ID Pack

theholygod

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So, i just bought the ID Pack thingie and have a number of criticisms:

After attempting to run a game that runs with DosBox a window would show and then suddenly vanish, i traced this back to steam "using" the dosbox exe. Fixed by restarting steam, i know theres a "please restart steam" warning when installing mods, however this could have been made clear on installing commercial games.

Each game has its own dosbox installation. Now, i can understand why valve would do this for people who only want to buy one or two ID games, however they could have easily stored dosbox in one location and set the game bat files to point to that single dosbox exe.

This leads me to my third point: how do i go about updating dosbox for those games? surely i would have to install it over the top of every existing installation.

So, a few problems (all revolving around dosbox) that valve easily could have handled better. Other than that, i'd like to see more views for steams game list (eg, icons) in the near future.
 
So, i just bought the ID Pack thingie and have a number of criticisms:

After attempting to run a game that runs with DosBox a window would show and then suddenly vanish, i traced this back to steam "using" the dosbox exe. Fixed by restarting steam, i know theres a "please restart steam" warning when installing mods, however this could have been made clear on installing commercial games.

Each game has its own dosbox installation. Now, i can understand why valve would do this for people who only want to buy one or two ID games, however they could have easily stored dosbox in one location and set the game bat files to point to that single dosbox exe.

This leads me to my third point: how do i go about updating dosbox for those games? surely i would have to install it over the top of every existing installation.

So, a few problems (all revolving around dosbox) that valve easily could have handled better. Other than that, i'd like to see more views for steams game list (eg, icons) in the near future.

First, I'll say I'm not arguing. I'm trying to understand your points because I'm considering buying the iD pack.

1) I don't understand your first point. Is it just a UI issue that a command window opens and closes?

2) Unless you're complaining that multiple DosBox installations takes up too much space, I don't see the distinction between points 2 & 3. It seems like 2 is just a statement of fact that supports 3, a criticism.

3) As time goes on and new DosBox versions come out, having a seperate DosBox for each game has an advantage: Updating one centralized DosBox installation would require retesting of all released games to ensure compatability. (Not to say DosBox devs don't already do this, but the responsibility to iD Pack owners sits with whoever pushes a new version through Steam, not the DosBox devs.) If you want to use a different DosBox (maybe your own centralized install location), is there anything keeping you from overriding the games' bat files rather than overriding the games' DosBox files?

Oh yeah, I'm also hoping for views that handle large numbers of games better. The "Favorites" feature was a step in the right direction, but eventually a heirarchy will be needed for large accounts.
 
My concerns are very small and the ID Pack is very good.

The first point isnt much of an issue at all, just need to restart steam after installing a game. It wasnt a UI issue, steam was generating a conflict that was preventing the games from opening.

I dont see why new dosbox versions would suddenly make previously compatible games not work, as the whole project is based on backwards compatability. Personally i would have preferred a single dosbox install.

I find it odd that many of the games come with dosbox, yet the doom/heretic games dont come with Doomsday (something i strongly reccomend). Ahh well, I'm just nitpicking.
 
A few more points others may find useful:

When attempting to run Doom 3 it asked me for a ROE CD key, which of course i don't have because i bought through steam. I managed to sort that out by running ROE, quitting, and running Doom 3.

Commander Keen 1-5: working fine (restart steam before running)
Wolf 3D: runs perfectly
Quake: perfect
Quake 2: perfect
Doom 3 and ROE: seems to be working, might need to start ROE once first though.
Doom/hexen games: work ok, the resolution has screwed up for me on DooM though. I suggest getting Doomsday
Master Levels of Doom: this seems to be completely unchanged from the original, you will probably need to change a lot of file paths in its options.
RTCW: need to restart pc before this works properly

Still downloading Quake 3 and Team Arena

Its possible I'm just really unlucky with these things, but if someone else does get these problems i hope this post helps.
 
I dont see why new dosbox versions would suddenly make previously compatible games not work, as the whole project is based on backwards compatability.

I agree. There is no reason that a new dosbox should break anything. I'm sure the dosbox devs are very careful. My point is that the burden of heavy, expensive, and tricky testing sits with whoever pushes out the dosbox upgrade over Steam to customers who paid for the games and, for many of them, wouldn't know how to use another version instead. Not having a central dosbox removes that burden. (Of course, they could have a central copy of each version of dosbox, but that's probably more trouble than it's worth.)
 
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