Steam to implement portable savegames and configs
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 - 8:30pm
Found via VoodooExtreme:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/valves_steam_cloud_will_keep_your_saveg...
Quote:
Valve announced today that Steam Cloud will be the next major update for the digital distribution service, allowing gamers to store not only their profiles and key bindings online, but also all of their savegames created through Steamworks-supported applications.
The biggest news is that game-generated data will now be stored with your Steam accounts in Valve servers. This includes game profiles, configuration settings, and even savegames! Valve will first be rolling this feature out to existing games like the Half-Life franchise, TF2, Counter-Strike. Left4Dead will be the first new game to remotely save your progress.
This is incredibly cool. With enough of this sort of functionality and convenience, Steam could rival and maybe surpass the consoles as a gaming platform.
Oh yeah, I've been waiting for them to do something like this. Go Valve!
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This is great. I can't really see any potential downfalls for this, because you're already connected to the internet.
You have no idea how freakin awesome that is. I've started HL: Source like 7 times. Never finish it and then end up reimaging my PC or installing it on another PC. I might actually finish it this time.
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Potentially very awesome. I'm anxious to see it implemented. Being able to seamlessly switch from my desktop to laptop would be fantastic!
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As long as you have the option not to, I'll be fine with it. I already had some issues with all my savegames being attached to GFW Live on Gears of War and Viva Pinata. That said, cool feature, and it continues to be the reason I continuously make impulse purchases on the client, it'll continue to be my favourite client (although I don't bear Stardock any ill will for their upcoming competition), and why I won't bat an eye at making a new game purchase over Steam even if it's the same price as retail, just to put my money where my mouth is.
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It would be extra cool if they let you specify directories and such for non-steamworks games that you purchased through steam, such as the "profiles" directory from CoD4. I'm sick of carrying it around on my iPod to get it from home to work.
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My only issue would be the save sizes...
Some saves can be quite large 10mb+ and as someone with only 128kbs (thats 12.8Kb/s) upload speed, this is quite a limiting factor, I really don't want to sit there waiting for a save for 10 min...
Apart from that minor concern, this is massive. Valve constantly amaze me with their innovation and ideas...
Go Valve!
I will open one of my six mouths, and sing the song that ends the Earth.
Exactly what I was thinking.
I think I'm going to cry.
And for low bandwidth folks, I'm sure it will be optional.
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Although I don't see myself using this very often, more features is never a bad thing.
Morrolan wrote:
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I really hope that they will make this optional or customisable -i.e. i might want to save my configuration but not apply it to a game unless i specify (i play some FPS games differently from each other) but also not save the save games.... or you could just save a user-selected game file.... etc.
This sounds expensive...i.e. storage is expensive. Do people think that steam will start to go with gold and silver accounts?
This sounds worrying. I hope this feature does not have to be enabled to play online etc - like the way you currently have to update to the latest version of game patches. What happens with patch compatibility issues? I rarely update my videocard drivers more than twice a year - especially when i find a stable release. Sound card drivers i virtually never update.
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Just the opposite isn't it? Storage has dropped in price so much that it allows a company to do this.
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This is so awesome. When I read about this I remembered about Botswana saying that steam is spyware. This may just put the nail in the coffin for him.
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I play on multiple machines and this is fantastic for me. I'm constantly saving files back and forth for save games, controls, and such.
Getting killed, though? In a way that you don't like? Suck it up, Gertrude.
I'm certainly glad to see that my saves will essentially be perpetrated across all my PCs, since I recently built a new one and was shocked to find out that I had to go manually grab my saves from the old one (which is currently not connected to anything, sitting on a desk in my home office, so that might be tricky if I can't remember to pick up that buggardly KVM I've been successfully forgetting for the past three months when I go get my TV at Fry's). As one of those pesky IT guys, though, I kind of worry about how much bandwidth this is going to use. I mean, I'm on Comcast, and I run my own DVR, and sometimes I have to get some fairly large recording files when, for instance, my cable cuts out me or the network decides that the Super Bowl really is important enough to let it run into my House recording, so I'm in danger of bumping my head on that invisible bandwidth limit already, and I don't even have speed limitations to worry about.
Sounds neat, though I doubt I'll use it much, if ever.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
I thought operating storage centres (i.e. like what Google have for large-scale storage) is expensive, what with all the constant power requirements, cooling, backup etc. Not to mention the software and RAID controllers that make it all work with the Steam interface. It's not a case of just buying a few hard drives....
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Does anyone know how to get the Steam client to display fonts larger for a wide screen monitor?
What would be real nice is saving online and offline in parrallel just in case. What if your internet connection dies and you saved everything online? But I'm sure they thought of this already.
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