Published today is a new patent from Valve that (amongst other things) might allow for an "instant play" feature for games being downloaded from Steam. Credit to SteamDB's Pavel Djundik for the find on Twitter.
The patent was submitted back in March 2020 from developer Pierre-Loup Griffais, who has been heavily involved in the Linux side of Valve (with Proton and the Steam Deck) but it only got published live today. Not only is it targetting letting people get into games a lot faster, but it also seems that it could be used to help free up disk space. As the description notes:
Client machines running game executables of a video game(s) may utilize a file system proxy component that is configured to track read operations made by the game executable during a game session, to generate access data based on the tracked read operations, and to report the access data to a remote system. This telemetry approach allows the remote system to collect access data reported by multiple client machines, to catalogue the access data according to client system configuration, and to analyze the access data to generate data that is usable by client machines to implement various game-related features including, without limitation, “instant play” of video games, discarding of unused blocks of game data to free up local memory resources, and/or local prefetching of game data for reducing latency during gameplay.
Some of it actually sounds a bit like how the current shader pre-cache system works, with it gathering data from multiple machines to then give out the shaders to other people when they download the game. In fact, that could be partly what the bit about prefetching of game data could be but it seems to go further with it dumping some elements into RAM for even faster access.
When it comes to the "instant play" feature, it's something other launchers sort-of have where you can hit the play button before the full download is done and this does sound similar. With the system that Valve are proposing here, it seems developers won't need to change their code either as the features would be baked into the Steam client and the way it downloads games with it predicting what you would need first in terms of the data involved based on the telemetry gathered from others.
See the full patent details for more.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: GuestMakes me wonder if the fast play data could also be used to pre cache data to ram for faster game loading in general since they both would need to know which data is used at what points during gameplay. I know nothing on the subject though...
Absolutely:
Quote...discarding of unused blocks of game data to free up local memory resources, and/or local prefetching of game data for reducing latency during gameplay.
Just feels wrong to me
Last edited by Arten on 21 September 2021 at 10:20 am UTC
I hope that means we get proper replacements for kludges like httpfs. I still use it for massive installs of intel architecture based PoS systems from a cheap ARM.
Quoting: skinnyrafDo we like software patents now, because Valve submits them and they serve Linux gaming community?
We still don't like patents, but what can be achived with this patent look promising.
Another think is, if somebody else submit this and Valve begin use it, they can be sued for patent infringement. So we don't know why they have this patent. They can have this only for protection and for bargaining if somebody else sue them for another patent infringement. That is valid use from my perspective. I'm not ok with this, if they have it for attacking others.
Though to be fair, that last part seems to have gotten better with the implementation of their new Downloads page.
Quoting: Guestand now it wants to look at my disk accessesFrom what I understand, it just wants to look at the games' disk accesses, not whatever else you are doing.
If anything, the game developers could feel spied on here, not you.
-The good: people with slow internet partially being able to play without the game without the need to finish it first. Could also be used to make game "demos" out of the full client and be used in those "free weekends" without the end game content for example.
-The bad: This could generate bugs with games not well optimized to partial run (missing essential files for example) and all the extra bandwidth generated by those new telemetry. (windows 10 is a hell in this part)
-The ugly: Based on the telemetry analysis, they would know the best places to put ads inside the game.
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