downloading games int he background, while playing another game..

[Toobs]

it annoys me that i cannot download a game, while i play another...
i could see why you shouldnt be able to download one game, while playing another game ONLINE....like call of duty for example, you can pretty much cheat by simply downloading, while hosting a match, it gives you an advantage...

but i dont see why i cant play say, Trine, or Incredipede, Angry Birds, Arkham City, The Witcher...anything offline really...while downloading another game in the background....my PC is my main form of entertainment while at home....mostly through games....when i buy something new id like to try it as soon as possible, which means i need to install it....
but downloading and installing takes time...and id like to entertain myself in the meantime...

but as soon as you launch a game, while downloading another, the download is automatically suspended....

unless of course theres an option somewhere to mke that not happen that i dont know about???


but either way, i dont see why i cant have my cake and eat it too...unless the cake REALLY IS a lie ;P

[Marble]

It does this because downloading games while playing them would impact on performance. If you want to resume the download while playing, you can alt+tab out of the game and resume the download, then go back to the game.

[Toobs]

ah nice...didnt know you could do that....thanks....
dont see how it would impact performance in any significant manner though, unless you have an EXTREMELY weak system....i download through other things while playing games on steam all the time, i see no difference....

[Marble]

Two reasons. The main one being Internet and depending on how your ISP handles the traffic it can lead to very high pings in multiplayer games. The other is HDD performance, but this is not so much a problem unless you have a slow disk.

[Toobs]

i was speaking about single player games....actually stated it specifically...

[Marble]

HDD access could still be an issue. If it's not then no worries.

[Toobs]

my point is....
it should be made to where your downloads continue, instead of Steam auto-forcing them into suspension upon launching a game...

if its an issue for someone, then theyll obviously be stopping the download before launching another game....but for the rest of us, we shouldnt have to deal with it....we should be able to do both without alt-tabbing out and all that....

[Black Blade]

We had a tread abut these (and i heard there were a few) some one was saying when you luanch a game they needs to be a keep downloading butten on it but its buggy right now so we can just hope in some update steam will add it or add a downloading page for the overlay

[sonnikdoh]

I agree I am playing an offline game with no trophies for steam to sync with and downloading stops. I understand why my PS3 would do that, but this fast computer no reason. But I am glad I can ALT+TAB and resume.

[sfnhltb]

It is annoying to have to do it manually, but I am not sure there is any way around it - you can make it so you can manually force it to continue before starting a game, but that requires the same amount of intervention by the user. It is generally going to make sense for the default to be for it to pause as that is the "safer" option to avoid slowing systems down. The only time a "force continue" to make things easier would be if you are jumping in between several games while something is downloading, in which case one click would be needed with such a feature, while the existing system means you need to alt tab every time you go into a new game, but that is a fairly edge case to bother changing when there are so many other improvements that could be made.