New CDS: I have 500+ game on Steam, please don't make me update all of them manually!

[Purple Tentacle]

I woke up this morning to a long list of Steam games sitting in the "Downloads" section, all paused.

After manually clicking on resume I'm getting the "Game content conversion" message, which needs to be manually confirmed. Then there is a lengthy conversion process during which time the Steam client can't be used in any way, then there is another dialog.

So Steam essentially forced me to

1. Click "Resume"
2. Click "OK"
3. Wait a few minutes, can't do other things on Steam
4. Click "OK" again

roughly a dozen times.

At least if I want to keep my "Downloads" list clean and my installed games in an updated and playable state that also works in offline mode.

I have no problems with the new CDS, I'm looking forward to it and its benefits. I also have no problem with older games being converted.

But please, give me an option to let this conversion happen automatically in the background and without having to confirm every single conversion manually.

What's the point in asking anyways, if I don't actually have a choice and if you're holding my games to ransom until I do the conversion?
Just do it and stop making it into a chore for me!

[Purple Tentacle]

P.S.: Two games didn't even "survive" the conversion process. Hard Reset had to be partially redownloaded and Sanctum in its entirety.

[aiusepsi]

The conversion process is basically identical to a cache verification. It's potentially CPU and disk intensive, so I'm guessing that's why they require user intervention. Otherwise you'd have people complaining about Steam suddenly using lots of CPU and thrashing the disk for no obvious reason!

As those two games were basically being verified, that bits of them are being redownloaded implies that they were either not up to date, or were corrupt.

[Ledow]

I had to do this recently when I moved to a new laptop and brought over my old Steam folders - it wanted to re-verify all the games (obviously) and though I had them all on disk, it wanted to convert them to the new format. Most of them I'd not run in ages so it would have asked me to do that when I played them anyway.

It was a pain, but every time I played a game, I just did 5 or 10 and got through my whole archive in under two days. And, yes, one or two wanted to do content updates too but nothing too drastic.

But, as has been said, while doing it, it really slags the hard disk - I'd be most annoyed if Steam just started doing that for no reason for all the games that I haven't played in years but still have installed. So it has to be manually triggered.

Your problem, like mine, was more a kind of OCD at not being able to just leave those games in that state until you actually want to play them - you just want your games list to be "clean". And it doesn't take much if you just do a few games a night and let it churn through them when you run off to the bathroom.

[Purple Tentacle]

Originally posted by aiusepsi:

As those two games were basically being verified, that bits of them are being redownloaded implies that they were either not up to date, or were corrupt.

This is not true. All my games are being kept automacially up to date. And after the free DLC upgrade I verified my Hard Reset files several times. There hasn't been an update since, or any form of "corruption".

The re-download did not occur due to any issues on my end, but due to issues with the conversion process. This was most likely due to a sloppy conversion of these two games to the new CDS on Valve's or the developer's end.

But I have fast and unlimited Internet, this doesn't bother me - at least it's doing the downloads in the background without preventing me from doing other things.

Originally posted by Ledow:

Your problem, like mine, was more a kind of OCD at not being able to just leave those games in that state until you actually want to play them - you just want your games list to be "clean". And it doesn't take much if you just do a few games a night and let it churn through them when you run off to the bathroom.

Beyond being a simple OCD issue, and I admit that I prefer an empty downloads list and a games list that isn't full of "update waiting" messages, it has other implications:
Not fully updates games cannot be played in offline mode. In order to be able to launch these games at your own discretion, you need to update them. One by one, manually and painfully.


I fully understand the reasoning behind the dialog (heavy disk activity), but I'm at least hoping for an option to do this whole messy process without my contant supervision. Heck, give me an option to manually do it for all the games in my "Download" window waiting for an update instead of each individual game and I'll be happy enough.

[Purple Tentacle]

Oh, great ... more games requiring my manual approval and redownloading. Full re-download of Trine 2, almost full for Dungeon Defenders, partial for Defense Grid and "converting" The Witcher is taking forever ...

Again, not complaining about the re-downloads, I'm sure there is a technical reason for them, but don't blame them on "corruption" or "missing updates" on my end - they are part of the conversion process.

And just give me an option to let Steam do its thing without me having to approve every single conversion. I have no choice but to approve if I want to keep playing me games, so why ask me hundreds of times and waste my time?

[Scorcher24]

The only thing I didn't like was that the conversion did not show up for me until I deleted all files except steamapps, steam.exe etc to force a refresh when I had some problems.
Then I had to convert about 20 installed games, which made me sit there for like 2 hours doing nothing else.

I wish it would tell you when you launch Steam which games need converting.

[aiusepsi]

You mentioned Dungeon Defenders as an example of a game that was dowoading again.

That was switched to the new content system on the 8th of June, with update 7.37. Your Dungeon Defenders is updating because it hasn't been patched at all in 4 months.

http://forums.trendyent.com/archive/index.php/t-65662.html?s=3f9c8f9795240c781a3f208f18b82344

Same with your other games. Because you haven't done the conversion yet, your games are versions behind what's current. Hence the downloading.

[Purple Tentacle]

My Dungeon Defenders was set to "Always keep this game up to date", like all of my games. But I haven't played it in the last four months and it apparently only decided to start the conversion yesterday (with a giant list of other games).

I did, however, play Hard Reset for example. I knew it was up to date and that there officially weren't any patches in a while and that all files were checked in and out. It still re-downloaded a huge chunk after the conversion.

If any games weren't converted or updated, it was Steam's fault, not mine. You're essentially making my point for me: I want this to happen in the background, without my intervention - that's how I set up Steam.

[aiusepsi]

I was just pointing out that it's nothing to do with the conversion per se. "Conversion" is a bad word really because nothing at all happens to the actual game files. They're just check summed to see if they match the latest version. If they're redownloading, it's because a file failed that check. I'm not blaming you; there's all sorts of reasons why that could happen, from common-or-garden files being out of date, all the way through to a cosmic ray flipping a bit on your hard disc at the improbable end (worryingly, this actually does happen).

I already explained why this process isn't done in the background; like any verification, it's CPU/disk intensive, and it's not so great to do that in the background. People don't like it when a background app starts chewing up resources for apparently no reason. We're in the realm of least bad options rather than having good options.

Luckily this only has to be done once per game, and it'll be significantly better in the long run, but it is essentially a trade-off. This bit sucks, but it means smaller patches, more features and better client performance in the future.

(As a sidebar, although DunDef was set to automatically update, all the new updates were being delivered on the new content system, so it couldn't get any updates while it was unconverted.)

[Purple Tentacle]

Yes, I understand the processes behind the "conversion" (for lack of a better word). It is still vastly different from the classic file verification check, since it is - as far as I know - using a very different hash algorithm to allow for delta patches.

Again, I understand the decision behind not doing it as a background process, but please understand that for some people the impact of this is quite a bit more severe than for others.

Originally posted by aiusepsi:

Luckily this only has to be done once per game

Yes, luckily I only need to click, wait several minutes of not being able to do anything on Steam, click again 385 times - the amount of currently installed games - lucky me. I have to disagree with you, that that's a fully acceptable trade-off so that there really is no need for an option to do it in the bloody background. Or at least an option to do out for all currently outstanding games and not having to manually trigger and interact for every single one.

(As a sidebar, although DunDef was set to automatically update, all the new updates were being delivered on the new content system, so it couldn't get any updates while it was unconverted.)

I understand that as well, you're really not telling me anything new here. But that's even more worrisome, why on earth did the update only show up recently? How many other games are currently in an unplayable state even though I explicitly told Steam to keep them up to date? For all I know offline mode currently only works for the handful of games I already painstakingly "converted" (that's the terminology Steam uses, deal with it) because they showed up in an "update paused" state inside the client and none of the others ...

... another reason to at least allow for batch conversion for all games that currently need it.

[Toliman]

I can understand Steam tm (or the people who actually develop the client) not wanting to auto-mangle game client data without notifying people in advance, but it's already doing this for people all the time.

Dungeon Defenders, the largest file in the folder is probably 100mb, it updated 4gb... and while I can understand all of the updates being queued under the new system, it's odd. Civ 5 wasn't that large.

but the issue is, i have 600 games.

I don't know which games have stopped updating.
I don't know which games need updating.
i can only check one game at a time
i can only check one game, by opening a properties panel
each game takes a minimum of 40 seconds to 6 minutes to process.

i can't use steam for anything else while it's validating those files, including the playing of games.

even if i was diligent, and there was a list of say 60 titles, 10% of what i had...

if 10% of my games needed updating, that's 45 minutes to 8 hours just spent checking known titles at 1-10 minutes each.

checking the remainder of titles for a silent change in auto-update status, takes 20 seconds.
checking the auto-update status of 540 titles, at 20 seconds a time, would take 3+ hours.

checking if the content is valid for 540 titles, manually, with an average time scale of 2 minutes each, would take 18 hours.

at least putting a new icon or a status colour on titles that need updating would be preferable to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around with the long way around, not knowing if the game is currently playable, until you play it.

[ThaMunsta]

Has anyone discovered a way to manually force the conversion process without launching games?

[treats]

Since this thread was necro'd anyways...
I just had to convert my game files for L4D2 . I've got horribly slow internet (capped at 352kb/s, which in reality means 60kb/s download speeds), and it took me 13 hours to finish converting the game files for just L4D2. (Most of it was 'Updating Files', which I think meant it was downloading stuff...). I woke up in the morning thinking that I could finally play L4D2, but then it hits me that I have to redownload L4D2 - all 13.8 gigabytes of it.

At the moment I've sat through 2 hours of downloading, only reached 8%.

I'm hoping it doesn't have to do this for Portal 2 and TF2 as well. They're both on 'Update Paused' at the moment, I hope it doesn't tell me to convert the game files again.

it's frustrating enough that 'Validating Game Files' takes a whole hour to complete.

[𝖅𝖊𝖓𝖎𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖘]

I have a similar problem. 100+ games, and I'm getting this message. Makes me reluctant to actually keep games on my drive, and instead just download them when I want to play them - a frustrating thought, since Aussie internet is capped by download limit.

Which means that L4D2 takes two -months- to fully download on my internet plan. Which combined with no good information about download sizes (since some games only install a downloader for third-party download, a la Fable III for example) destroys purchase confidence.

NB: I have a fairly high-spec machine, so 'conversions' of games like Audiosurf shouldn't take as long as they do - my CPU isn't even warm from this.