targetbsp

Been away for a few days so out of touch! I presume cheaper planes offset by more expensive hangars has been considered at some point?

You made no mistake. Steam *is* going to be the platform with the experimental builds. There just aren't any yet. For when there are though, right clicking games in steam and hitting properties is where you can opt in for beta's.

Yes. Steam automatically downloads updates whenever there is one

I think it was said earlier in the thread that the mac and Linux versions aren't there yet but will be in a couple of days.

In steam you can right click a game in your library and hit properties. And should any exist (none for Xenonauts yet) a beta's tab will show allowing you to choose a version to install.

I buy lots of games on Desura so I've had a few Steam keys from them after games have been added to Steam without issue. There's no reasons this should be hard for them. Though they've all added them to your Desura CD Key page rather than emailing them like I understand the plan is here. Though one game did email me to tell me it was on my CD Key page so they clearly have the capability to email everyone getting a Steam key.

Steam is good because it just works most of the time. When you do have a problem though, their support is dreadful. I guess all of these 75% off sales leaves their support team underfunded! Everyone elses support blows them out of the water. EA's Origin support team for instance tends to be same day response and is far more helpful.

The problem was stated back here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/3420-Desura-Ongoing-Issues-(-Build-V16-1) Desura does an MD5 check on every file to check for changes. That's going to take a long time on a lot of files. Presumably Steam have a more efficient way of tracking what files need to be updated. Note that it can work perfectly fine - which it wouldn't be able to do if it had a overflow issue. The problem is the immense amount of time it takes (which is greatly reduced by an SSD) and the seemingly high probability of it encountering a network error which causes you to have to start again.

It's Civ IV (BtS) and it has a touch over 30k files. Not quite Xenonuats size but like you I can't believe there's a tipping point 30k and 37k where the client will suddenly lose the will to live. I just checked and Steam can validate a 30k files Civ IV install on a hard drive in about 3 minutes. The Desura client is dated 2011 and presumably pretty much abandoned so I don't think we're going to see improvement from it to cope with this!

Ooh, that sounds promising! The fact that armour is so effective against Chryssalids in the new XCOM is rubbish. They were far scarier in the original.

Civ 4 has a similar number of files (30k). Steam handles it no sweat.

But the fact that desura hosted the zip file isn't in anyway going to influence the contents of the zip file. It would fail to unzip if it was damaged for instance. The reason we've had past concerns about desura is with regards to the client rather than the standalone.

Ermm... aren't we using standalone (non-Desura) builds of 18.4?

Mystery? It's well known they are Australian isn't it?

Unlikely. They're in Australia. It's early evening. Unless they work late - we may have a bit of a wait on our hands now!

In your list of games, to the left of the status column, there should be an icon which you click to update games. From memory (I have none that need updating to be 100% sure about this) it's two white arrows chasing each other in a circle. But basically any icon, for any game, to the left of the status means you should click it as the game wants your attention.

They open sourced the client a while back but we only seems to be seeing Linux builds out of that.

We were discussing on the Steam forum the other day how Desura appear to have pretty much abandoned their software. Their last client update was back in 2011. I hadn't even started using them until after they'd given up on development! Their solution to any client issue appears to be to use the standalone versions rather than the client. I haven't personally had any client issue, apart from MCF errors (which are generally resolved by trying another day and so are presumably server issues), but it's a bit worrying for the future! It's a shame because I really like their concept of a DRM free client. Gives you the best of both worlds, organising/updating your games and the fact that it's entirely optional if you have network issues.

There's not a problem with what's on Desura, mine updated fine. There's just a problem with Desura's ability to handle this many files which is what the compression thing mentioned in post 1, but currently disabled, is to counter. You pretty much want Xenonauts on an SSD (to quickly handle the 100,000s of small files) and to be updating it when Desuras servers are quiet or you're going to have a nightmare time updating it via the client.

Time to re-visit Steam for downloads during development? http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Early%20Access/ They appear to have changed their stance on the subject!

It says in the first sentence of the post that it's still alpha...

Silent Storm is an amazing game btw. The only* XCOM style game with actually better tactical combat than the original IMO. But it lacks the strategic layer. Also... I now want Predators in the game. *I haven't played Xenonauts enough to know where to place it in this respect. I only played the kickstarter demo enough to realise its the first XCOM clone that 'feels right' and then I bought it and planned to wait until its finished to play.

If you're replacing one version of a program with another version of the same program it will use the same (if any) registry entries.

I'm not entirely sure Desura have that much bandwidth.