Steam - astounding

Mindriot · 27 May 2007 at 18:28

I have been wondering for a while now...

I downloaded the Dark Messiah demo (not important) and clicked launch. Of course i had only just started downloading so it had its launching bar. I left it for a little while to download.

When i next came back to it it said it was ready to play but only about 22% downloaded. How is this possible? I assumed this was normal for mods of CS or HL2 but a complete demo?

Perhaps because HL2 was already installed then the source engine itself was already on the machine but could a 2GB demo be 78% the same as HL2?

Anyone know?

tomanders91 · 27 May 2007 at 18:30

same thing happens to me with games and demos through steam, they are ready to play sometimes at very low percentages, although when i played the dark messiah demo when it was at a low percentage, it was very unstable and kept crashing.

Zogger · 27 May 2007 at 19:02

I would imagine there's a huge chunk of media etc. that isn't needed at the start of the game, dunno about 78% though cause DM is a big game. That must be a couple of Gigabytes... You'll probably find you can play a level then you'll have to wait for it to download the next one

edit: although this is the demo.. seems even less likely.

PinkPig · 27 May 2007 at 19:07

When games in Steam say they're "ready to play" when less than 100% downloaded, this is a feature which lets the game play before everything is on your computer. After all, you don't need sounds, maps and graphics from the end of the game to start playing at the beginning! In practice I've found this is a bit flakey and the games run more reliably if you wait for everything to download.

As for some games having the same content as others (ie. with HL2, HL2: Episode 1 and so on), this also saves download time, but not in the way that you've described. Since all of these can be installed completely seperately (episode 1 isn't strictly an add-on), Steam stores lots of information (ie. Source common files) independantly of games. You notice this when, after installing something, it immediately starts at, say, 80% rather than from zero.