Game Folder Shrinkage

[Amara]

I decided to dust off the old TF2 because lets face it, who can watch the Meet the Medic and not feel like ubering people?

I went to play it and it needed to update. This was understandable, I haven't played it in sadly, a long long time. I was a bit amazed though that it wanted me to download something like close to 2 gigs. That didn't seem right. I also noticed that Portal 2 was in my download queue and it wanted to download 9 gigs.

Some troubleshooting later, it seems that my TF2 and Portal 2 folders are way way too small to be installed games. The Boyfriend ran the back up thingie and I copied these files over to my computer to fix the installs. Only neither backups would run. They would come up saying they need to install, I click install and sometimes I would get the Windows security message, which I would say yes to... but then nothing would happen. No processes were running, just nothing.

Tonight we are going to try copying his actual folders to my machine, if this doesn't work, then I will have to download them all which isn't good. I am hoping some people might have come across this? I run my non-steam games through Steam and they work fine, as well as the few Steam games I checked. It just seems to be Portal 2 and TF2 that have shrunk.

I am starting to think maybe my computer has something against sequels. If this is the case, I am getting a new computer before GW2.

[Getafix]

Very odd. During my initial attempts to turn my wife into a gamer, I downloaded Steam onto her laptop, gifted her the Orange Box and a couple of other games and copied the game folders from my PC into a shared folder on our LAN. Once transferred to her laptop steam did a quick check and was happy enough with the state of things; we haven't had any problems.

If your TF2 and Portal installs have somehow been corrupted, a clean delete and copy from your boyfriends computer ought to do the trick. It is odd that the recover didn't work, but computers are nothing if not odd.

Worse case, uninstall and reinstall and let it download the whole thing again, but I doubt that will be necessary.

[Amara]

I admit it is funky, the games are showing as being installed on Steam (they just want to update).. it's just like all the other files needed seem to have went walkabout. The TF2 folder was something like 30 megs big.

Hopefully the copy across will work. I am guessing I will lose all favourite server lists and whatnot?

[Jigoku]

"X:\Steam\steamapps\common\portal 2" is the game folder and should be approx 9.92GB

"X:\Steam\steamapps\username\team fortress 2" is NOT the game folder. It is where critical files are extracted to and where custom maps and configs are stored. Your game files are in "X:\Steam\steamapps\" and include "team fortress 2 *.gcf" and the engine itself as "source *.gcf"

[Amara]

Thanks Jigoku!

I know the Portal 2 one was no where near that size. But then, I guess that's why it wanted to download 9 gigs.

I'll check the TF2 tonight.

[Chief]

Steam has a bug which I encounter regularly, where it decides to download several gig instead of just an update. It happens to me with all source engine games almost every time they're updated. Common bug and there's still no word on why it happens or how to fix it.

Hopefully it will be resolved when valve change steam's patching methods.

[Jigoku]

Further to Chief's comment there is another bug which makes the client claim you are downloading more than you actually do.

For example, a recent Day of Defeat: Source update showed as 3.5GB where I actually downloaded less than 100MB ...

[Purg]

I believe (currently) Steam doesn't have the ability to patch files, it just replaces them with the updated files. So, if a large data file needs patching, Steam just replaces it with a pre-patched file.

Outside of Steam, if you have a large binary file needing to be patched there's a application that can change what's needed within the file instead of downloading the whole file.

I had a several GB update for Portal 2 the other day - and it was really several GB. Looking at my Portal directory, it looks like the update touched a whole bunch of 200MB .pak files at the very least.

[Amara]

Sadly the copying didn't work.

I copied over Portal 2, the file is the right size now but Steam still wants to download the whole 9gigs again. While I can't confirm it is actually downloading it all, it sure is acting like it.

Looks like I will download it again

Have you heard anything more about this possible bug, Purg?

[Reoh]

I know a lot of people have been having issues with steam downloads lately. I've had a few trying to downlod that just go on forever, or that brief pre-install prepare they do taking many hours instead of a few seconds like usual.

I do know that Steam are closing on a means to let files update more efficiently. Mostly of late they pretty much just re-download the whole game instead of the appropriate files.