Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Steam 3.0: True Autoupdates
A post on the halflife2.net forums has revealed some more 3.0 news. It will feature true autoupdates, where the client doesn’t even have to be restarted to receive one (discounting updates to Steam itself, of course). Interestingly enough, this was originally a feature anyway, though I don’t personally recall how well it worked.
It is ‘one of many reasons’ for which 3.0 moves away from the ‘connectionless approach’ 1.0 and 2.0 had – i.e., the client doesn’t maintain a constant connection. You can see this yourself: load Steam, run netstat, then wait a short while and run netstat again. Maintaining a persistent session is presumably at least part of the architectural solution to Friends’ instability mentioned in last week’s interview.
It is ‘one of many reasons’ for which 3.0 moves away from the ‘connectionless approach’ 1.0 and 2.0 had – i.e., the client doesn’t maintain a constant connection. You can see this yourself: load Steam, run netstat, then wait a short while and run netstat again. Maintaining a persistent session is presumably at least part of the architectural solution to Friends’ instability mentioned in last week’s interview.
