Suggestion for Steam: Add the ability to Sync folders between computers (saves/configs for non-steamcloud games)

[Mr. Lahey]

So I have loads of games on Steam, as most of you probably do, that I play across several machines. Steam-Cloud is a great service, but I hate that developers have to want to use it. For lots of older games, they'll likely never be updated to take advantage of it.

It would be great if Valve implemented a feature where you could choose to sync folders between two (or more) machines, so your saved games/configurations/etc would seamlessly follow you from computer to computer. So essentially like a legacy steam-cloud.

As of now, if you want to do this you have to use some 3rd party clunky software or copy them on to a USB drive and paste them onto another computer.

[SwooopyG]

How would the transfer work ?
If there is no cloud, its not possible ???

[Marble]

If you find other software solutions "clunky", what makes you think Valve will be able to do a better job?

[Mr. Lahey]

Originally posted by Skyline-R34:

How would the transfer work ?
If there is no cloud, its not possible ???

I'm not saying that it couldn't use Valves servers to store the files... so it could still be cloud based... but just not quite in the same way the current Steam-cloud works. I'm sure there a quite a few ways it could be achieved however. Be it via a server or even a P2P file transfer.

Originally posted by Canti:

If you find other software solutions "clunky", what makes you think Valve will be able to do a better job?

The only reason I find other solutions clunky is because you're having to install and configure 3rd party software on each machine. Having it all part of the Steam Service would be ideal... since it would be used for Steam games. It would be a far more elegant solution.

[SwooopyG]

As steam already has cloud service for game saves, I would suggest your issue would be that the actual game company themselves have not signed up for this service.

[Mr. Lahey]

Originally posted by Skyline-R34:

As steam already has cloud service for game saves, I would suggest your issue would be that the actual game company themselves have not signed up for this service.

That's exactly what the problem is (for Steam Games at least). I'm sure it's for a variety of reasons as well... devs not wanting to update an old game, maybe it's not in the budget to figure it out or possibly even don't care about adding the feature. A feature like this would also help users manage non-steam games as well (or those of us that like to use the Steam Launcher and Overlay for their entire library)

[Tev]

You would still have to specify where the non-Steam games' save files are, so you could upload them in the Cloud, for you to download them back from at next installation / other PC. Even then, it would not be automatic, because even if the non-Steam game was similarly titled on both PCs, the clients wouldn't consider them the same thing, non-Steam games do not have a GID.

The only GID non-Steam games have is with the screenshot folder, and those are locally generated GIDs by the remote or screenshots.vdf -files. Which means removing either will screw whatever non-Steam game screenshots you have on the screenshot manager.

I understand that you're trying to say you don't want to use 3rd party programs like Dropbox to place your vital-for-game-saves My Documents / %appdata% -folders in.

However, ultimately you'd not be able to tie save -games with a non-Steam -game to upload and download from Steam Cloud. You'd have to upload & download the save files separate, which would allow all kinds of other file sharing.

Simply put, you'd do the uploading & downloading MANUALLY, which isn't any different from how you handle things on Dropbox. Only Valve doesn't want Steam Cloud to be abused with files that don't belong there.

[SwooopyG]

Originally posted by DrSTEVIL ~RD~:

Originally posted by Skyline-R34:

As steam already has cloud service for game saves, I would suggest your issue would be that the actual game company themselves have not signed up for this service.

That's exactly what the problem is (for Steam Games at least). I'm sure it's for a variety of reasons as well... devs not wanting to update an old game, maybe it's not in the budget to figure it out or possibly even don't care about adding the feature. A feature like this would also help users manage non-steam games as well (or those of us that like to use the Steam Launcher and Overlay for their entire library)

if they dont agree to the current cloud, why would they agree to a new one ?

[Tev]

Originally posted by Skyline-R34:

Originally posted by DrSTEVIL ~RD~:

That's exactly what the problem is (for Steam Games at least). I'm sure it's for a variety of reasons as well... devs not wanting to update an old game, maybe it's not in the budget to figure it out or possibly even don't care about adding the feature. A feature like this would also help users manage non-steam games as well (or those of us that like to use the Steam Launcher and Overlay for their entire library)

if they dont agree to the current cloud, why would they agree to a new one ?

He's saying it'd be manual-Steam-Cloud-entries, which is never going to happen for various reasons.

[Mr. Lahey]

Originally posted by Teutep:

You would still have to specify where the non-Steam games' save files are, so you could upload them in the Cloud, for you to download them back from at next installation / other PC. Even then, it would not be automatic, because even if the non-Steam game was similarly titled on both PCs, the clients wouldn't consider them the same thing, non-Steam games do not have a GID.

The only GID non-Steam games have is with the screenshot folder, and those are locally generated GIDs by the remote or screenshots.vdf -files. Which means removing either will screw whatever non-Steam game screenshots you have on the screenshot manager.

I understand that you're trying to say you don't want to use 3rd party programs like Dropbox to place your vital-for-game-saves My Documents / %appdata% -folders in.

However, ultimately you'd not be able to tie save -games with a non-Steam -game to upload and download from Steam Cloud. You'd have to upload & download the save files separate, which would allow all kinds of other file sharing.

Simply put, you'd do the uploading & downloading MANUALLY, which isn't any different from how you handle things on Dropbox. Only Valve doesn't want Steam Cloud to be abused with files that don't belong there.

That makes sense about the abuse of other file types and there would really be nothing they could do to stop it, however, if it was setup as a peer 2 peer service, would they really care what you were syncing between machines since they'd never have to touch or store the data?

As for the syncing issue, I don't think it would be that big of a deal. Since both computers would be running Steam, there would be a service monitoring the specified files/folders on both computers, and once it saw them as having different time stamps, it would use the latest save date to overwrite the older versions.

It's not nearly as nice as having native Steam Cloud support (especially since you'd have to setup everything manually), but it's still better than nothing for unsupported games... especially now that Valve is trying to push Steam Machines in the living room. I think you're right though, we'll likely never see it.

[Marble]

If youre going to have to manually specify the location of every save, it may as well be done with something like Skydrive or Google Drive. These already work. If you're that opposed to 3rd party software, use Windows built-in sync tools to my to a network share.

[Tev]

Peer 2 Peer service would work, but you can do that on the Windows side already, with no requirement for any 3rd party software. Also, while I might be wrong, I don't think Steam has any administrative controls over that.

And, if they went the Dropbox route uploading it on the Cloud, it would be on Steam's servers, therefore they'd store the data. Would it be a legit file, or an illegal file with a different file extension (given it's limited), would still be too abusable a system.

As far as the synching goes. non-Steam game Game ID differs on one PC from the other's, even if it was titled the same (locally generated). The paths could be stored, yup - so it shows that the other file path is obsolete, but that might not work on just reformatted computers, where an older entry might still display as a newer one - simply due to re-creation of the said path.

It really depends on the situation, but it gets kinda too tacky and would just introduce a set of new problems.

[TeKraken]

Originally posted by Canti:

If youre going to have to manually specify the location of every save, it may as well be done with something like Skydrive or Google Drive. These already work. If you're that opposed to 3rd party software, use Windows built-in sync tools to my to a network share.

I use skydrive and gamesave-manager[www.gamesave-manager.com] (which has a cloud option).

[motz]

i use softlinks and dropbox to handle that

[HeLivesByTheEwoks]

Something like drop box would be nice! ... when making projects it would be helpfull...

[RiderUp]

I've been working on a way to build this DIY solution using SkyDrive and some batch folders. While creating the batch files to copy the data between the game folder and a cloud-synced folder isn't a big deal, I am having trouble incorporating that process into a Steam launch.

I'm looking to do either one of two things. One option would be to specify scripts that I want called before and after Steam launches a game. The other option would be replace the game launch command with a new command that does the sync and calls the game launcher.

I thought the latter might be easiest, and just rename the game.exe to gameLaunch.exe and then save my batch file / script as game.exe so that Steam would call it instead. So far it's not working for me.

Here's one I'm working on for the game FlatOut2 on a Windows machine. It's got a couple bugs to iron out, but you can see where I'm going with this...

@echo off

Rem Setup:
Rem Rename the FlatOut2.exe file to FlatOut2Game.exe
Rem Rename this batch file to FlatOut2.exe and place it in the game folder

Rem Create the SteamHack\FlatOut2 subfolder(s) in your cloud sync home folder
Rem Change the following variable to match the new path in your cloud sync folder

Set SYNCPATH=%USERPROFILE%\SkyDrive\SteamHack\FlatOut2

Rem First backup the local .sav files. Twice. 
Rem Versions may be preserved in the cloud app too, but I do like my backups.

Del .\Savegame\*.bak
Ren .\Savegame\*.bac .\Savegame\*.bak
Ren .\Savegame\*.sav .\Savegame\*.bac

Rem Copy the .sav files down from the cloud.

copy "%SYNCPATH%\*.sav" .\Savegame\

Rem Now call the renamed game executable and wait for it to terminate.

rem Start /W FlatOut2.exe
Start /w steam://rungameid/2990

Rem Once the game closes, copy the .sav files to the cloud and overwrite the ones that are there.

copy /Y .\Savegame\*.sav "%SYNCPATH%\FlatOut2"

Rem Pause for a few seconds so you can see the window before it closes.

rem ping localhost -n 5 > nul

pause