Steam - is it always this bad?

I haven't fussed with Steam in a while, so maybe someone can give me a heads up: is it possible now to have more than one directory for game installs, or does it drop everything in the same folder structure still?

 

AFAICT it's still all stuck under the steam\steamapps directory. You can't have your programs and system disk on one partition, and your games elsewhere.

 

Steam was utter shite during the free weekends for UT3. I am not the only one apparently that was annoyed with it. All my coworkers could not get to even get the freaking download to start and by the time 3 PM on Sunday rolled around EST of course, the servers would not let us play because the weekend was over or something like that....wtf....

 

I have have ut3 retail dvd does the patch/titan pack come without steam I have steam installed but dont want ut3 running under it plus steam + ut3 are on different drives

 

Yes, you can download the patch 2.0 and the Titan pack (the latter needs the former), and apply them separately from Steam. You then just continue to use the game as normal, and Steam is not involved in any way. If you have any problems, you can delete your config files and have the game remake them automatically.

Download links & mirrors are listed in this Epic forum thread.

 

thanks bzb

 

Hmmm, didn't know that. None of the games I've purchased of Steam had any, so I thought it was a standard for all of them...

 

Steam version of Red Alert 3 still had Securom until it was removed with a recent patch (as it apparently caused problems for some people).

 

As usuall... Securom and problems is like fish and chips or something

 

Actually, I've never had a single problem with Securom and only minor problems with other copy protection systems. But then again I don't mess up my system(s) like other people do.

 

I had a ridiculous problem with retail bought Crysis where Securom wouldn't allow the game to be run if Steam was running in the background.

 

Same here. And I have lots of tools installed from Vm, burning, debuggers, steam drivers etc. The only thing I've ever encountered was the need to restart the system to unload memory resident file after launching Process Explorer tool.

 

I had my first bad experience with game DRM not long ago with the game Drakensang. I figured out how to get it working but if I use the default shortcuts it still says 'please insert the original disc' or some such. What shit.

 

You can certainly install Steam into your games location.
At the worst, just move the Steam folder where you want it & create a new shortcut to the steam.exe. (might need to delete the client registry .blob file)

 

so what would i do having games split across 2 drives + 4 partitions ?

 

get back your sanity ?
;p

 

Well I want Steam on my programs partition, and the games on another disc - I don't see any way to do that. You either have Steam in with your games, or your Steam games in with your programs. There isn't AFAICT a way to split the two.

 

Sometimes it helps to change your download region. For me the german server was too slow, but with UK as download region I got/get full speed (ok, it's 180 KB/s).

 

Have you tried installing Steam into your programs directory and then use a hard link for the "steamapps" directory into your games drive? I'm not sure if NTFS can do hard links across partitions. Anyways, that's by far the largest directory within the Steam hierarchy. In my case E:\Steam\ uses 61,681 Megs and E:\Steam\steamapps\ uses 61,621 Megs.

 

Like Brit says, the 'Steam program' is basically just a few MB consisting mainly of a browser type thing, no big deal having it in your Games area
Unless you have some bizzare pedantic need to have it in your Programs partition, in which case you get the much bigger issue of many gigs of game files along with it
I guess you could mount a partition as <path>\Steamapps