[HN Gopher] Steam now allows you to copy games over a local netw...
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Steam now allows you to copy games over a local network to another
PC
Author : FinnKuhn
Score : 135 points
Date : 2023-02-18 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Long ago I had setup lancache for this purpose, which is strictly
| inferior. Not only can chunks be evicted from cache, but it
| seemed like there were a lot of cache misses even when testing
| re-downloading the same game.
|
| Though lancache does still have one plus over this method: when I
| boot from Linux to Windows there's still a chance I might not
| have to re-download chunks.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| I wonder if the image in the tweet was made by an AI?
| [deleted]
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Oh YES. For a family of pc gamers, this is a huge improvement!
| nathias wrote:
| steam deck is really making a lot of improvements on the whole pc
| gaming environment
| aquova wrote:
| They've been rumored to be working on this for some time; I think
| it's an excellent feature. I know people who live in areas with
| poor internet speed, and this type of thing is a godsend. It may
| seem simple to people on here how to simply transfer game files
| or set up a network cache, but to many users it's akin to dark
| magic.
| _dain_ wrote:
| I thought you could always do this?
| stodor89 wrote:
| Good, another 500 years like that and modern gaming may reach
| feature parity with 2002 gaming.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| We need Indie games to work on this. Triple A studios won't
| tolerate it. Probably going to be very cheap to make indie
| games soon, with cheap generative AI.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Most indie games I know of can just be copied. In fact, many
| indie games on steam can just be copied because they contain
| no drm at all.
| ninepoints wrote:
| Why do you feel the need to write this
| [deleted]
| CyanBird wrote:
| Because the lack of generalized Lan is exceedingly
| frustrating throughout the landscape of video games
|
| It really is a problem
| bobmaxup wrote:
| I can see what you are getting at, but does that really apply
| here?
| okamiueru wrote:
| I'm not OP. but, yes?
|
| Steam is DRM. Before DRM, this process was solved very easily
| by copying over files.
|
| What this adds is convenience. Which, I suppose is OK. But,
| in many ways, "buying games" used to come with some
| flexibility that we gave up for convenience.
|
| I don't think OP suggest what valve is doing is a bad move.
| Just that, nostalgically, it used to be quite good. But,
| nothing stops us from buying games on GoG instead, and just
| copying over install files the "good old way" either.
| gambiting wrote:
| But.....you still can just "copy over files" if you really
| want to bring over the good old 2002-like flow. Just copy
| over files from another machine, then start the install
| process, steam will realize it already has all the files
| and will finish instantly, done. I've done this many times.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Hm, that is true. Good point. I suppose this is just a
| nice thing then :). Maybe OP wasn't aware that you could
| do this without steam complaining.
| NBJack wrote:
| Steam does not enforce digital rights management unless the
| distributer wants it. Many games that can be executed from
| their own directories without Steam even active agree with
| this. Steam is first and foremost a software distribution
| platform.
|
| This copying concept has actually been possible by hand for
| some time, whether by using the Backup feature or by way of
| just copying data from the commons directory of the
| installation.
| DRW_ wrote:
| >Steam is DRM.
|
| This is false. Steam offers OPTIONAL DRM. There are plenty
| of DRM free games on Steam.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Before DRM, this process was solved very easily by
| copying over files._
|
| Before Steam, the game would just yell you to insert the CD
| after you copied over the files.
| tmtvl wrote:
| And inevitably CDs would become unreadable or lost and
| one could no longer play the game. I remember one of my
| Baldur's Gate 2 CDs having a crack from the centre to the
| edge after suffering an unfortunate fall.
| adra wrote:
| The only way this was true was when cracks were a thing.
| Most games had some sort of copy protection before (and
| often after) steam. I couldn't imagine a community of
| idiots downloading untrusted exes these days...
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| Very magnanimous.
| trissylegs wrote:
| I remember when my Girlfriend and I were play Elder scrolls
| Online. I was really short on disk space at the time. (The
| download was also huge)
|
| So I just set up a network share on her computer for it and
| launched it from a network mapped drive.
|
| It just worked. I was kinda surprised. But I guess if the devs
| don't do anything fancy there's no reason it shouldn't work.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Bring back DS download play! Maybe one day they'll let you play
| with others who don't have the game, using this to install a
| temporary multiplayer-only copy...
|
| EDIT: Of course they already have something similar,
| https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay. So "one day" might be
| sooner than I thought
| Natsu wrote:
| Huh, I was just thinking of that myself, but I didn't know
| Steam already had this feature. It's a great idea and something
| I'd like to make more use of.
| e4e5 wrote:
| Steam remote play?
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| that isn't quite the same, ds download play sent a small
| multiplayer-only to the guest device, independent of the host
| device. Remote play merely streams your whole session over.
|
| The only thing close for the PC market I can think of is It
| Takes Two and its "Friends Pass"
| crtasm wrote:
| Operation Tango is another example of a free install for
| player 2.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| funny thing is I could always do this with cracked games... and
| much more
| spiritplumber wrote:
| did that stop working at some point?
| Baeocystin wrote:
| No, it still works. I do exactly that regularly. It's
| particularly useful if you're playing around with mods- you
| keep a vanilla copy of the game folder on standby so that you
| can pave over your mistakes with ease.
| StreamBright wrote:
| I am more and more inclined to purchase things that I can hold in
| my hand or have it in the room with me and does not require
| internet connection to function.
| grujicd wrote:
| So this feature seems to be target to family sharing PCs? I
| really hate Steam's family sharing. It seemed a great idea. I
| could purchase some games for kids on my account and they could
| play on their separate PC. I fully expected that I can't run same
| game on two PCs if I purchased just a single license. What I
| totally didn't expect was that if kid is playing any single game
| from my library, I can't play anything else on my PC! Two
| entirely different games, with two full paid licenses can't be
| played at the same time.
|
| This policy moved Steam from "oh it's so convenient" to "ugh, I
| won't purchase anything ever again on the Steam". Yes, I could
| create a new account but then I'm locked out form all the games I
| already purchased.
|
| Now if I'm buying a game the first thing I'm looking is if
| there's is a non-Steam version.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| This happens for any game that requires you to be online. So
| I'll note that it shouldn't be a problem if it's a single
| player game.
| photoGrant wrote:
| No it seems to target having the game on your PC then wanting
| to install it on your Steam Deck.
| rstupek wrote:
| I can play if I'm in offline mode without an issue when my son
| plays on his computer. Have you tried that?
| chaostheory wrote:
| Why not just disable Family Share instead?
| [deleted]
| Thiez wrote:
| Back in the day (must be 15 years ago?) at lan parties we would
| share steam game files locally if someone already had it
| installed. If the files were present locally in the correct
| forder, the client would be smart enough to skip to verifying the
| download.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > If the files were present locally in the correct forder, the
| client would be smart enough to skip to verifying the download.
|
| It still is; I just replaced the boot drive in my PC, pointed
| Steam at my already-installed library (on a secondary drive)
| and installed the games with no downloads necessary (other than
| updates for some games).
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember CD games where it was MUCH faster to copy the
| install directory over the network than wait for the installed
| to decompress everything. And then a quick repair and you were
| good to go.
| piperswe wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's still the case, I don't recall them
| making any change that would break it
| dmonitor wrote:
| Yeah, this is just Steam doing it automatically for you
| Ekaros wrote:
| There is and has been also option to make backups from steam
| games. And then install those on other machines.
| misnome wrote:
| I remember spawn installs!
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation - games came
| with the ability to install multiple multiplayer-only copies so
| that you only needed one copy of the game to play. This was
| invaluable for LAN parties but also families - this list
| certainly dominated the games that I played with my siblings.
|
| It so often feels like things are moving backward <Old man
| continues to yell at clouds>.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I definitely remember seeing the "spawn install" option from
| the StarCraft CD and just assuming it was something to do
| with the comic book character.
| NotACop182 wrote:
| Oh the good old days warcraft 2 I believe also did this.
| Still waiting for the next installation. WC4.
| danaris wrote:
| I think WoW is supposed to be WC4 through...10? 12? not
| sure how many expacs it's had now...
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| It's a completely different kind of game, just set in the
| same universe.
| trissylegs wrote:
| Steam is pretty robust. If delete everything but steam.exe and
| the steamapps dir. Launching steam.exe will basically just
| reinstall steam in place and have all your Games there.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| We would ask everyone to have the game installed and updated
| before they arrive, however inevitably the events would turn
| into "install parties". I still miss those days, though; if
| nothing else because I had more time and patience.
| sowbug wrote:
| Why wasn't this functionality ever baked into the web? HEAD
| requests could return a SHA hash of the content, and browsers
| would check peers before issuing a GET for the remote resource.
| capableweb wrote:
| If you read some of the original documents about the web,
| you'll see that it was one of the ideas. It never made it
| further than being an idea though.
|
| Although IPFS seems to want to implement something like that,
| and probably much easier to do in a content-addressable way
| (like IPFS). So content has a hash, and as long as you trust
| the source of the hash, you can download the content of a hash
| from anywhere, even your drunk and slightly annoying neighbor
| that you don't actually trust, because you can verify that you
| got the right bytes after all.
|
| Bittorrent does it for transfers already, and it works alright,
| so why not for the web too?
| _dain_ wrote:
| isn't that just bittorrent?
| 7steps2much wrote:
| I mean ... At that point you could just include a caching/proxy
| layer at your router.
| fbrchps wrote:
| The security implications of "find me another device on this
| network who has gone to a specific page" are immense. Not to
| mention accessing account-related information due to improper
| no-cache headers on the website.
| ruined wrote:
| there are plenty of more plausible misconfiguration risks
| that we accept, or consider the operators responsible. i'm
| not sure why you would take issue with this one.
|
| additionally, content-addressing provides another layer of
| security beyond location addressing. even improperly cached
| information is as secure as your hashing algorithm.
| [deleted]
| amaccuish wrote:
| Because that would effectively broadcast your browsing history
| to the LAN.
| WJW wrote:
| Seems like it would only work in a very benign network
| environment. The first thing 4chan would do is to write a
| "peer" that answers yes for every SHA it gets and then sends
| over porn instead. Hope all your network software re-verifies
| the hash for every file you get! There is also the massive
| privacy leak of asking for the SHA of a certain file only found
| on specific websites and then seeing who has it.
|
| HTTP is just inherently server-client, decreasing load on
| servers by sharing between clients was not a design goal.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Which peers? Connected how?
|
| Sounds simple, but number of cases where this would happen is
| likely pretty low.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That doesn't work with dynamic pages. A simple timestamp change
| would invalidate the hash between HEAD and GET.
| ffhhj wrote:
| In the meanwhile Steam's "backup and restore games" option
| doesn't really work, games are redownloaded anyways. The only way
| around is copying from steamapps both the game's folder and its
| appmanifest file.
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