Steam LAN Sync - needed

[Virtual Insanity]

Hi, just got in front of my PC and realized Left 4 Dead 2 is updating, 8 gig.
It was going slowly, so i investigated.
Seems it is also updating on 3 other Steam accounts in the family home here.

So a total of 4 x 8Gig = 32Gig, @ 6mbit/s = 13 hours updating 1 game.

I propose something along the lines of DropBox's 'lansync' feature.

Allow the clients on a local network to communicate with each other and have 1 client update from the steam servers, and the other clients update from it.
Alternately a cache of some sort (does squid work for Steam?) on the local network might also work.


I have manually canceled the downloads on the other machines for now, and will restore from a backup later.

I'd dissalow auto updating, only each account here has a different mix of games.
So not really an ideal solution.
Would prefer not to manually veto updates as then nothing would automatically be 'ready to go' when we next sit down to game.

[Satoru]

Copy the steam apps folder across the LAN

[Fretlon Hor]

I second this. It should be trivial for Steam to detect other running Steam clients on the local LAN and if a download request is made that another local client already has then it's brain dead to download it from the internet again. Right now my son's machine is downloading CS:GO from the internet at 2MBps when it could be downloading it at 100MBps over my 1Gbps LAN from my Linux desktop. (We both run Linux)

[Satoru]

This would be problematic because you'd have no way to verify the data on a client you're pulling from

A rogue server could serve up a virus or worse to others

[wuddih]

http://blog.multiplay.co.uk/2014/04/lancache-dynamically-caching-game-installs-at-lans-using-nginx/

[aiusepsi]

Originally posted by Satoru:

This would be problematic because you'd have no way to verify the data on a client you're pulling from

A rogue server could serve up a virus or worse to others

Verifying the data is trivial; the manifest you retrieve from Steam has SHA-1 hashes for all the chunks you download. Steam currently uses them to guard against corruption, but it'd work equally as well against rogue peers. Bittorrent uses a very similar scheme: if you trust the .torrent, you can trust the entire download. It's a solved problem.

Personally I'd love to see it. Most of the ingredients you'd need to build such a feature already exist, for example Steam discovering other clients running on the local network, which was developed for in-home streaming.

[Virtual Insanity]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Copy the steam apps folder across the LAN

Even on a gig network copying the entire apps folder would take a long time, not to mention that not every user is running identical apps.

Originally posted by Fretlon Hor:

I second this. It should be trivial ...

Your post is right on the money, it shouldn't be hard to impliment.

Originally posted by Satoru:

This would be problematic because you'd have no way to verify the data on a client you're pulling from

A rogue server could serve up a virus or worse to others

As mentioned, verifying data is easy.
Client can download a manifest from steam direct and use it to verify the files it pulls over the LAN.

Originally posted by ☔ wuddih SpNv ✔:

http://blog.multiplay.co.uk/2014/04/lancache-dynamically-caching-game-installs-at-lans-using-nginx/

Stumbled across the same artical, it is a bit out of my league.
With some effort i might be able to get it going, but i havent had a great deal if *nix experience.

[~GShock~]

Agree this is needed.

[Achoobert]

For the LOVE OF GOD please yes
People have been requesting this since ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 2010.
Steam has released family sharing, so they KNOW that people play the same games on the same network. Additionally, having the game updated and ready to go is one of the incentives to purchase rather than pirate. Having to shuffle updates around via LAN or USB defeates that critically important ideal.
Recently Payday 2 has been slamming daily updates of at least 100 MB. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying to move 28 gig everytime it updates around my local 4 computers to try to save my bandwidth.

[Ssenkrad_II]

Brilliant idea... Seriously brilliant... two thumbs up*

I would also love it if they added LAN hookup for playing games across Steamplay as when I play games via Steamplay vs LAN the LAG is unreal... (crap internet)

Don't know if that is even possible however, would just be awesome...

[YONAI]

Support!

[Virtual Insanity]

Back here again as we've just had another bunch of updates that have downloaded 3 times each.
This is costing Steam in content delivery costs and costing me in ISP data quota.

I do try to keep auto updates turned off to share the updates by a backup/restore process, but this means then having to acknowledge and manually download updates, which when when the urge strikes to do a little online gaming causes issues if your game client is out of date.

C'mon Steam, c'mon users lets back this!

[cinedine]

Guess I posted it in another thread. Look up SteamPipe and local mirrors, there is a way to do what you want.