[AdmiralRalwood]

Anyone actually get Descent on Steam here yet?

Well, since it's just the same old DOS version I now have, like, five different copies of...

I put it on my wishlist, does that count?

[Hobbie]

See previous page :

More on-topic, Descent II has now been added...though they're charging $10 with no current discount.  That same price will get you both games on GOG.

Old news is old.

Yes, well, I missed it in all the discussion about non-Descent things.

[watsisname]

Anyone actually get Descent on Steam here yet?

*waves*

Hoping Descent 3 makes it onto Steam as well -- it was just awesome in multiplayer. =)

[Zacam]

So, I have both Descent's on Steam. I'm a little sad that neither of them come with any sort of extended mission compilations like the last released boxed sets did.

That being said, setting them up is just about the same as setting up from Retail Media, including modding them (so long as you're not still using some windows "Protected" location directory).

The addition of the entire Classic Quake series as well as Heretic+Hexen makes me happy (though inclusion of Heretic 2 would have been nice).

[CP5670]

I still have my old Descent installs from the mid 90s, at least in some form. I kept migrating them to different machines over the years, and have all my saved games and demos from over the years. I'm trying to get D2X-XL to use the Yamaha SYXG50 midi driver, which has now been ported to Windows 7/8 and sounds far better than the default Windows synth. This needs a few changes to the midi interface in sdl_mixer.dll due to the way Windows handles midi, but I think they should be easy to do from the source.

I hate Steam itself. It's in your face all the time with its frequent auto-updates and ads, and I hate how it doesn't let you choose install folders and blocks you from playing older versions of games when updates are found (which can break mods). However, it's true that its userbase is much larger than GOG. More exposure to these games is always a good thing.

Lord knows D3 could use it.  I don't know that there's even anyone left in the Descent community still making new D3 levels.  It probably didn't help that D3Edit took something of a cumbersome approach to level-building, from what I understand.

Especially singleplayer levels. D3 never seemed to have gotten much interest there. There were only a handful of good levels ever made, and only one or two campaigns. In contrast, D2 has tons of great levels and mission sets, many of which are superior to the original game.

[Zacam]

I hate Steam itself. It's in your face all the time with its frequent auto-updates and ads,

A fair point. It can be a tad obnoxious especially when they do several updates in 1 day and then an update a day for 4 days in a row. The ads, I can live with to SOME extent, because it's either about New Games, or sales or events regarding a particular Franchise or Special. So at least it beats out on breast enhancement/penis enlargement pills or free/discount handbags. But for the most part? It runs minimized to my task tray and I don't even see it half the time I'm on my system. In fact, I sometimes forget whether or not I even have it running at times and accidentally try to "open" it again, which fortunately just gently chuckles and brings up the already running instance.

and I hate how it doesn't let you choose install folders

Um, what? You can define any install location for Steam Itself and in addition to that, you can add any drive/destination you want as a "Library" to install to. Granted, this really is nowhere NEAR as flexible as manually selecting each and every install path for every single item, but you can still direct an exact and explicit baseline (the exception to that being Source SDK based stuff which installs dependent on where Steam itself is installed to).

and blocks you from playing older versions of games when updates are found (which can break mods).

What again? I've never had a pending update declare or cause for a game to become unplayable on me unless/until I updated. And with ONE games exception (which had NOTHING to do with Steam and everything to do with the designing Studio) I've never had a game update break any saves or progress. Further more, any mods that do happen to break can be broken by any updating, regardless of whether or not it comes to you via Steam, you control when and how an update takes place (and on a per-game basis if you want or via Global).


(Please note, everything BELOW this line here is not related as a direct reply to the quoted post, user, or any specific individual or post related in this thread and is probably more correct being in a general "Steam Discussions" thread)
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I get that there are a lot of people that don't like Steam. I don't understand WHY they don't and a lot of times (not to put too fine a point on it) a lot of the reasons I can't logically accommodate as being "reasonable" reasons to hate the platform, product or the company behind it.

It will never be a perfect platform. It's probably not even the best platform that we have possible. But it is a platform that does do what its goal is: Sell and deliver to you the products that you buy for you to use. I certainly will never herald Steam as the "Golden Calf" or have fantasies about being able to bear its children or any other fanatically supportive paradigms there are that seem to be all the rave these days, but I do find it a much more agreeable platform with a much more agreeable (to me) company behind it that I can stand supporting it.

As for the "Magic Bullet" discussion ender of "But you can't sell what you've bought!" So? Who says I want to? I don't suffer "Buyers Remorse" and immediately demand a refund. I suck it up, accept that I responsibly spent my money and then I spread the word so that others don't have to and forget that it even exists. If I haven't played it in ages and currently can't think of a time when I will? I still won't sell it. Because then I might want to, or it may no longer be an available option to purchase if some nifty little "doesn't exist yet" happens to take place that finally draws my interest in it.

And if I want to draw somebody else into it, how does it invest me to give my only copy of it to them when I can just get them one and we both get to win?

[karajorma]

I think my biggest issue with Steam is this. What happens if one day they sell it to EA or the like?

I know a lot of people say "Well that's not going to happen", and I'll agree it's not looking likely now. But things change. Even companies that seem nice can grow more evil (Google is a great example of this). So I equate buying things on Steam to putting eggs in one basket. The more I have in that basket, the more disastrous the consequences of something going bad. If I only buy a few games then it is annoying if something happens to Steam, but that annoyance grows proportionally with the value I sink into my Steam games collection.

With GOG, this isn't a consideration. Everything I download I can back up. IF something horrible were to happen to GOG, I'd still have 95% of the value I sunk into my collection (I give being able to reinstall from somewhere other than my backups a 5% value).


And this is where Akelabeth makes a good point, that objection would vanish if Steam were a Netflixesque service that simply gave me access to their entire catalogue. If they were to go down or turn evil, I could just cancel my service having lost nothing. But otherwise, given that I don't play many games which are only available on Steam, I don't feel the rewards are worth the (admittedly small) risk.

[Aesaar]

I think my biggest issue with Steam is this. What happens if one day they sell it to EA or the like?

Considering Origin, I'd be sorry about the loss of Steam's ridiculous sales, but I don't think I'd care much otherwise.

[karajorma]

I think you've missed my point. There's all kinds of things a company who took them over could do which you'd hate. Suppose they decided they didn't need to spend as much on servers for instance. So what if servers are unavailable some of the time?

They didn't worry much about that before Sim City came out after all.

I only said EA cause that's who everyone seems to hate the most. I'd be more worried if they sold it to someone who knew **** all about the games industry.

[CP5670]

Um, what? You can define any install location for Steam Itself and in addition to that, you can add any drive/destination you want as a "Library" to install to. Granted, this really is nowhere NEAR as flexible as manually selecting each and every install path for every single item, but you can still direct an exact and explicit baseline (the exception to that being Source SDK based stuff which installs dependent on where Steam itself is installed to).

I want to choose the actual folders for games, the way I would with any regular program, not a "Steam library." I organize my non-Steam games by various categories and like to have easy access to their folders for setting up mods.

What again? I've never had a pending update declare or cause for a game to become unplayable on me unless/until I updated. And with ONE games exception (which had NOTHING to do with Steam and everything to do with the designing Studio) I've never had a game update break any saves or progress. Further more, any mods that do happen to break can be broken by any updating, regardless of whether or not it comes to you via Steam, you control when and how an update takes place (and on a per-game basis if you want or via Global).

Just had this happen with several games yesterday (Dishonored, Serious Sam HD and a few others), after I hadn't loaded up Steam in a few months. I have auto updates disabled for all games. However, if Steam detects that an update is available, the game will say "update required" and not let you play until you update manually, even if you go into the offline mode. There are plenty of posts on the Steam forum about this.

Mods are the most common thing that updates mess up. For Dishonored, the update reverted the no-intro edits I had made, which was at least easy to fix, but I've had other cases where a patch rendered a modded game unplayable. At a minimum, I want to see what the patch does before getting it, but Steam's "release notes" for patches are worthless and just take you to a page with more ads.

I know a lot of people say "Well that's not going to happen", and I'll agree it's not looking likely now. But things change. Even companies that seem nice can grow more evil (Google is a great example of this). So I equate buying things on Steam to putting eggs in one basket. The more I have in that basket, the more disastrous the consequences of something going bad. If I only buy a few games then it is annoying if something happens to Steam, but that annoyance grows proportionally with the value I sink into my Steam games collection.

In general, I see Steam's monopoly status on game distribution as a bad thing, even if the software itself was good (which it isn't). Origin is not any different from Steam, but it does at least provide Steam competition.

[Fury]

I think my biggest issue with Steam is this. What happens if one day they sell it to EA or the like?

What happens if your physical game collection is destroyed or rendered useless by fire, water damage, acidic or alkaline substance, tree falling or hurricane coming in to say hello. There are plenty of options to choose from what may or may not happen to your physical stuff. If something like that happens, I do not believe your physical game collection would be on top of your worries but it would be gone nonetheless.

I think you've missed my point. There's all kinds of things a company who took them over could do which you'd hate. Suppose they decided they didn't need to spend as much on servers for instance. So what if servers are unavailable some of the time?

At least you still have access to your games, unlike what would be the case with your physical copies in scenarios above...

Point being, there is no such a thing as complete certainty. Five years from now Steam may be only a memory, but so may be your house.

[karajorma]

That's a pretty weak argument given I've already expressed my preference for GOG over Steam. Or are you asking what if my house is destroyed and GOG turn evil at the same time?

I buy games on GOG in preference to physical media for similar reasons to the ones you mention (although I'm more worried about destruction of my physical media by scratching a CD, etc). Bear in mind that Tencent offer me 10 TB of cloud storage for free. If GOG went down I could back up my entire games collection and still have space. Hell, now that I think of it, I might upload all my games there anyway.

[Fury]

Well excuse me for not keeping track of 9 full pages of people preferences and arguments.

Still, preference or not, hard to get a game off from GOG it does not have.

[karajorma]

All the more reason for supporting them when it comes to the games they do have then so that they have more power to get other games, surely.

Which kind of brings me back to my original point that I still feel we should support GOG over Steam when suggesting where to get Freespace 2. Or at the very least avoid only mentioning Steam.

[Nakura]

Anyone actually get Descent on Steam here yet?

Waiting for the glorious 75% off sale.

[Grizzly]

What again? I've never had a pending update declare or cause for a game to become unplayable on me unless/until I updated. And with ONE games exception (which had NOTHING to do with Steam and everything to do with the designing Studio) I've never had a game update break any saves or progress. Further more, any mods that do happen to break can be broken by any updating, regardless of whether or not it comes to you via Steam, you control when and how an update takes place (and on a per-game basis if you want or via Global).

Do note that, for the longest of times, a new update for your game also resetted the per-game basis options you would set in the steam client. This included the option not to update a game. This has stayed broken for several years (Same with the offline mode, which had a tendency to not work whenever you started steam after you had been unexpectedly disconnected from the internet), and only has been fixed in... 2013 or so.

As a result, many people have simply not used these features anymore and missed the fact that they were fixed.

Anyone actually get Descent on Steam here yet?

Waiting for the glorious 75% off sale.

:|.

[jr2]

I'm trying to get D2X-XL to use the Yamaha SYXG50 midi driver, which has now been ported to Windows 7/8

ZOMGWTFBBQ      









(For those who have never experienced the Yamaha SXGY50 MIDI synth, it is the best MIDI synthesizer I have heard on a computer bar none.  I kept the old install from one of my Dad's computers, but sadly, It was only compatible with '98 and XP, this changes things, yessss, Preciousssss....

[Akalabeth Angel]

Here's a scenario.

What happens when Steam shuts down?
They're going to give you the ability to still download your games right?

What if they don't? Are you going to sue them? You can't, not as a group, because you all agreed in contract to not join class action law suits against Valve.


Nintendo just shut down the multiplayer servers for the Wii.
Microsoft a few years ago shut down the Xbox multiplayer servers.

In these cases people still can play their games in single player, but point is these online services come to an end, one way or another. Maybe Valve and Steam will stick around for the next 200 years, maybe they won't.  But if Steam goes the way of the dodo, there's no guarantee they're going to give you the ability to still play the games you paid money for, and if they don't there's nothing you can do about it.

[CP5670]

ZOMGWTFBBQ      

(For those who have never experienced the Yamaha SXGY50 MIDI synth, it is the best MIDI synthesizer I have heard on a computer bar none.  I kept the old install from one of my Dad's computers, but sadly, It was only compatible with '98 and XP, this changes things, yessss, Preciousssss....

Ah, you've seen the godliness that is SYXG50. I remained on XP for ages just for this, and only switched to 8 once I found ways to get it working there. See the details here. This driver can load any VSTI instrument set into the Windows midi mapper, and there were obscure, Japan-only VSTI versions of the SYXG50 and 100 that work with it. Once you get used to playing Descent with it, it's impossible to go back.

One problem is that the midi mapper is screwed up in modern Windows, and doesn't let you change the default midi device. The program has to request a device. I can use it in Winamp and in VMs, but most games don't read it. However, D2X-XL is the only midi game I play a lot and fortunately uses the open source sdl_mixer library for all audio, so it should be possible to get this working.

[Scotty]

Neither of those are comparable situations - they arose because of the march of technology forward and the switch to a new game system.  In several cases on the Xbox, games that continue to work on the 360 still have functioning servers.  If you had a disc of the game that worked on the 360 (for those not backwards compatible) of the game with no other changes, the multiplayer would still work.  It's much less dropping services than it is transitioning to new platforms.

Considering that PC iterations aren't advanced in "generations" like consoles, and that Valve still lets you play your WIN95/98 games multi on your own, the likelihood of any of it being dropped for the reasons you described is, while non-zero, exceedingly low.

Which, of course, ignores the fact that you aren't required to use Valve's servers in the first place.  Even for Valve games.  The group of friends I play Left 4 Dead with host their own server with an impressive list of mods to it, and it's supported separate from Steam.