Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Steam Punks
This week 1UP, not coincidentally the internet extension of CGW, are running ‘Steam Punks’, a five-day Valve feature with a new article every morning. Today’s piece centres on Steam, episodic content and SiN Episodes, and includes a video interview with Tom Mustaine of Ritual Entertainment. As you might expect from an all-purpose site much of the information is old or introductory, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely devoid of information and three interesting snippets have presented themselves.
Read the whole article at 1UP.
- Some indirect news first: digital distribution quietly received another advocate last week at the Gamer Convention Developer Conference. “PC games are on the verge of a major market shift”, said Former Blizzard director and Flagship Studios (Hellgate: London) president Bill Roper, “as PC developers and publishers start to move from selling CDs of single-player games to retail outlets, to selling online games to those with broadband connections”. Does he have something up his sleeve? Here’s hoping to it.
- Steam 3.0 is also covered, albeit briefly, with the first details of what it actually does beyond VAC2 and deeper Friends integration: it “manages connections better”, a development perhaps spurred on by the irksome state of the Australian internet structure and the problems it consistently causes. Still no official word on tangible features though, and my personal inquiries have confirmed that there won’t be any in the immediate future either.
- Episodic content is the main focus of the article but, to be honest, there’s not too much of it that we’ve not heard before. Except, that is, for Valve’s claim that “the episodic content will be better than Half-Life 2”, thanks to the compressed nature of each instalment. In-house writer Mark Laidlaw uses ICO as an example of this philosophy: “[ICO] is powerful because when the really interesting moments happen at the end of the game, you remember all the things that led up to them, and you played through them in a reasonable amount of time. So, it's not like, ‘Yeah, I think somebody told me something about this like three weeks ago when I first started playing.’”
Read the whole article at 1UP.
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I'm hoping the "managing connections better" is a rearchitecting of Steam with the unreliability of the internet placed first and foremost.
Steam currently is built with the assumption the internet is always avaliable and perfectly reliable. Note how offline mode is essentially bolted on. Which is fine, but that assumes a perfectly offline enviroment too. When online and offline meet, you get all sorts of bad things happening, like games not being ready for offline, games being out of sync at LAN parties, etc.
As one example of something I think is horrendously broken is how at the moment, when Steam detects an update, for itself or for a game, the game or Steam itself is broken until the update can actually complete. Steam essentially breaks itself!
This is more or less what happens with Steam updates in Australia. Steam detects the update, then stops working until it's downloaded, which sometimes takes an unreasonably long time. With an otherwise functioning copy of Steam just refusing to work.
Steam currently is built with the assumption the internet is always avaliable and perfectly reliable. Note how offline mode is essentially bolted on. Which is fine, but that assumes a perfectly offline enviroment too. When online and offline meet, you get all sorts of bad things happening, like games not being ready for offline, games being out of sync at LAN parties, etc.
As one example of something I think is horrendously broken is how at the moment, when Steam detects an update, for itself or for a game, the game or Steam itself is broken until the update can actually complete. Steam essentially breaks itself!
This is more or less what happens with Steam updates in Australia. Steam detects the update, then stops working until it's downloaded, which sometimes takes an unreasonably long time. With an otherwise functioning copy of Steam just refusing to work.
# posted by 
: 9:11 pm
: 9:11 pm
That isn't exactly a network issue though, it's just how Steam handles the data once it recieves it (both the fact that there is an update and the update itself). I definitely agree with you though - if you ask me, offline should be avalaible from the moment the game can be launched while online. A notice about needing to download more content is far better than not being able to access the game at all. And don't get me started on the consistent lack of an -offline paramater!
Hopefully our prayers will be answered.
Hopefully our prayers will be answered.
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