Games updating again after verifying.

[Chrius]

This is a weird issue that I noticed started happening this week.

Basically every time there's a new update to a game, steam downloads it, then I try playing it and it works perfectly. Then, if I close and reopen steam, it will download the same update again. (and it will work fine after that too).

After noticing this I tried verifying the game files to see if there was any issue with it. After verifying it, the same patch was redownloaded (it was the same size, it looks like it's always the last patch released). The game played fine after that, and after restarting steam, the same patch redownloaded again.

This only happens after there's a new patch released, or after I verify the files. After the second download, steam stops trying to redownload it.

I tested it with multiple games, in different drives, it always happens.
I also tried clearing my download cache and switched to the steam beta client to see if anything would happen, but the issue still occurs.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing it, and also if there's any way to fix this?

[Iceira]

Make steam Ticket, no ticket then steam dont have a problem with it.

im sure, you can see logic in this, if you have any lesser then 200gb, then it look like a crash and somehow windows and steam and its ways to recover free space trigger this.

and yet it happend everyday, for a new steam user, and why small boot disk is soon dead.
or steam make a buffer file with extra free space allocated to steam as warning buffer,

because most here dont have that refetch patch issue then free space is not a problem.

and why i said it many times 3 to 5 in DL size is required as workspace, just to be sure.

and sense games is past 50gb today thats 150gb and 100gb DL thats 300gb, and why user keep make mistake with system under 200gb free left.

and its not our job here to tell or educated ppl with lack of free space.

just so you get it , its ppl own faulth steam need to tell or slap ppl for no free space left,
whatever works for you, you can be told nicely or been told not enough free space left for system to even work, and that is windows system.

im sure steam know this, but again they might say not our problem people go under last 10% or use last 200gb free space left.

so yeah tecknicaly its not a steam problem and yet it is, then user might not know old advice we other learn from the past win7

ps.
in a few years its 500gb free ( game is soon past 100gb+ in DL and did you notice i said 3 to 5 ) and that did not explan dlc's, event or other game devs patch. or collection DL then main game store page point at 30gb storage info.

fallout4 GotY is 93gb

[Chrius]

I did open a ticket, however I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about with the rest of your post.

One of the games that I was testing this issue with is Stormworks. That game is less than 2GB, and I have 872GB free on the drive I have it installed.
In fact out of all my drives, the one with least free space still has 330GB free...

[Chrius]

Ok, I managed to fix it.
I had to reinstall the steam client and create new libraries on the other drives.

After moving my games from the old libraries to the new ones steam was working correctly again.

[Iceira]

Originally posted by Chrius:

Ok, I managed to fix it.
I had to reinstall the steam client and create new libraries on the other drives.

After moving my games from the old libraries to the new ones steam was working correctly again.

Whatever that was is odd, sounds like a crash, sense you need to rebuild or add steam library folder again.

next steam user try this.
steam://flushconfig ( do have login and PW rdy )

and repair steam Library folder from steam storage management
rest is per game "validate game intergrity of files.


and i told you this crash and things get removed, thats is steam and windows problem, and why i said you need to contact steam.

Box games that crash in old days did not remove content. ( you need a broken harddisk for that ) and why i told you let steam deal with it, you need to be real good at know past ways and steam faulthy ways now, plenty of steam user have mention things is gone or removed, and it all happned after crash, and no we dont know why as user here, it look like lack of free space, for most user, but somehow you dont fit that. and thats still a steam support issue.

[Chrius]

Well dang... it started again...
The games that were having this issue before are fine now, but games that received updates today are having the same issue as before...

The weirdest part is that it seems like steam is downloading the previous patch instead of the most current one.

Vampire Survivors for example was just updated to 0.11.401, after the patch downloaded, I started the game and it was on the correct version. After restarting steam, it was patched back to 0.11.306.
Verifying the game files would update it again to 0.11.401, but if I restart again, it goes back to 0.11.306.

I tried Repairing my library, but it didn't help, and flushconfig is the same as clearing the cache (I had done that before, but I did it again just in case). But the issue is still happening.

I closed my ticket when it seemed to be fixed yesterday, reopened it now and waiting for an answer...

[Chrius]

I ended up reinstalling windows 2 days ago to see if the issue would persist, and today it started again...

However I finally figured out the problem... DisplayMagician accesses and locks steams appinfo.vdf file while it's running. I'm guessing that's where steam keeps the update info for the games. Since it's not updated because the file is in use, steam reverts to the previous version when restarting.

Closing DisplayMagician allows steam to access the file and allows it to work correctly again.

What I don't know is why this problem randomly started last week, since I've had DisplayMagician running on startup for months and never had any issues before...

[Iceira]

Report it to steam so they know, but look like user own thirdpart app issue, but atleast it might help other steam user to understand, fiddle or change any steam files might trigger such. and why steam support should know.

[Chrius]

Originally posted by Iceira W10:

Report it to steam so they know, but look like user own thirdpart app issue, but atleast it might help other steam user to understand, fiddle or change any steam files might trigger such. and why steam support should know.

Yeah I added it to the ticket I had before I closed it.
I also added it as an issue on the DisplayMagician github to see if it can be fixed.

[terry.macdonald]

Hi, I'm the creator of DisplayMagician, and I can confirm this was a bug that has now been fixed. DisplayMagician wasn't correctly releasing a file handle, which meant that Steam couldn't update the file (and that's where it was wanting to make changes). If you update to the latest version of DisplayMagician then the Steam files will be released correctly and this issue won't occur.

Thanks
Terry

[Chrius]

I made this post before I opened the issue on github. I forgot I had made it :P