Yet another reason I hate steam-ing pile of crap blog - Otreum

Otreum

Nathan joined Oct 22, 2007

I am now an independent developer learning to create my own game engine with C++ and Direct X, however to begin with, I will be learning C++ and openGL as that is what is taught in the Complete C++ training DVD from 3dbuzz.com (that's where i'm starting). I will be working on various projects that you may or may not see released, these projects are to keep practising various skills in games development. I have now gotten a minor and feature article published in the book: "FROM GAMER TO GAME DESIGNER: The official FAR CRY 2 Map Editing Guide", which I know is nothing spectacular, but still an achievement. My career goal is to have my own engine to develop retail games with so that I can have my own studio here in Australia, this goal will start small, eventually you may see smaller arcade games from me, and eventually larger games that I plan to contest big time game releases by larger companies.

Report article Yet another reason I hate steam-ing pile of crap

Posted by Otreum on Oct 12th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

So i've come to a great amount of frustration yet AGAIN with steam and it's stupid features.

This time, i'm going to complain about the damn auto update that steam uses.

I have been playing Empire: Total war a fair bit since it was released, and although I couldn't install Empire specifically to where I wanted to install it, I had an enjoyable experience with the game minus performance problems, random crashes etc.

So i've been playing on the 1.4 version of the game since 1.4 was released and i've been pretty damn happy, it ran better, there were no sound problems with the game, and no crashes (oh my!), but then a very annoying event occurred....STEAM AUTOUPDATE!

Little did I know that Empire: Total war patch 1.5 was a complete and utter failure, the patch finished, I tried to play and noticed that the game was kindof like it was when I first got it when it was unpatched; it took ages to get to the menu.
I then decided to try and load my save games and BAM!......CTD....I tried again, BAM, same spot, CTD, ....restart computer, tried playing again, BAM!, same problem, my saves games were kaputt.

I figured I was in a crap spot in the campaign anyway and wouldn't mind starting again as the Russians, so went to start a new game and BAM!.....CTD.
No matter what, I just could not get IN GAME, it only allowed me to browse the menu....which brings me to another note.

The menu has some annoying bloody advertisement that sits in the bottom right of the screen telling me about this new expansion that has come out. Not only that but my Empire: total war background video has changed to what you would think would be the background menu for the expansion, not the vanilla version.

I spent a while trying to restart and play the game, reinstall, repatch and so on, but no matter what, the game just would not run.

I then checked out the forums and it seems i'm not alone, it seems the 1.5 patch has messed up the game for anybody with a nvidia card using a certain driver, and there was a "fix" on the page.
The "Fix" was "update to the latest beta driver", so I did that but nope, same problem!

So I figured maybe I could just download the 1.4 patch and turn off autoupdate or something.
I checked around and ....oooooh yeeeeah, steam keeps games up to the LATEST patch, you can't pick any previous patches to update to, not only that but developers who use steam don't have external/manual patches, because steam is so l337 and all.
Now both because of Steam's piece of shit auto updater, combined with Sega's woeful 1.5 patch release, I can't play Empire: total war, and my save games are pooped.

So yeah, great work Sega and Steam, you make a horrible couple!