So yesterday I have a few minutes and I want to play Defense Grid. So I fire it up and not only does it update Steam, but then it launches into a large update of Defense Grid. My time goes away and I don't get to play.

So today, I want to play DG again. And again it launches into another large update.

THIS SUCKS. Steam should present the option of playing or updating. Or better yet, download the updates to some random folder so you can PLAY WHILE IT'S DOWNLOADING and then copy/paste or whatever with the update when you're done.

Anyone else having trouble with lots of updating with your Steam games?

Steam released an update to the beta UI to address the extraneous downloads, so hopefully it won't happen again?

I've been having some interesting issues with steam and it opening up all of it's windows for no reason

Steam has always done that for me. Every time I try to play a game, it has to download some huge update and by the time it's done downloading and installing, I don't have time to play anymore (or sometimes I just don't want to play anymore).

To be fair, the game really kinda required that update, as they made significant changes to the game's leaderboards and steam integration.

That said, I leave steam running all the time, so it downloads overnight in the background, thus I'm never out of date. Plus, most of my games I play online, which would necessitate the latest version anyway.

I still haven't beat hl2 because every time I want to play it updates for a damn hour. Are they serving the update files through a damn 56k modem!?

You don't play very often, do you?

I download most of my updates at 500KB/s or faster

And Half-Life 2 doesn't exactly get updated often...

Edit: In fact, it hasn't been updated since 2006. I think you just don't even try, Brian.

Yeah, I don't think I've heard anyone ever complain about Steam speeds.

There has not been once on Steam where I didn't max out my connection. I remember after formatting when I was installing 4 games simultaneously I was getting 1MB/s on each.

And yeah, I never leave my Steam running but HL2 updates are far and few between nowadays. Every time I've downloaded it on my Boot Camp partition I've hardly had to update.

Yeah Brian you need to run Steam every once in a while otherwise it won't be able to fetch patches in the background.

oh **** guys, this game I never update says it needs to update

Okay, I looked on the steam forum for Defense Grid, and apparently they rolled out some new content, which was one of the updates. Then they realized it had a bug in it that took away all our progress in the game, so they rolled it back (update #2). I'm guessing they fixed the bug, because the stupid game is updating YET AGAIN. :-P

Yeah, I don't play often. I still should have a choice whether I upgrade, it shouldn't be forced on me. ****, even MS doesn't force updates.

You do have a choice, it's called offline mode.

Offline mode only works if you start steam in online mode first, and even then It might think something needed an update before it went offline.

You can set games to manually update to make it work.

the demo changes are to fix a hack that lets you use the zero gear demo to play mw2 online

Have steam run on startup so it keeps everything updated.

One of todays updates is: Really fixed offline mode.

On a side note, it's starting to look like Steam will be released for the Mac soon.

I just reinstalled OSX, so it looks like I'm gonna be front and center when it drops.

I bet Source games run at a max of 75% the framerate the Windows versions do. I honestly think it'll be closer to 50% but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sweet, I can run 4 Source games in OS X on my MacBook Pro now!

Or I can continue to play them on my desktop that's a bajillion times awesomer...

I just hope that the games run well on the Mac. As most mac games suck and really dont work too well, Bioshock on my Mac run just soooooo painfully slow.

Source games degrade and run rather well on slower hardware, so it'll probably run well, it just won't look as good.

Whenever I start steam without an internet connection it says "no connection available, start in offline mode?"

Offline mode has never worked right for me.

I don't think that many people are buying Macs for their gaming capabilities. However, it's nice for those of us that do occasionally play a game or two to have access to Steam. There are quite a few games that perform rather well on Macs. I don't personally care about Call of Duty 13 or Left For Dead 10. I didn't even play games like that when I had a really nice gaming PC. I used to spend thousands of dollars building computers to play Jedi Knight & Mysteries of the Sith (something that my brother used to play on his P1 75Mhz).

This is not as funny as you think it is. And there are only two Left 4 Deads. You can't even make a joke about there being a lot of them.

My theory is they will be announcing official support for Wine in Source engine, possible also for Steam, maybe a Steam native port. Source is already great with compatibility and since Wine implemented DX9 support (not sure how good it is, haven't used Wine since it only supported DX8) Valve may have decided the time was right to officially support Wine.

A little thing that backs up my theory is the switch to Webkit from IE in the Steam UI beta. Embedded ActiveX WebBrowser is more than slightly troublesome and a big hack to get working in Wine, plus you get Gecko and not Trident which can cause compatibility hiccups. With Webkit embedded directly in Steam that would not only make it portable to Mac (where before it would not have been possible) but could also make it run better in Wine I think.

Never as in "I tried in 2006 and gave up"?

Same.

Tibby was referring to Steam's need to verify and authenticate your games online before you can play them offline. Usually this data is stored so you only need to actually go online once (or perhaps periodically? I dunno I've never used it).

I wasn't trying to be funny. I wasn't making a joke. I was pointing out the fact that there are people like me that don't care about the latest & greatest graphics when there's literally hundreds of older gams that we haven't had a chance to play yet & it would be nice to have access to these games via Steam. I'm aware of how many Call of Duty & Left For Dead games there are because my brothers have all of them. Those were obviously used as examples of popular games w/ good graphics that I could care less about.