X4 NoSteam

[yerdna]

Any ETA on when the game might come out in a steam-free form?

I don't mind using Steam to download the game and keep it up to date, but for play, I'd like to not have have Steam running at all. (X3:R became much more enjoyable and responsive with the no-steam version)
It seems that the world's shittiest programmers ended up on the Steam team...in the background eats over 1GB of physical RAM, and page faults like crazy

[VincentTH]

It already exists, and is called the GOG version?

[yerdna]

It already exists, and is called the GOG version?

but what about those of us that have unwittingly bought it via Steam?
...at least with Factorio, once you link your Steam, you can get the Steam-free version directly from the devs.

[CBJ]

We don't have a specific ETA yet, but rest assured that it's on our radar.

[yerdna]

We don't have a specific ETA yet, but rest assured that it's on our radar.

crickets...certainly feeling the love

[CBJ]

We've not forgotten, but there have been other priorities. The current plan is to release the NoSteam version with 2.50, with the caveat that there's still time for that plan to change.

[yerdna]

crickets...2.5 is out...and apparently commenting out the steam header or copy pasta-ing the GoG exe is too difficult

[Alan Phipps]

When Egosoft announce a No-Steam exe for X4 in these forums then there will indeed be one available to download from them, until then ... well you know the rest.

[Imperial Good]

Any ETA on when the game might come out in a steam-free form?

I don't mind using Steam to download the game and keep it up to date, but for play, I'd like to not have have Steam running at all. (X3:R became much more enjoyable and responsive with the no-steam version)
It seems that the world's shittiest programmers ended up on the Steam team...in the background eats over 1GB of physical RAM, and page faults like crazy

Try clean installing steam. Steam should not be using anywhere close to 1GB of memory. Mine uses ~250MB, which honestly I am not sure why but I am guessing it might be related to the inbuilt web browser.

[Pesanur]

Any ETA on when the game might come out in a steam-free form?

I don't mind using Steam to download the game and keep it up to date, but for play, I'd like to not have have Steam running at all. (X3:R became much more enjoyable and responsive with the no-steam version)
It seems that the world's shittiest programmers ended up on the Steam team...in the background eats over 1GB of physical RAM, and page faults like crazy

In Steam settings disable shadow cache preload. Despite what the description of this setting says, disabling it you get better performance and more stability (and Steam use less resources).

[Imperial Good]

In Steam settings disable shadow cache preload. Despite what the description of this setting says, disabling it you get better performance and more stability (and Steam use less resources).

There is no such setting in the steam settings...

If you meant "Shader Pre-Caching" then that should not make a difference. For example mine is sitting at a massive 1MB of cached shaders. Turning it off and steam still uses ~250 MB odd.

Clearing local download cache appears to have helped a bit, but still steam is using a stupid amount of memory at the moment.

[Pesanur]

In Steam settings disable shadow cache preload. Despite what the description of this setting says, disabling it you get better performance and more stability (and Steam use less resources).

There is no such setting in the steam settings...

If you meant "Shader Pre-Caching" then that should not make a difference. For example mine is sitting at a massive 1MB of cached shaders. Turning it off and steam still uses ~250 MB odd.

Clearing local download cache appears to have helped a bit, but still steam is using a stupid amount of memory at the moment.

At least for me, whit it disabled, games runs smoother, and not have missing textures bugs with several games, opposed to when this aberration is enabled.

Edit: Keep in mind that Steam, after all, is an Electron App. Electron App and resource light cannot be put in the same paragraph without a negation.

[Imperial Good]

At least for me, whit it disabled, games runs smoother, and not have missing textures bugs with several games, opposed to when this aberration is enabled.

I am guessing you encountered a bug where it downloaded pre-compiled shaders which were not fully compatible with your drivers or the current game version. Hence the shaders were not producing the correct results.

I will attempt to explain why the feature is good in theory and also where it can go wrong. Modern graphic APIs rely on the use of "programmable shaders". These are programs which the GPU hardware can execute on given inputs to generate the outputs developers intend in a very efficient way. However the actual hardware operates differently between vendors offering different instructions and capabilities, which is not practical for developers to deal with. To allow for portability between vendors there is an abstraction between the physical hardware and the API which game developers use. The shaders game developers create follow the specification of the API and it is the responsibility of the graphic drivers to use these to produce the desired results. Since such shader code cannot be executed directly on the GPU hardware they require being recompiled. During recompilation the graphic driver might apply platform specific optimizations to allow the underlying hardware to execute the code more efficiently at the cost of more time spent performing compilation. For a high end game the shader code might be so complex that significant CPU time is required, possibly in the order of seconds, to recompile the standard shader code for execution during which time the GPU sits idle and cannot produce any frames. To reduce this graphic drivers often cache compiled shaders so that recently encountered shader code ordered to be compiled is read very quickly from the cache rather than being recompiled. Steam takes this even further, since compiled shaders are very small and internet is now very fast one can pre-cache compiled shaders from other people with similar hardware meaning that even initially there is no shader compilation stutter. The issue is that anything from different revisions of the game, graphic driver or even physical GPU can require different shaders. If the wrong shader is loaded the graphic results will be incorrect or even unstable. For this reason game developers should try to asynchronously compile shaders before they are needed by their games rather than relying on steam caching since then one can be sure that the locally executed shader code is correct for the system it is running on.

I have not done any actual tests with this feature. Since I had only "1MB" cached I am guessing few people still use a GTX 760 4GB version which is compatible with me or few of my games support it. As such I can only assume it makes mistakes given the feedback above.

Edit: Keep in mind that Steam, after all, is an Electron App. Electron App and resource light cannot be put in the same paragraph without a negation.

Still is no excuse for anyone to create a background application that when not doing anything uses 250MB.

I am guessing it is related to their web browser. Since now all web browsers are memory hungry even for the most simple of web sites.