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Half-Life Games Make Steam Compulsory
Thanks to PlanetHalfLife for clarifying that you will soon need Valve's Steam technology installed to play any Half-Life engine title online. According to the site, "...sometime in the near future, Valve will be releasing an update to Half-Life that will require you to convert your old WonID CD-Key into a SteamID", and Valve's Erik Johnson explains this means "...you'll have to have ['digital content platform'] Steam installed to play the most current version of Half-Life [online]." Although he clarifies that "...no, you do not have to pay for Steam", and PlanetHalfLife points out "you should still be able to play HL through third-party server browsers", this is still a major change for Half-Life engine games such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Day Of Defeat.
Hopefully Valve will keep doing things to turn off the gaming community. Between this and the surprisingly good looking quake 1 engines that have been coming out, I'll hopefully have some company on ye olde Quake 1 servers...
Yes, but unless they open the source to the SDK, there's no way we can get the kind of cross-platform support we'd need to use it in, say, CrystalSpace. I've done some work to a VFS implementation that treats bits of the local filesystem as 'cache' and checks the contents of the remote server for updates for each file; and while this works in specific cases, it's not a replacement for a general updater for an application. Something like this would be a great boon to the open source dev community. But there's just no way I could consider it unless it's open-sourced at the SDK level, and not just an open API. That would kill off their commercial ideas, unfortunately, IMO, and as such, I doubt they'll do it. Hopefully, though, it'll spur someone else into doing the job.
-- A mind is a terrible thing.
Indeed, the closed nature of steam at the moment does present problems for community groups. However, valve doesn't even seem to think that steam would be at all a participant in community projects. All it seems to be geared towards doing is downloading updates and content for commercial software.
I dunno, maybe valve will go for some non-commercial licensing scheme in the future.
But I don't really see the great potential for steam in the community as an updater, it's method for updating software seems to just check version numbers and if they are different just download the thing again (well, the changed files), not at all hard to do but steam has a collected environment. Where's the attraction?
The idea behind Steam is good - using the proliference of broadband to allow game companies to publish and manage their own games. Bye bye Sierra hopefully.
Dial-up users will suffer pain on updates, difficult to get away from unless there are options to disable automatic updates to Steam.
Steam's state right now - well, once started it is OK. However, it can take a few seconds to several minutes to actually appear as a window, often leaving you wondering where the heck it is, or did you double click like you thought you did. Pain in the ass if you like positive confirmation something is running.