Valve Announces Steamcloud

[Hectic Glenn]

Rockpapershotgun.com were present at a mini-conference with Valve, who unveiled some of the details regarding their new venture, Steamcloud. Essentially it will bring what makes your Steam account yours, to every computer you log into. This means all your saved games and keyboard configurations will be stored by the Steam back-end.[br] To begin with we will see Half-life and Counter-Strike starting with Steamcloud support (it will be free to download of course). The good news is that Left 4 Dead will ship with it already supported.

If you're offline, Steam caches the data locally, and then uploads it as soon as it can. Save games will also be kept forever.

Alongside this great idea, Steamcloud will also bring with it "Driver Auto Updating" to keep everything running smoothly AND system analysing, where Steam will be able to analyse your system to assess whether you are going to be able to play a particular game. Positive news ahead for Steamcloud, watch this space. Also other mentionable news from this conference...

• Gabe Newell and Jason Holtman are both keen to expand Steam's catalogs of games, but also provide confidence in developers to allow these games be available worldwide, rather than continental restrictions
• Meet the Sniper is on it's way for the next Team Fortress 2 "Meet the..." videos. It comes highly rated!

Sources - Steamcloud Summary details from conference and RPS Live Blog

 

[Shinobi]

honestly this is a little more than I would ever want..

I guess it's good for those who dont have a lot of computer experience (specifically the driver stuff) but for me I would rather manage my computer by myself.

 

[Zephos]

Woo for saved games being carried over.

 

[highlander]

oh f*ck yes. Go valve!

 

[63]

Steam, Steamworks, Steamcloud = Crytek, Crysis, CryEngine ?????

 

[Sheepo]

I was told Meet the Pyro!

 

[FoxFire]

I was told Meet the Pyro!

No, they're working on Meet the Sniper, but the next class to get achievements and new weapons will be the Pyro.

 

[Xendance]

Good news post, Glenn.

 

[Kadayi]

Good news post, Glenn.

Glenn beat Evo & Digi to their PMs box :naughty:

 

[-Psy-]

Yes! Valve are attempting to help non-techy people see if they can run games or not. This is exactly what PC gaming needs.

 

[Deleted member 56031]

Wow, I really didn't expect something like this :O

Valve. Best developer ever?

 

[scotland1]

Left 4 Dead will ship with it already supported.

Awesome.

Steamcloud will also bring with it "Driver Auto Updating" to keep everything running smoothly AND system analysing, where Steam will be able to analyse your system to assess whether you are going to be able to play a particular game.

Double awesome!

 

[jondy]

Fantastic.

Is anyone else now thinking along the lines of SteamOS?

 

[Sheepo]

No, they're working on Meet the Sniper, but the next class to get achievements and new weapons will be the Pyro.

Where did you hear that? The Meet the Sniper part may be true, but I know the pyro achievements have not been confirmed.

 

[Escaep]

All your saved games are belong to us.

 

[Lucid]

Oh God, I hope one of the Pyro unlockables is the napalm rocket launcher! :O

 

[-Psy-]

The Pyro achievements have been confirmed.

As the TF2 portion of the presentation was coming to an end, we were treated to a few snippets about the game's next updates: a rough-cut of Meet the Sniper was shown, and the next class to receive an achievement-based upgrade was confirmed to be the Pyro.

 

[Mahalis]

AND system analysing, where Steam will be able to analyse your system to assess whether you are going to be able to play a particular game

I don't like this. Steam has proven rubbish at guessing whether I can run a game or not - every Source game I ran on my old machine auto-set itself to shittacular settings because it didn't recognize my video driver. Hell, I started installing Lost Coast last night on my new rig - 2.5ghz Core 2 Quad, 8800GTS - and got a warning about it not being up to "recommended" specs.

 

[-Psy-]

That's because Lost Coast has a recommended spec of 3.2Ghz P4. It hasn't been updated to recognise multi-threaded CPUs.

 

[Asuka]

Iv been waiting for this for so long! Man Valve really knows what they are doing.

 

[McGooTheWise]

Fantastic.

Is anyone else now thinking along the lines of SteamOS?

It would be the greatest piece of software ever engineered.

VISTA SAPPIN MAH COMPUTA!

 

[Adabiviak]

shittacular

Ha! The word of the day!

 

[Intamin]

honestly this is a little more than I would ever want..

I guess it's good for those who dont have a lot of computer experience (specifically the driver stuff) but for me I would rather manage my computer by myself.

I agree. Just as long as you have the option of not installing the drivers, that'll be fine. But if it's auto-updating your computer for just one game...ehhh...no thanks.

 

[Cavalry]

I cant wait for the Meet the Sniper video, I think thats what I'm most exited for

 

[sixteenth]

I wouldn't be surprised if the "Driver Updating" and "System Analyzing" features fail badly. Many have different kinds of setups with conflicting hardware and software. It would kinda suck to have a Steam update screw up your driver configuration.

But as long as they are optional features I wouldn't care.

 

[ríomhaire]

Oh dear God I hope you can turn that stuff off. It's hard enough getting Steam games to work on a dial-up modem.

 

[jondy]

But as long as they are optional features I wouldn't care.

I'm sure they will be. All of this stuff will be optional.

 

[DiSTuRbEd]

I agree. Just as long as you have the option of not installing the drivers, that'll be fine. But if it's auto-updating your computer for just one game...ehhh...no thanks.

Driver updating is going to be optional, of course. It will tell you if your drivers are out of date like normal and ask if you'd like to download them from Steam I'd suppose. Valve is just giving a helping hand because some people don't know where/how to get new drivers, should be a nice feature to newbies on the computer.

 

[FoxFire]

Where did you hear that? The Meet the Sniper part may be true, but I know the pyro achievements have not been confirmed.

As the TF2 portion of the presentation was coming to an end, we were treated to a few snippets about the game's next updates: a rough-cut of Meet the Sniper was shown, and the next class to receive an achievement-based upgrade was confirmed to be the Pyro.

- PC Gamer

 

[Sheepo]

*cries*

 

[fifty7var]

The auto-updating driver thing seems a bit silly to be honest, it doesn't seem to really fit the hard-core gamer segment (as some drivers are more stable/faster on certain platforms than the most recent), so I'm hoping it can be disabled.

The rest seems cool though, I had portal installed on my laptop as well as my desktop and was kind of pissed i had to beat it on both (yeah, i could have copied the save games except my desktop wasn't available at the time).

 

[605Scorpion]

That's because Lost Coast has a recommended spec of 3.2Ghz P4. It hasn't been updated to recognise multi-threaded CPUs.

TBH it seems like a trivial thing to update. Someone could probably do it alone in one day.

 

[Absinthe]

What's so silly about driver auto-updating. If you don't need it, then ignore it.

Not everybody is knowledgeable about this kind of shit when it comes to PC gaming, and if Valve wants to make the process a bit more convenient, then who cares? And if you have any reservations about using it, then I direct you back to the first sentence.

 

[fifty7var]

What's so silly about driver auto-updating. If you don't need it, then ignore it.

Absolutely, providing we can opt out of that feature. Valve tends to be smarter about this than other companies though, so I'm not worried.