Read more.A recent beta update makes reference to a range of new application-type IDs.
Read more.A recent beta update makes reference to a range of new application-type IDs.
Could this possibly just be a reference to SteamOS ? as I think a lot of people who have tried it have been asking for some media playback ability.
Although Valve do seem to be pushing more and more stuff onto their store, so I can believe they would sell films and music also.
I'd prefer a backup/restore feature that actually worked - every time I've tried to (apps partition is now getting very tight for space) back off some old title the backup's got to 90%+ and then said that there's been some (undisclosed) error.If you are tired of seeing unwanted/finished games in your Steam library, you might be interested to know that Steam Beta participants are now able to hide games, with the latest update. TechnoBuffalo has put together an easy guide showing how to turn on beta access and the simple steps involved in hiding your games should you be interested.
Second on my "wish list" for Steam would be a way to have multiple library locations - e.g. a "main" and an "archive" with the ability to move games from main to archive and back again. Main Steam library is on an SSD and it's be real handy to have seldom played games migrated to a HDD-resident partition.
TV, movies and music on Steam I'm not that bothered about - after all, let's be honest, it's not as if there's a lack of other vendors already out there, be it Play, iTunes or Amazon.
You can have multiple library locations, which is awesome when you're running out of space! I don't know of a way to move things between different library locations though. It may be a simple as copying the game folder from one steam/steamapps/common/ to another but I haven't tried it.
Regarding backup, I'm pretty sure that's just you, I just backed up gmod and it was totally fine.
You can already have multiple libraries but moving between them is not a simple operation, games make entries in the registry which you could move to point elsewhere but that isn't going to be quick, maybe a few minutes worst case? Currently you can just copy the files across, delete the game in the original library then re-download and select the new library, it should find the existing files re-install. That process already takes a few minutes. I'm not sure you could automate it and leave it running in the background either since it's likely to hammer the storage devices involved, so might make your computer rather unresponsive.
If you've got plenty of ram, Imdisk Ramdrive allows you to mount a ramdrive in a particular folder... ie /steam/steamapps/common/<game of choice>, and it'll run faster than an SSD and as an image file reads off mechanical drives almost as fast as SSD's, as it's a single large sequential (as long as your drive's not too fragmented) file.
I run all my games this way, as I enable ntfs compression on the Ramdrive which makes the images smaller, and somehow faster as well.
Just backup the game folders in steam\steamapps\common
The if you need to restore, you start the download going, then exit steam, copy files and log back in. Never had an issue doing it that way.
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Check the Steam forums (and other gaming related ones) and I'm sure you'll see that it's definitely not just me who has issues with it. "Flaky" is a word oft-used. Actually I'm probably being a touch unfair as I've not tried it in a month or two - maybe give it a whirl tonight. Then again there's always the zip-the-directory-structure backup that's been mentioned elsewhere. That also gets your saved games.
Apart from that thanks for the reply. I'll have to look up the multiple library feature - could be useful for stuff that's not that important.
I hope they make it easy - ie can be as simple as launching an "in-Steam browser" - for accessing stuff like Netflix. This would simplify quite a bit of the work since in the case of Netflix, they are starting to move away from Silverlight and going for HTML5 native mode - http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/netflix-linux-html5-support-plugins. Likewise with BBC iPlayer, they have a bigscreen mode for their website - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen/ - stuff like that would be trivial for Steam to add on as "services" where it's just launching a browser to their website.
I like Steam in that it's just for games (and a few apps). I don't want another place to have to manage my digital film/tv library. Steam lives on my gaming PC, My NAS, Lovefilm and bluray player are for my living room TV.
It's certainly going to water down my experience as a gamer, are Valve going to get all the big studios and labels on board to offer content? What are the prices going to be like?
I appreciate that they are trying to break in to the living room, but I'm hoping if they do expand their core gaming service to digital media there's an option to hide non-game content.
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