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PayPalPublished 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: skinnyrafDo we like software patents now, because Valve submits them and they serve Linux gaming community?Valve are at least a member of the Open Invention Network, which is a patent non-aggression organisation.
Quoting: GuestConsoles have had the "play before it finishes downloading" thing for many years. I'm surprised its taken this long for Steam to consider a similar feature
Probably because this one may not require the developers to opt-in this feature, like consoles does (similar of how they don't need to do anything for proton to work with their games)
Mohandevir Sep 21, 2021
Quoting: CatKillerQuoting: skinnyrafDo we like software patents now, because Valve submits them and they serve Linux gaming community?Valve are at least a member of the Open Invention Network, which is a patent non-aggression organisation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall Valve ever sueing anybody over a patent infrigement. Usually they patent stuff to protect themselves from patent Trolls. It's more like a "Patents are a reality we have to deal with, so let's do what must be done to protect ourself from them".
Edit: Is this feature something that could be used to, let's say, prevent the Steam Deck from downloading 4k textures on a 800p screen? That would be awesome!
Last edited by Mohandevir on 21 September 2021 at 3:47 pm UTC
1) This skims awfully close to existing "profile guided optimization" techniques. I don't believe it should be different using such techniques for games vs anything else, but if this patent specifically applies to games then if could cause a conflict. Either the patent could be invalidated based on prior art, or it could block a lot of optimization work.
2) What happens if it drops a part that nobody uses, until someone uses it? Presumably all that code had to be present in the first place following the software build for a reason. Perhaps it just wasn't triggered as it belongs to a secret area almost nobody finds? It might not be horrible if this only affected the order of things loaded into RAM, but if the required code is nowhere to be found (even on disk) because it was never downloaded then this may cause a spectacularly messy failure.
Quoting: Developer12IANAL.Why are so many people on the internet so ANAL?
Quoting: MohandevirCorrect me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall Valve ever sueing anybody over a patent infrigement. Usually they patent stuff to protect themselves from patent Trolls. It's more like a "Patents are a reality we have to deal with, so let's do what must be done to protect ourself from them".
That's the idea of the OIN. If companies don't patent stuff, out of altruism or whatever, then someone else is going to and then shake them down, especially since the US struggles to identify open source software as prior art. And there's no deterrent since you don't have any patents of your own. See, for example, Microsoft making more money from Android phones than Windows phones when they still had Windows phones. So OIN was formed as a patent pool particularly to protect open source stuff: if one member gets sued over a bogus patent, all of the patents from the pool are available to counter-sue with. Along with automatic cross-licensing for members, and an agreement not to use them to start litigation, just as defence.
Quoting: SalvatosIf it works anything like the shader pre-caching, I’m not looking forward to it. 2+ hours of processing for no noticeable gains and it has to do it again every time the client is updated (or whatever the actual trigger is)? No thanks.
Though to be fair, that last part seems to have gotten better with the implementation of their new Downloads page.
I think pre-caching is triggered everytime when are shaders updated. Probably its when are updated GPU drivers or if game update changed shaders.
InhaleOblivion Sep 23, 2021
Quoting: InhaleOblivionGuild Wars 2 has had this feature built into it's launcher for a while now with patches. Basically you can update to about 25%-30% of the patch and load the game up while it continues to update in the background.The first Guild Wars did that too. I remember having to wait several minutes for each new map to download in-game on my slow Internet connection, making it nearly impossible to find anyone to play with without getting kicked out or left behind.
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