Dawn of War II/Steam Update Strangeness
First, the facts:
1. We are on satellite internet (don't get me started), and therefore have a bandwidth usage cap, forcing me to be very circumspect with any large file downloads.
2. I didn't purchase Dawn of War II through Steam...I purchased it on sale through, I believe it was THQ's UK site, and when I installed it, it set itself up on my Steam account. I guess it uses both Games for Windows Live and Steam for DRM? Seemed like overkill to me, but I was pleased to have the game added to my Steam account at the time.
Anyway, when the expansion for DOW II was released, they put out a fairly large update for the base game. When I opened up Steam that day, the update automatically began downloading. I let it get up to about 20%, then came back, figured out how big this file was, and paused updating for the next time I could mooch off of somebody else's wireless. Shortly after that, decided to bite the bullet and go ahead. It got up to about 60% or so, and then, infuriatingly, reset back to 0 and "started" again. I think it got up to a few percentage points before I faced facts and decided I really couldn't "afford" that much downstream usage and paused it indefinitely.
This afternoon, the wife and I splurged and went to the coffee shop, so I decided to chisel away at that big update while I was there. Opened up Steam, and when I resumed the update, it immediately went right back to 61 or 62%--yay!--but then shortly after it hit 63, reset again to 0%--boo!
Anyone know what's going on here?
Tangentially...under Steam, is there a way to play the game without doing the update? I know there's an option to "not automatically update this game," but it doesn't seem to help if the update has already started. Or will it still keep me from playing if there is an update available even if I have this option selected?
"I didn't come to play...I came to win. Now let's play." - Philip J. Fry
IIRC the update to v2 is 2.6GB
Relic have this strange notion that when they release an expansion, they must put out all the expansion content, including singleplayer, to everyone regardless of what version of the game they have. It means everyone can play against everyone else in multiplayer, but I think the system could be better if they only downloaded the parts of the game you have the license to.
With regards the download percentage, I think it's the remaining percentage since the last time you restarted steam, so if you download 75% of a 2GB update and restart, the next time it should be showing the progress on the remaining 500MB.
I have a very strict and expensive data cap, for this reason I can't even consider DoW2, which is tragic, it looks awesome. But all the updates since launch would kill me.
That is my experience.
Once the game is updated you can set it to not check for updates again. Right now though, you're stuck.
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Mystic Violet wrote:
I had a glitch getting the update through Steam in which it was downloading a bad install (5.5gb instead of 6.7gb). If the same thing is happening to you: I got back my original install via Restore Previous Versions (r-click), moved the profile folder (My Docs/My Games), uninstalled via Control Panel then from Steam, copied the folders back, reinstalled on Steam.
Hope things work out for you!
"Duke Nukem Forever's switch from Quake II to Unreal technology took six weeks, but it will ultimately save months of development time."
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Thanks, guys!
If the percentage it's showing is only the percentage of the remaining data, why then did it start at 62% in the coffee shop yesterday, and then drop back to 0% after 15-20 mins? Also seems like it's always started with the percentage of the total before, but it's been awhile since I've had to do this, so I may well be remembering it wrong.
Anyway...going off to set all of my other Steam games to not automatically update now! Thanks again!
"I didn't come to play...I came to win. Now let's play." - Philip J. Fry
I've had messy Steam progress bars before, when it'd start from 0% despite still having what it downloaded before. I'd guess that this was merely a display glitch, or Steam showing the progress of what's remaining since the start of the current download session.
For DoW2 and Relic's patching politics ... I really really like it the way it is. It's not so much tailored towards players of the single player version; players of multiplayer matches really need the additional data however. Even disregarding the new units that arrived for the old armies as well; whether you have the license for something or not, if you play against Chaos, you need the Chaos models and speech, you need their weapon types and animations, you need the new maps.
That's what is in the patch for DoW2 players - bringing them up on par to a version that lets them play with everybody else. Like this, owners of only the original DoW2 can happily play just the four old armies, owners of only the expansion can only play Chaos, and owners of both can play everything, against everybody. The alternative would be a segmentation of player space, where people who don't own the expansion suddenly could barely play against anybody anymore (because everybody else does have the expansion).
What you can try in your particular case, for minimizing what you have to download: Since you appear to own a physical-media version of both DoW2 and Chaos Rising, you can try backing up the data it has downloaded at the time being, in case you want to go back. It should be in this directory:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dawn of war 2
After you have backed up everything in there, delete all local content of DoW2 in Steam (this will delete this folder and an index file in the steamapps directory), and put Steam into offline mode. Then install the original game, after that, install Chaos Rising. With this, you should now have most, if not all, of that added model data and whatnot. As a sidenote, owners of DoW2 did not have to download anything in addition to the patched version of the original game when Chaos Rising was unlocked - all the game content is in there, what changes is to what content different players have access. So if that actually works, you should then be able to put Steam back into online mode, and you should only have very little data to download left.
I'm not 100% sure if everything works this way, since I don't own a physical-media version myself, although I did juggle with steam apps like this before. Thus if things don't work out, just exit Steam, copy the backup back in place, restart Steam, and tell Steam to "Verify integrity of game cache" - it's in the right click properties of the game, "Local Files" tab. This should get Steam to realize what data it has, and make it continue from the 63% of the patch you have downloaded now.
Good luck :)
Thanks, haslo! I actually don't have Chaos Rising, but the procedure you described might come in handy if I ever do get it.
I also only have a physical copy of DOW II in that I bought the game from THQ's online store, and downloaded the install files, a la Direct2Drive (I was able to download them at work, so's not to add to my at-home data usage). But I think as pertains to what you were describing, it's the same difference.
"I didn't come to play...I came to win. Now let's play." - Philip J. Fry
Yeah, I think it's just a general wonkiness in steam, I've noticed similar things before.
AFAIK there is essentially no difference between the physical copies or DoW2 and download versions. It's like the Orange Box in that it is basically a Steam data pack. The game, once installed, goes directly into steam and requires an update to verify the key and patch the game.
I do see that the way Relic does patching is beneficial to most of the player base, sadly, for me specifically it makes the game inaccessible.
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Mystic Violet wrote: