STEAM GAMES on DVD not Download

[FatRakoon]

Ok, surely others must have similar thoughts..

I have a few games that are on Steam.

HalfLife, HL2, Episode 1 and Episode 2 and CounterStrike etc etc etc, all source

Now, Half Life 2 and Episode 1 I have as DVD.
So, I can install those games by Disk or by Steam over the internet.
The others I must do over the internet.

Ok, this is fine. I can go with that.


Now, I also have a few other games too!

Dawn Of War : SoulStorm
Dawn of War II
UnReal Tournament 3

Now, my problem is this...

I had SouldStorm, and Dawn Of War 2 and UT3 all installed from their DVDs and yet, in my steam list, they did not show up as installed.

Now, one irritating thing is that Dawn Of War 2 was showing up in the Steam list and I never added it to it, it did it itself. I have since added UT3 and SoulStorm, but I did not add DOW2. That I think is a little naughty, but there you go, its done.

So, back to the games, the yare installed but according to Steam they are not?

If I want Steam to see the games as installed, then I have to do it through downloading them all through steam.

WHY?

Now, if I wanted to add a steam game from DVD, I can add " -install X: " to teh steam.exe and I have tried this with Episode 1 and that did work, but thats also a Steam DVD, but it wont work with any of those other 3?

As a kinf os experiment, I have installed UT3 off the disk and the Steam and I have 2 copies of the game now on the disk... Not good news for such a massive game.

So, I have only 2 options left to me now...

1 - Use Steam only and accept that whenever I do an F&R on my system, I am not only going to have to download a billion Terrabytes because of Vistas updates, but also to reinstall my steam games Im going to also have to download close to 30GB too!

2 - Get steam to Completely forget my games and for Steam to not have control of those games anymore!?

How can I do that?

Ah, I dont know.

 

[knowledge123]

That's really strange, out of the UT3 ones, do both of them work? If they do, you could just try removing one of them to save space.

You could partition your disk into two sections, one for Vista and then a 40GB~ partition for Steam. Once you do your F&R you can just run the Steam application from your second partiton, no faffing, or (as I do) keep it on an external HDD for use with multiple machines.

You can manually specify to add a non Steam game, also.

 

[Final8y]

You must install UT3 from DVD to your \Steam\steamapps\common folder, then steam would will pick it up.

 

[Skaface]

You must install UT3 from DVD to your \Steam\steamapps\common folder, then steam would will pick it up.

Oh lawdy, thank you. I've been having the same problem!

 

[linktoinsanity]

Final8y is probably right.

Another thing to do in future would be to use steam to make a backup of all the games you already have, then you can copy that to some dvds and then restore in future. This should save your bandwidth.

 

[Makhaira]

Just keep a copy of the Steam folder if you reinstall, and you can just copy the files back. Mine is over 60Gb these days, I'd hate to have to reinstall it all!