be reckoned with, an alternative to endless CD checks and a glimpse at how, one day, all game will behave.
The first question to be asked is why? Why take WON, a perfectly functional system, and replace it with another? Why force the suspicious public to install an addition program to their game? "A while back", as Valve founder Gabe Newell explains, "we were starting to have a lot of success with our games on the internet.
[But] the scale at which were developing was starting to give us a bunch of problems...we were releasing lots of content so whenever you installed one of our games it took forever with all the updating and patching and we came to the conclusion that we needed a better way of doing that". Seem fair? It isn't entirely that innocuous. Cheating and piracy abounded on the WON system and there was no realistic way for Valve to stop it. Anybody could enter in a valid CD Key (popular pirated keys were eventually blacklisted on the WON servers, but replacements were never hard to come by) and play to their heart's content. And cheating – well, with the intensely competitive play of Half-Life's greatest mod Counter-Strike, cheating was always going to be a problem. A large part of Steam is the increased security against both pirate copies of the games and online cheats. Although, of course, Steam also does what Newell describes. Not only is it a matter of just clicking a game to get the latest version, it's physically impossible to play any Steam game online without the latest patches, now sensibly known as 'updates', already downloaded and applied, entirely automatically. Valve are even offering to extend this service to the more popular community mods, and gamers can anticipate Natural Selection and Sven Co-op appearing for download and update in the near future."There are a couple of different pieces in Steam," Newell continues, "and probably the most important is the Distributed File System. It's job is to make sure content is delivered on a timely basis...so while I'm running through the first ten megabytes of content it's downloading everything that comes next". With games such as Half-Life 2 sizing up at around three and a half gigabytes, this content streaming functionality will prove to be vital for those opting to download the game.
Which brings us on to another feature: purchasing through Steam. When you buy a Valve game in a shop, most of the money goes to Vivendi Universal, the series' publishers, and the store. When you buy a game through Steam it all goes straight to Valve, cutting out both the middle men in one fell swoop. But you don't get a CD or box: you enter you credit card details into the program, the rights to the game are instantly added to your account (at least until your credit card is verified) and you then download the content from the internet and play. To avoid network congestion, new games are 'preloaded': a locked version of the game is downloaded and unlocked on the day of release. This allows content to be distributed over a longer period – so Half-Life 2's graphical assets began preloading on the 17th August, and as we write levels and code have yet to be made available. Login anywhere in the world (as long as you're not logged in elsewhere) and you can play your games almost immediately regardless of whether your host owns them or not. By separating the content from the ability to play, Valve deal another blow to piracy.However, prices are steep. $35 on Steam for Half-Life and it's free mods, except Counter-Strike (which comes with Condition Zero, the other game package currently available) and including Opposing Force, when you could walk into a store and buy the same plus Counter-Strike and the second single-player expansion Blue Shift for as little as a fiver, entering the CD Key into Steam for the same effect as an online purchase. Presumably the prices are such because Valve do not want to compete, anywhere in the world – but if you can find a place selling Half-Life for that much, do give us a call.
When you buy through Steam you also skirt around one of the less popular aspects of the program: limiting one CD key to one account. Those who shared their copy of the game (which is in fact illegal) with friends soon found that they had missed out on using their key and needed to buy a new copy of the game. Many angry customers complained before things settled down, and the situation wasn't helped by Vivendi's accidental reprinting of a large batch of keys. Luckily a quick phone call to the group is all that is required to set the matter straight.
The other features of Steam are arguably smaller. Friends, an instant-messaging client, shows you what games your, well, friends are playing, the server they are playing on, and lets you join them. The biggest advantage it has over competitors such as X-Fire is it's ability to work in-game but although improvements have been made it still suffers from frequent downtime. The built-in server browser is a huge improvement over the old and makes a viable challenger to dedicated solutions such as Gamespy Arcade and The All-Seeing Eye. Both of these are built on Valve's VGUI2 system, which allows them to run both on the desktop and within games. Codename: Gordon, a small fan-made flash game based on what has so far been seen of Half-Life 2 was added to Steam and downloaded, at the last count, over 600,000 times: the sort of popularity most fan projects can only dream of.
Then there are other features, very much in the background. The use of single files for games, as opposed to the sprawling structures of the WON system, makes things a lot clearer and allows for custom content to be downloaded and stored away from the important parts of the program; but it can lead to problems for those with unreliable or seriously fragmented hard drives. The surprisingly successful Valve Anti-Cheat system was only made viable by Steam and has dramatically cut back on cheating. And Valve can now rest easy at night knowing that their gamers have the latest and greatest versions of all their games.But it isn't all rosy. After the concept has been laid down and the theories made, there have been many problems implementing Steam. Updates have been released which send players straight back to the desktop on a Friday and which were not even started to be fixed until the following Monday, and updates have been released on major league nights sending the organised games tumbling into freefall. Friends and for a long time the entire Steam client have been horribly unreliable. People's favourite servers were forgotten, their hardware made incompatible, their third party server browser programs lost functionality. There have even been occasional reports of people losing access to their games after a format (the solution to which, for anyone panicking, appears to be to logout before you wipe the disk) although the official line is that they are logging back in with the wrong account. During these periods a lot of players became irate with not having their games on-demand and the hate spilled out, mostly across the official forums.
Luckily all that is now in the past. Steam's built-in update feature ensures that you can't have anything less than the latest version and today's Steam is not the monster it once was. Faster, more stable, more functional and with a great community behind it, already on the cutting edge Steam is really looking into the future. Because it is the future that Steam was made for: Half-Life based games have always had their quirks following their migration to the new platform but it is the astonishing Half-Life 2 engine Source that will really make Steam shine. By the time you install Steam from your Half-Life 2 CD it will be a force to be reckoned with, an alternative to endless CD checks and a glimpse at how, one day, all game will behave.
