I AM VERY MUCH DISLIKING STEAM TODAY

[Fletch]

You know what is an incredibly dumbfuck idea? Tying your editor to your content delivery system. I mean, it's not bad enough that you have to launch one memory hogging program just to launch the other, but hey, in case your content delivery program fucks up royally, you can't open up your editor to do any work.

But hey, at least Valve's great customer support came to this solution after exhausting everything they already told me: "Why don't you just delete all your steam and cache files and reinstall?"

*grumble*

[Kamikazi!]

Well duh, just uninstall steam then reinstall it like 14 times, then it will work. Don't they teach you any thing in the internet?

[Fletch]

I really liked the point where it wouldn't let me reinstall the bulk of hl2 and cs:s from my CDs until I rooted through regedit and removed a bunch of references their "uninstall" program didn't get.

And I finally found the culprit: I was dumb enough to "install" TFC without fully exiting Steam first. Turns out, Steam had updated in the last few days, and the new install's cache and the old one got all confused and had what I can only imagine to be a cripple fight on my hard drive.

Luckily I was able to discern this from their clear and to the point error message: "No Steam Content Delivery Servesr Are Available Right Now. Please Try Again Later."

Except for the fact that the content servers were only at 10% capacity... and that my actual problem had nothing at all to do with that.

Le sigh.

[mikezilla]

I experienced this problem in that short period I felt doing textures for a steam product were worth doing.

They had a DOS BASED content compilation system that wouldn't work unless steam was running in the background. It was simply compiling a shader into a vft but if steam wasn't running it would refuse to do it. This turned into quite a problem when steam servers would go down and it was impossible to compile.

This feature was not available in offline mode. (Which launching in and of itself is mostly impossible short of unplugging your network cable and waiting for ten minutes.)

Yet another bullet point on a long list of reasons hl2 just ain't worth modding for.

[Pericolos0]

there is a photoshop plugin to easily save vtf files ofcourse.. not by valve

with the customs tools available source editing isnt that much of a chore anymore, but you still have to know about all those third party tools

[insta]

I've found that the solution is to never ever reboot your computer or exit Steam.

[InsaneSingingBlender]

maybe we could get a sticky thread for all those 3rd party tools?

[Section_Ei8ht]

Greatest Steam tech support reply ever:

"We dont know what the problem is."

True reply.

[RD]

maybe we could get a sticky thread for all those 3rd party tools?

yeah

I saw on cs.net forums some guy posted a tool which automatically puts all the files associated with a bsp (such as textures, models, materials and sounds) into the bsp.

[MJ]

if someone can make hammer work outside steam...

[ShaDoW]

if someone can make hammer work...

Wouldn't mind some Radient support for Source.

[Quakis]

^ Radient as in the editor, similar to DoomEdit? Hell yes

[mike-0]

peri, whats that photoshop vtf plugin called? /needs

[ReNo]

http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=154#p154

[mike-0]

thanks reno