Sharing Game Downloads between PCs on the same network.

[BeyondAeon]

I live in a country with Data caps - this is not fun

I have 2 comptuers in my living room (and 4 comptuers with steam installed in total)
When I have a game and want it on both computers, I have to download it once , back it up , and restore it.
and then game updates Download Twice.
Could there be a way (Linked with family share maybe) that allowed 1 PC to share Installed games and game updates with other PCs on it's own subnet.

( PC requests through steam servers that other PCs (logged in) with the game talk to it opens port, other PC tries to connect to local ip and port give through the steam server , if it finds the expected PC running steam with teh right username etc it shares the game files.
The origonal PC requesting the game then does a validate on files received. )

This would speed up user downloads and reduce server overhead for Valve.

[Black Blade]

These was suggested before, may be best to support older treads then make a new tread on these
And i do think that be a great idea if Valve add it

[[BT] ogsixer]

What stops you from copying the game dir to the other pc using your own lan? If you have homegroups setup, this very simple.

[BeyondAeon]

Originally posted by BT ogsixer:

What stops you from copying the game dir to the other pc using your own lan? If you have homegroups setup, this very simple.

I do this , but then the games update , and I cannot play them without 200+ MB downloads to each PC

[mayhem]

While setting up a Shared Network folder is plausible, it wouldn't be viable for a few reasons:

* Your network is almost certainly quite a bit slower than the SATA ports on your mobo or even USB. Trying to load a game from the Network would take a long time.

* If multiple people are trying to play the same game, that load time would take even longer since they're both accessing the same source files.

* Similarly to above, just in general, the more people trying to access that shared games folder, the more the bandwidth has to be shared and will slow everything down.

* I could imagine Windows' security request for shared (game) system files turning into a nightmare.

It would be a nice option for 2 Steam accounts on the same network be able to to automatically copy the necessary file data from each other.

[76561198178218382]

ghbdtn

[John Marlboro]

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[MrDieAlotZA]

Would a fast NAS help in this regard? With two Gigabit ports Teamed, could an iScsi solution work?

I am looking for a way to share ARK files between two good computers, my ARK instance, with Mods, are close to 100Gb.

[JD777]

Originally posted by BeyondAeon:

Originally posted by BT ogsixer:

What stops you from copying the game dir to the other pc using your own lan? If you have homegroups setup, this very simple.

I do this , but then the games update , and I cannot play them without 200+ MB downloads to each PC

So here is what I did awhile back when I was using my friends computer to play my Steam games.

Make sure to not have Steam running on the secondary computer that you are copying the files too.

 
1.Right click on the game I want to copy to the other computer and select "Create Desktop Shortcut". 

2.Find the shortcut on the desktop and right click on it and select "Properties". Than copy the number at the end of the URL in properties window to a blank notepad file. (Example :The game Terraria will look like this "steam://rungameid/225260" = 225260).Close Properties window and delete the shortcut if you dont want it anymore.

3.Right click on the game I want to copy to the other computer and select "Properties" and navigate to the "LOCAL FILES" tab and click on "BROWSE LOCAL FILES..." button.

4. When the file explorer window opens go back one folder to the "common" folder and right click on the games folder and select copy.Copy it to the other computers Steam folder (Steam\steamapps\common).

5. Go back to the "Steam\steamapps\common" folder from step 4 and go back one more folder to "Steam\steamapps" and find the file "appmanifest_######.acf" replace the "####" with the number from step 2 (Example :The game Terraria will look like appmanifest_225260.acf ).Copy this file to the other computers "Steam\steamapps" folder.

6.Start up Steam on the secondary computer and select install for the game you copied. It will say something about "discovering existing game files" (paraphrasing). 

7. If the game updates on one of the computers you are using just copy the same file"appmanifest_######.acf" and game folder to the computer that was not updated yet (Steam should not be on on the computer copying files too) and start Steam and it should not bother you for a update on the second computer.

Hope this helps.