This seems an incredible technical accomplishment.
My one question is, is it supposed to be solving for disk space constraints or connection speed constraints?
I'm guessing both, but the former is pretty cheaply solved these days with a new drive (or by finally admitting you only need to have 2-3 games installed at once and probably aren't playing a dozen games in parallel), and I'm not sure it seems to be solving the latter.
The site says "stuck with 120mbps", and the demo on YouTube artificially caps download speeds to 200mbps, presumably as if to simulate "poor" connections. I'm in Australia and get 90-100 mbps, which is half of the demo speed, and I would be an upper outlier in this country. I can only imagine the people really suffering from 100GB downloads are on circa 5, 10, 20, 40 mbps. I get 10MBPs (megabytes) down reliably from Steam, which means even a 100GB game would "only" take ~ 2 and a half hours to download. The speed used in the demo would take ~ 75 minutes to download a 100GB game! Is that really an outrageously inconvenient wait?
I sound more negative than I am. I guess what I'm saying is I'd love to know how slow your speed can get before this stops working well.
Right. 2.5 hours initial wait to then play a game normally is... fine. It's a non issue for most folks:)
I noticed Battle.net from BLizzard tracks couple of thresholds in the progress bar - when the game will be fully downloaded, but also when the game is playable. For many updates, those two thresholds are very close together; but occasionally, the "playable" is half the distance or less of "completed", which makes me think somebody there is still putting in the effort :)
I'm in the USA with 3mbps average download speed. Fine for streaming, but when I used to play games and my friends wanted to switch to a large game (Sea of Theft, say, or Rat Slaughter 2, whatever they're called) I'd set it to download overnight. I don't consider this a problem.
That sounds like a lot of engineering effort for something with minimal payoff. Carefully balancing early vs late offsets for the one time payoff of playing while the game is still downloading. So many potential failure states vs just saying, "Wait another hour and then start"
To you it might sound like a lot of effort but for a user who is on his 1 day off for the week not having to wait twice the amount of time to log in to play his game probably means more than you or I could ever imagine. Blizzard used to be about making everyone have an excellent experience and some of the legacy features they've had for years seriously still do show what kind of commitments to that fact they have made in the past.
I think you're also over-estimating how hard it is to flag something as not-necessary for the majority of users. Especially when downloading a fresh copy of a new expansion. If you know most players aren't going to be in the final boss lair for 3 weeks but still ship the game with that content it's not unimaginable to just allow the game to download those files in the background.
Blizzards downloaded is top tier. The startup time from initial, bare bones install to playable is very fast.
It starts with placeholder content to get you running, and anything immediately necessary for your area. For example, if you’re in a capital city, it doesn’t wait to download the entire city, just where you are. It can rough out the other areas and add details almost in real time as you start making your way through it.
Things get more difficult if you mount up and start flying more world to load, but even still it doesn’t load it all.
There’s certainly a cost, there can be FPS loss during busy areas, but by the time you get to something important, it should all be loaded.
Contrived example is you’re in a raid, some reason you feel you need to reinstall, you could do that, fire up the game, it’ll load the raid and by the time you hit the first boss, it’ll all be there. This will take minutes.
Since I leave the client running, it updates in the background. During new releases it starts to download the entirety of the new release a couple of weeks before it’s due, to get the bulk of the content down. When they cut the release, it’s typically a much smaller update to turn the new content on. I rarely have to wait to play the game.
Experiencing a few other games makes me really appreciate the work Blizzard had done in this regard. It’s top drawer.
Gaming industry is notoriously crunch time. Feels a hard ask to spend any resources on partially downloaded gameplay vs the mountain of bugs which likely exist in the non-quantum state of download-or-not.
Steam supports this as well but actually I have read that it is a lot of effort.
Firstly, your entire asset pipeline which combines and compresses resources needs to be aware of it.
Secondly, it's work that can't be reused cross platform. (The effort for Steam will not apply to PS5&etc).
Thirdly, it's another configuration to test, and as the user will forget about the feature after they get started playing, it's natural to just say it's too much effort.
Or. like with installing gt7 on ps4 from disc, you wait about 1 hour to install, then you can put second disk, and play a small version of game until it install the rest (0.5h), then it restarts and you can again play small version until it downloads and installs update (another 15min). Best of both worlds I guess...
> I get 10MBPs (megabytes) down reliably from Steam
Ahhh, that's interesting. Personally, I've relocated to Brisbane recently and the NBN connections up here go to 1Gb/s (!). I'm on a 400Mbps plan, with downloads of .isos from mirrors (etc) routinely being 40-50MB/s.
But the fastest downloads from Steam (using Brisbane download server) are 5-6MB/s, which really sucks. :( :(
Very interesting, I didn't know many people got > 100mpbs without paying for the infra. I am going off the fact that (as you may have seen in the news) a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount (majority?) of consumers could possibly pay for that without realising they'd never get it. After that made the news I noticed much more prominent caveats on 100mbps tiers, and many telcos dropped their top plan to 75mbps or even 50.
I didn't realise some places were genuinely getting 1Gbps. Amazing!
> a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount ... never get it.
Ahhh, yeah. I'm with Launtel (https://launtel.net.au), who seem to be extremely technically clueful and the opposite of the shady places that are around (Dodo, etc).
So I've been with them in Melb, Syd, and now Brisbane. Melb speed was 100/40, Syd was 50/20, and here is Bris currently on 400/50.
At all locations, the download speed has been "as advertised" or better. Technically the connection here can do 1000/50, and when I tested it the download rates were in the 80-90MB/s range for various things (isos, etc). But that's $15 (AUD) extra per month while 40-50MB/s is totally fine for my purposes. :)
Really wish Steam downloads were faster than 5-6MB/s though. :/
Have you played around with what region you're downloading from? You can change it manually and it may be worth checking out whether or not Sydney/Melbourne offer better download speeds than Brisbane.
Interestingly, when testing Steam downloads from Syd and Bris servers just now - 4:10am local time - (downloading Control Ultimate Edition this time around), both of them were able to give consistent download rates of ~50MB/s.
That's in line with "line speed" for my current NBN plan through Launtel. Might try bumping that up to the 1000/50 plan at some point and see if the download rates go that high too. :)
Trying the same test (downloading Control Ultimate Edition) from the Brisbane server at ~3pm rather than the dead of night gives the same download rate too. ~50MB/s.
---
After bumping the NBN connection speed up to 1000/50, and confirming that was effective (eg through speedtest.net), I've retried the download of Control Ultimate Edition.
Downloads from the Brisbane server are still mostly around 50MB/s, though the peak download rate was 72.7MB/s (very briefly).
Downloads from the Sydney server were mostly around 20MB/s, with a brief peak up to 43.7MB/s.
Downloads from the Melbourne server were mostly around 10MB/s, with a peak of 17.1MB/s. Seems like some kind of artificial restriction is in place now, though it could turn out to be something else (tcp buffer config of some sort maybe?).
Anyway, it seems like the local server (Brisbane) is now easily the fastest download for me, so I'll be using that from here on. Might as well drop the NBN connection back down to 400/50 as well, as there doesn't currently seem to be an advantage using the higher 1000/50 plan.
Launtel are great, and I've never had any issue getting line speed on Steam from them. Give them a call, the staff are lovely and I'm confident will be happy to help resolve.
> I'm in Australia and get 90-100 mbps, which is half of the demo speed, and I would be an upper outlier in this country.
This incorrect, although commonly repeated as we love as a country to collectively moan. Shadow leader at the time Albo was fact checked on this 2 years ago[1], and we clocked in at 82.58mbps back then. We now sit 16th at 96.05mbps[2].
If you have large drives then you can have best of both worlds where it downloads and caches your most used stuff without you having to wait for a full download to start playing, and then next time you play it's already downloaded.
the real problem here isn't office ctr, it's the fact that there are 10 different ways to run a third-party program from start-up, many of which are not only opt-out but opt-out somewhere deep in the mysteries of the regisphere
Not affiliated with this project but it looks to be incredibly cool - very small team. I hope this shows up as a Linux / Steamdeck option in the near future as well.
TL;DW: Mounts a virtual filesystem that on-demands downloads game content to your local drive in the form of a cache. Start playing games instantly without downloading the entire game.
I am little skeptical since a game needs to load one file and then another file and then another file and this could add up to an awful lot of waiting in an uncontrolled manner. Although big downloads are slow in my rural area I feel included by them because I can play the game in the end whereas streaming is not a good option at all.
Yep, you even had to account for this on spinning media(i.e. DVDs) where you'd want "seek-free" loading since you'd hitch/stall of you ended up bouncing all over the disk.
I worked on a title where this was particularly problematic from a game design perspective(limited ram, large assets), we ended up designing in "slow" sequences to mask the disk load.
Thanks for the link. As they say in the video though, latency issues depend on the game's implementation. From [1]: "If the game does like a read-wait-read-wait pattern, then it's bottlenecked by the latency... and that can become a problem."
Halo presumably has a solid streaming foundation, so it's a good fit for the service.
"Server Side Prediction: Via servers are constantly learning from repeat access patterns of players. This let's us make high quality predictions for what content you'll need, before you need it."
You know if it also took the time to utilize the bandwidth while it has it. Like via shouldn't stop downloading if a game doesn't request the files.
They might even be able to integrated a bit of brains into it and keep a record of which files tend to be historically requested next for a game. In the background you're slowly grabbing those, and those threads pause for direct requests. I guess this is simpler but it feels like using via is costing you by inducing longer load times for the whole game.
I like it, but it does not "solve" the big downloads issue. You know what would solve the 100 GB game download problem? Reducing that to 30 or 40 GB, not inventing an (admittedly clever and nice) man in the middle streaming things to you in byte-sized chunks.
I am not condoning piracy, but when looking at game sizes, go check out fitgirl repacks. Right now there is a Steam game there reduced from 20GB to 10GB. Another is reduced from 3.5GB to 1.1GB. The downloads from there are consistently and significantly reduced.
If a pirate can do that, why not a game company? or Steam?
That ain’t happening, and I don’t want it to happen, personally.
All that data represents visual fidelity. I don’t want the of type games that boast amazing graphics and endless content to get smaller and more crude.
I think this product is actually a big dead end because all you need is fast Internet to make this whole thing obsolete.
Storage is also stupidly cheap even for blazing fast SSDs, for the price of a typical AAA title you can get a 2TB pcie nvme tlc SSD.
I also see cable companies like Xfinity offering speeds above 1Gbps over plain copper. They’re selling speeds that consumer WiFi can’t even handle. Even the laziest monopoly cable companies have rolled out new docsis versions at minimal cost that deliver really impressive speeds on their ancient copper networks.
If you saturate WiFi 6 at 600mbps a 100GB download is only going to take around 30 minutes if not less.
It just doesn’t bother me. If a game wasted something like 500GB of storage space that means it’s temporarily borrowing $20 worth of SSD storage.
(I think the uncompressed audio was usually because of CPU decoding restraints, and the fact that a typical PlayStation game had such a crazy amount of “free” storage to work with on a disc compared to the amount of data needed to create the game and its world - might as well toss in voice acting and FMV video)
When you realize NVMe turns your high performance 6 Gbps SATA ports off and you have to migrate 500GB of data from one SSD to another over 3gbps... and it gets slower once you consider that you as a software developer have millions of tiny files that take even longer to copy over. Oh yeah also your boot entry doesn't work so you have to fix that one up. Upgrading from 500GB to 2TB easily cost 4 hours plus letting it run overnight to avoid wasting time on the transfer.
> Storage is also stupidly cheap even for blazing fast SSDs
Also stupidly difficult when you have a preconfigured device such as a laptop. I think anything that would require you to modify your equipment's hardware configuration is not much of an argument.
Virtual texturing ( or people may have heard of MegaTextue ) meant we could easily scale 100s GB for high quality Graphics. We are already quite CPU bound in the PS5 era sp I dont see super-compression to happen. The only way to solve this would be something like Generative Graphics. But I think that is an worst option than large storage space.
This, and the apparent need for 4TB+ SSDs for Steam libraries is at odds with how I play games.
I tend to bounce between 2 or 3 AAA games at most before I "finish" and delete them. Maybe I will come back some day, but I certainly don't switch every day to warrant keeping dozens at once or insta installing them, and if its an intricate mod setup or something I just archive it.
I kinda did this when i got my steam deck. I mounted my nas to steam deck, added it as a steam storage and moved my games there. It works rather well. No storage required on steam deck. It is slower than playing from SD, but not that bad on smaller games.
Slightly offtopic, is there a way to setup a virtual file system that caches most used files and removes least used of a project in internal SSD from an external HDD?
Ooh, I'd love that. Or native steam functionality for the same. I never install games onto my SSD for that reason, so I'm at the mercy of whatever windows naturally does in that space. (Possibly nothing, as I don't remember manually configuring a SSD cache file on this computer, and last I checked that was required).
seconded. Primocache is wonderful, and doesn't suffer from the glaring issue using the powershell hack of Windows Storage Spaces [1]. You can set this up, with proper powershell scripts/commands, but Xbox games won't install to a Storage Space. It boggled my mind when I finally tracked this down.
Primo Cache [2] has one disadvantage over storage spaces - the SSD cache space is dedicated as Cache, and does not add to the total space of the drive. 1TB SSD + 4TB hdd = 4TB available, vs storage spaces which will give you 5TB. This minor (to me) downside is outweighed by the fact it works for everything. It shows up as a normal drive, not a virtual disk, and it just works. I recommend it highly for anyone who has limited SSD space.
"To approximate average connections, demos were ran with a 120 Mbps download speed limit."
Whoah. I know 3Mbps isn't blazing fast anymore, but it works fine for streaming video and downloading a 100Gb game from Steam overnight, back when I used to play games.
Via seems like a cool idea, but the energy cost is high if I'm playing Vermintide 2 with only 10Gb available- that's a lot of continuous downloading, depending on how long I play.
Not wanting to bother with downloading so much data contributed to to my preference for small games like Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic, and ultimately to being done with videogames.
Ok the video on the home page is very confusing. I couldn't understand why it was demoing that you can play a game without waiting for the full install..when the video only runs games that are already installed.
Turns out that's just a visual side affect of the app itself - everything appears as if it's already installed. So when he opens Destiny in the demo it's not actually installed yet (even though it looks like it is).
Hm, I think they talked about the server some... It's possible there's a server coordinating things and the client talks to steam for the actual data, but that sounds (even more) complicated.
That’s been solved already. Play older games. Better story, less fluff. As an extra credit, they are smaller, don’t require top of the line hardware, do not need to insert any kernel anti-cheat rootkits, and do not spy on you.
My apartment contract forces me to pay $99/mo. for roughly 120mbit, while most residences on my block can get 1gbit symmetric from Google Fiber for $70/mo.
I assume the parent comment is making the opposite point? I'm in Australia and I can get 90-100mbps which is very fast in this country - I'd say the average house gets 50-60mbps (guessing, haven't looked it up).
those prices are crazy. it never ceases to amaze me how expensive life is in the US. that aside, I'd be delighted with 120mbi/s. that's just under 2 hours to download 100gb. it may well take you longer to actually go to the shop and buy a physical copy
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing, and I'm happy to have it. I've lived a lot of my life on much slower connections, usually 10-20mbit..
Over that same span of time, I've seen my local storage throughout go from ~100mb/sec to ~6000mb/sec.
The improvement of internet bandwidth for the average person is moving at a glacial pace. I'm happy to live near the middle of that spectrum; and I'm frustrated to be so close, yet so far away, from the bleeding edge.
I recently downgraded to 30Mbps because it's the cheapest plan my ISP offers, and still more than I need.
I grew up with dialup and my brain simply automatically makes me do several things in parallel so some can finish loading while I'm working on others. If things load too quickly it throws me off, quite honestly. A large download is for tomorrow, or after dinner at the very least.
On the flipside, I do expect local desktop apps to open instantly, and when Discord or Teams takes 25 seconds to start up and render an interface, I'm profoundly annoyed.
Why, yes, I am cranky all the time, thanks for asking.
I felt the urge to play Deadfire today so I got my gaming PC out of the closet. Shortly thereafter it went down a flight of stairs (don’t ask) and lost both wifi antennas.
Downloading 20GB at about 5mbit was painfully retro, but I got the idea to Ethernet it to my MacBook and in a few clicks was borrowing its quite decent wifi connection. But my MacBook doesn’t have an Ethernet port or a normal usb port. So I got a dongle with Ethernet and plugged it into a USB to mini and then a mini to C (didn’t have a USB to USB C cable).
Probably the most “LAN party experience” I’ve had in 15 years.
My one question is, is it supposed to be solving for disk space constraints or connection speed constraints?
I'm guessing both, but the former is pretty cheaply solved these days with a new drive (or by finally admitting you only need to have 2-3 games installed at once and probably aren't playing a dozen games in parallel), and I'm not sure it seems to be solving the latter.
The site says "stuck with 120mbps", and the demo on YouTube artificially caps download speeds to 200mbps, presumably as if to simulate "poor" connections. I'm in Australia and get 90-100 mbps, which is half of the demo speed, and I would be an upper outlier in this country. I can only imagine the people really suffering from 100GB downloads are on circa 5, 10, 20, 40 mbps. I get 10MBPs (megabytes) down reliably from Steam, which means even a 100GB game would "only" take ~ 2 and a half hours to download. The speed used in the demo would take ~ 75 minutes to download a 100GB game! Is that really an outrageously inconvenient wait?
I sound more negative than I am. I guess what I'm saying is I'd love to know how slow your speed can get before this stops working well.
That said, truly an impressive piece of tech.