Steam - the truth

[Mr. Redundant]

what people dont understand about Steam:

1. think of how many people play on the hl engine (any mods) I mean cs alone is the most played online game, period. now all those people including you are trying to grab the same content. limited bandwidth almost limitless user base. thats why your downloads are slow, this isnt a steam "bug" ... its just reality, be patient and things will get sorted as people get their content.

2. steam doesnt denote what its doing very well (update bug) if it cant get all the content it needs to run something... lets say CS, it will still hightlight the icon, and allow you to launch it (well at least sit at the "now launching" screen) this is a bug, and its being worked on I assume. if you actually click on properties you will notice the file trying to update every now and then (when it gets a chance at the content servers) this just comes down to waiting till you have it, patience is a virtue.

3. third party software sometimes isnt converted properly.. THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE, to steam.. is anything non valve created or affiliated. in other words mods like NS, TS, etc. you can however easily fix this problem by moving it yourself.
*****
take your mod directory folder and drag it into your
c:\program files\steam\steamapps\*your e-mail*\hl\
directory
(where *your e-mail* is the e-mail you entered for steam)
this will make it show up in your steam browser under third party.

4. anything graphic related (for example, options missing, servers not showing up, buttons not showing up etc) are directly affected by what you have downloaded, this relates to #2, therefore if you dont have all of CS, your going to be missing options / random crashes. in essence you shouldnt be able to start the program or activate it, but it still lets you do this because steam assumes you have enough of the software to run it. - if this is happening, you need to let it do what it needs to do, leave it overnight, right click on your mods and make sure the option "always keep this game up to date" is on.

now, those lil kids out there posting "kill steam" and "no steam petition" threads, are the kind of people we dont want on steam anyway. personally if you have to express that way in public without reasoning/asking for help, or just plain being impatient you prolly dont deserve steam. (dont put it down if you havent tried it) and those of you dissing valve for it are even lamer.
trust me, once you get steam working, and the servers are more readily available you are going to eat your words HARDCORE.
steam is the single most impressive addition in software I have seen in ... well a long time.

REMEMBER, the people whining are the same people WHINING when it was delayed a day... so in essence you shoulda stfu and let them do their work eh?

WHAT STEAM CAN DO:

1. an extremely robust friends list.
2. alt-tabbing out and in without any loss of sound / being dropped
3. load times are twice as fast as before
4. hl engine mods and hl now can be set to 32bit color
5. fps increase, even in higher resolutions, and fps stability under ati cards
6. awesome server browser, thats fast reliable and has tons of neat options like "auto rejoin" (cant get on a server with your friend? put on auto rejoin, and as soon as a free slot opens you get in)
7. the friends capabilities are reminiscent of XBOX live.. as in, if your friend is playing cs, it shows he is in CS, and you can Join him even if your playing something else, you can see what all your friends are doing, the servers they are on etc - very robust.
8. you can chat with anyone on your friends list while playing any mod.
9. you can play realtime games with them... WHILE HL IS OPEN (eg: Im playing TS, I died in a round based game, so did Jim my friend, so we play a quick game of chess/checkers/go/etc while we wait, while we are still logged in to that server, we play in console... amazing, and so cool.
10. mp3 support (its in there, I gotta figure out how to use it)
...
the list goes on and on.
you idiots dont know what your talking about, dissing steam.
yeah I had some initial problems too, but if your patient and give valve a frickin break its all worth it.
(note Im only insulting the morons who dissed valve / steam for their own incompetence, not people like "Dr. Freemen" who actually had problems that need to be sorted.)

nuff said

 

[bizzy420]

steam is dope. its only been out for like 2days, people just need to calm down and wait. it'll get better in a week.

 

[Mr. Redundant]

my point exactly

 

[]SK[]

The reason most ppl are upset is that...it doesnt work. Ive installed it on two PC's neither work. Both fail at different places. Clicking 'Games' on one PC makes Steam freeze. The other just sits saying Updating after logging in. Nuff said.

 

[Mr. Redundant]

you need to read my post then
the REASON its freezing is explained in #2: here lemme cut and paste so you can read it this time.

2. steam doesnt denote what its doing very well (update bug) if it cant get all the content it needs to run something... lets say CS, it will still hightlight the icon, and allow you to launch it (well at least sit at the "now launching" screen) this is a bug, and its being worked on I assume. if you actually click on properties you will notice the file trying to update every now and then (when it gets a chance at the content servers) this just comes down to waiting till you have it, patience is a virtue.

* let me summarize
you do not have the content to launch the mod your trying to play
this is due to heavy bandwidth consumption. do you have the slightest idea how many people play hl and its mods?

- nuff said
(note I wouldnt have been a bitch about it if you didnt try to reprimand me and then use a smug "nuff said")
and yeah I have 2 computers as well, with 2 hl cdkeys (one for my lil bro/if friends pop over) and it updated *with problems already mentioned* but I got it fixed up in the end.

this comp froze when I ran hl or any mod, letting it update the whole day fixed it.

the other comp also had the updating bug like yours
I downloaded the prechached cs pack and it fixed that one too.
go ahead and try it.
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/130000/130271.shtml
getting pissy about something, or blaming someone isnt going to fix anything. as I said be patient stick it out, try some things I suggested. I mean it does work, theres already a couple thousand cs servers up and thousands of peeps playing, I been playing TS so third party mods work too.

 

[dawdler]

Even if there is a reason it doesnt work, it just doesnt work, thats fact. For example, why could DoD start one time, then shutting down Steam and restarting it said the game is unavailable? Why does HL dont even want to start? It just locks up at the menu (with windows menubar still showing). It worked perfectly when HL was seperate. What ON GODS GREEN EARTH does Steam have to interfere with fo me wanting to start a SP HL game?! Its already online for gods sake. Do I have HL? Do I have a legit key? Takes what, 1 second MAX to confirm.

The truth? Its a good concept. Its a little flawed concept. And its a terribly buggy excecution.

 

[]SK[]

You cant seem to see that people have a right to moan, there is a reason people are moaning. It just doesnt work. Is that not a fair comment?

The CS thing you mentioned above wouldnt be useful to me as I dont play the CS mod? Does it work with other mods, ie TFC standalone HL?

 

[Mr. Redundant]

yeah, but I wasnt directing this at the people with genuin problems, it was more of "hey you children slandering steam and valve" kinda deal.
steam has genuin problems, no denying that, moaning is great and dandy, but theres no reason to put down a company that has done nothing but sacrifice to create innovative products for us

and well I had nothing better to do at 2:05am (sleep pattern is messed up)

EDIT: I dont play CS either, and the prechached pack does include the hl update, so its one less thing to worry about. as for Team fortress classic.. no Im afraid its not. unfortunately. but it still might fix your problems, as it has for quite a few people that just had bad luck the first time, had some missalocated bytes etc. might as well try it, you dont have anything to lose

 

[Gunner]

Gah!

 

[Mr. Redundant]

get the precached pack from, well nearly all shareware sites now. its gonna take forever on steam

 

[Guest]

i installed the steaminstall_cs.exe(379mb), but i still can't play anything, i can't run hl, i can't connect to any cs server, whenever i click on rather "play" in "Games" or "connect" in "Servers", it says:"Preparing to play half life...", but the game never started. Man what can i do? besides, how come it never ask me to enter the valid cd-key? Man i wasted all my real e-mail account and it still doesn't work. it can't convert, it can't play, it can't even download. I'm dead. luckly i paste my hl2 videos to another folder, so that i can still enjoy them while i got pissed off by steam.

my computer is p4 2.4 GHz, 512MB ram and i have more than 20GB of hard drive space. i don't think my computer doesn't meet the system requirement. I have been trying steam the whole day from yestoday's morning to today's morning, now it's 5:17. Man......

 

[Mr. Redundant]

did you do a fresh re-install? was any part of steam working before you reinstalled it?
when it says preparing to play something, it means you are lacking updates. well for the most part. this however is unusual if you have uninstalled your old steam and re-installed the precache. since it has the updated hl stuff.
when you say it cant convert, what wont it convert? your regular hl files?


if worst comes to worst you could
uninstall steam
re-install hl
re-install steam with the precache pack
enter your old e-mail
and see if that does it.
since the pack comes with the hl 1.0.1.2 patch it shouldnt hang trying to load hl. if it still does my only assumption is that theres something weird in how steam handles its media.

 

[Guest]

Originally posted by Mr. Redundant
did you do a fresh re-install? was any part of steam working before you reinstalled it?
when it says preparing to play something, it means you are lacking updates. well for the most part. this however is unusual if you have uninstalled your old steam and re-installed the precache. since it has the updated hl stuff.
when you say it cant convert, what wont it convert? your regular hl files?


if worst comes to worst you could
uninstall steam
re-install hl
re-install steam with the precache pack
enter your old e-mail
and see if that does it.
since the pack comes with the hl 1.0.1.2 patch it shouldnt hang trying to load hl. if it still does my only assumption is that theres something weird in how steam handles its media.

yes i have installed it many many time today. but i have only 2 e-mail address, i can only keep trying it on the same account. First time i install it, it stop at the place where it converts hl, cs and other games, since it says the conversion might take several min, i just go to watch tv, after like few hours(from about 5:00 to 11:00), i go back to it, steam seems to be freezing and still in the process of converting games. So i click on cancel to quite the program, then i click on the steam.exe, the hl icon is in color(it seems to be converted successfully) but when i click on it, it always says "prepare to play hl...". i got so pissed off since i don't get nothing out of 6 hours of labour of my computer. I uninstall everything and install it again and again, it still doesn't work. after 12:00, i download the steam with cs and hl precache which is 379MB, then i install them, now the hl and cs icon is in color, but they still don't work. what can i do????

 

[Xenome]

All it does is crashing on me, and i'm not a n00b, programs NEVER crash on me, due to my fault!

 

[SCSI-Terminator]

Here's another example of some of the crazyness Steam can perform.

Thats right folks, I'm playing the game while its being downloaded. While I would normaly say "thats cool" the problem is it will freeze while it waits to grab that missing texture or sound file that the level calls for, and then jerk back to life without warning. Granted it only does this the first play thru since the data does get cached, but still I thought lag was only a big deal when you played multiplayer, but Steam will change that.

Also seams it will only download this content while I am actualy playing the game, making that first play thru a painfull experiance.

 

[Fuzzy]

Originally posted by Mr. Redundant
take your mod directory folder and drag it into your
c:\program files\steam\steamapps\*your e-mail*\hl\
directory
(where *your e-mail* is the e-mail you entered for steam)
this will make it show up in your steam browser under third party.

Hey, i tried to do that, but i dont have any folders inside \steamapps\
All i have in there is 4 .gcf files.

I have the feeling my comp just rejects steam, ive reinstalled like 8 times, never got into a game though. :-(

 

[Shockwave]

guys it aint gonna get better in the week, we are only 300,000-500,000 that are downloading it. There are 8 million half life players and when the next HL patch comes out in a couple weeks it will be worse than it is right now

 

[]SK[]

Originally posted by )[eVo]( Para
Gah!

 

[H2HSnake]

[take your mod directory folder and drag it into your
c:\program files\steam\steamapps\*your e-mail*\hl\
directory
(where *your e-mail* is the e-mail you entered for steam)
this will make it show up in your steam browser under third party.
]
it's not working...I have steam apps installed on a different drive.

 

[BWMASTER]

Originally posted by SCSI-Terminator
Here's another example of some of the crazyness Steam can perform.

Thats right folks, I'm playing the game while its being downloaded. While I would normaly say "thats cool" the problem is it will freeze while it waits to grab that missing texture or sound file that the level calls for, and then jerk back to life without warning. Granted it only does this the first play thru since the data does get cached, but still I thought lag was only a big deal when you played multiplayer, but Steam will change that.

Also seams it will only download this content while I am actualy playing the game, making that first play thru a painfull experiance.

You can play level 1 for example while steam is downlaoding level 2 so you don't have to wait for the whole game to be downloaded .

 

[H2HSnake]

Ok i've tried to play HL but i got - Steam error - "the game is currently unavailable-please try another time" i want to play HL singleplayer or 3 party mods and HL don't want to load...WTF is happening.

 

[SCSI-Terminator]

Originally posted by BWMASTER
You can play level 1 for example while steam is downlaoding level 2

You would think that, but no, my experiance shows it only grabs stuff when there is demand for it. So it only starts grabbing level 2 when I finish level 1. I would love it if it would grab stuff while I'm playing previous levels, or hell even grab stuff while I'm not playing at all. But stupid Steam has to see an immidiate need for it before it will try to fill it.

 

[OCybrManO]

I was not asked for a cd-key until I created a new account.
If you create an account with the HLDS Update thing and log into that account or an old beta account rather than creating a new one you will not be asked for a cd-key and you won't be able to play games.

If you want to use your old beta account you must register a new account under the same name.

EDIT: I estimated the same number of people (300k-500k) would be downloading it but when you look at the Steam IDs people are getting the number appears to be in the 3 million range.

 

[GraphicFoxx]

Originally posted by SCSI-Terminator
You would think that, but no, my experiance shows it only grabs stuff when there is demand for it. So it only starts grabbing level 2 when I finish level 1. I would love it if it would grab stuff while I'm playing previous levels, or hell even grab stuff while I'm not playing at all. But stupid Steam has to see an immidiate need for it before it will try to fill it.

Exactly. It's quite annoying really. Started up a new game of HL since it didn't copy over my old stuff, and on the first Loading... while riding the tram, steam started downloading. Once it was complete, the game kept going from where it was. Steam didn't start updating again until the next Loading... portion, which is where I'm at now.
I say there should be an option where you can choose to download the whole thing at once. I'd much rather do that. Just let it download over night, then play the game, instead of play for a couple minutes, then download for 20.
Hopefully they will update this, and give us a choice.