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I have an i7 3770s and 8gb of ram, this would ruin my Steam experience. Not everyone has a super duper computer my friend.
B) I obviously never said to forcibly apply it to everything. I asked for the option to have Steam manage it for games where we turn it on, or to let us apply post-install commands which would have to be specific to individual games. Either way, if you didn't want to use it, you just wouldn't use it.
It would have zero effect on anything if you don't use it.
So to play a game, I have to wait 20 or 30 minutes while my game decompresses... while also needing the room for the game to decompress... ya no thanks to this.
If you want games to take up less space, ask the game devs to compress their games more... but as mentioned before you're still going to need space to install updates because the games need to be decompressed to have the updates put in them and then recompessed again.
Payday 2 did this... people complained about the size (it was 80ish gigs at the time). So they compressed the game (taking it down to around 35ish), then people started complaining about the time it takes to update the game.... because it has to do what I mentioned above. Now the game is back up to 85ish gigs.... while compressed and updates still take a while.
Also the more compression and decompression that is done on SSDs the more it gets used and the higher the chance its going to cause issues with the SSDs.
It should not be up to Steam to compress a game for you. Also pretty sure this would require the game to be able to handle the files being compressed to play.
And if you do, you just don't use it. It's obviously not a mandatory thing you'd turn on for every game. You don't need to be hostile to options that improve things for people.
Like I said, changing and educating every dev just isn't realistic, and it's not going to be useful, because there are always more devs. Having Steam manage the system compression on the other hand is completely trivial, and improves many space wasting cases.
Yeah, you have to keep that much space free, obviously, but it's not like you keep that space for every game at the same time, The savings is still massive across games, and if you'd rather lose the extra space for some reason, you just don't use it on that game.
Great anecdote about even pro devs doing a bad job with their updates and compression and why monolithic files are problematic, but I'd still rather updates took a while than a game eats an extra 85GB. Games don't need to update that often for me to burn huge amounts of disk space so it will be slightly faster. This is also something that hopefully would rarely get used on games that big, since devs making those kinds of games ought to have people figuring compression out, and that large of a game might lead to too much time wasted on caching re-decompressed data.
The decompression is done while reading to RAM, not on disk, so there is no extra disk use going on as you run the game. There's actually less disk use in play, because the system reads less data. The game updates, then changed files get recompressed, and aren't touched again unless they update again. It's not going to change your SSD use.
Steam manages the game installs, and this is a significant OS feature that's easy to add to managing those installs. Steam knows when the files get updated, so it's clearly the best point to do this housekeeping on updates.
Yeah, you obviously didn't read pretty much everything about how it works. It's called transparent for a reason. The game never even knows the files are stored compressed. It just sees normal files as it reads them. Programs don't look at files on disk in modern systems. They look at RAM copies of files on disk. The trick is just decompressing as the system makes those RAM copies.