Valve has announced the latest upgrade to help players with a Steam Deck. It's called Dynamic Cloud Sync and will let you easily switch between your PC and a Steam Deck.
The idea is that when you enter suspend mode on the Steam Deck, like you might with other consoles, the Steam Deck will then upload any modified save data to the Steam Cloud ready to be picked up anywhere else. When you wake the device, it will then automatically download any changes ready for you to carry on.
Valve say this is not a requirement but they "recommend" developer use it to give players the best experience possible. Without it though, there may be problems as Valve say: "Without Dynamic Cloud Sync enabled, Steam will still track when save game data is changed on the Steam Deck. However, any user who suspends their Deck while your game is running and then tries to resume that game on a different device, will be prompted to first return to their Deck to close the running process or continue without their most recent save game progress".
It's free to use but not automatic so developers must do some work to take advantage of it. This includes new integrations into games, which is where some problems may arise. This has been announced really close to the release of the Steam Deck, which of course is not ideal for developers who are often already overworked. Are many likely to go back through their older titles to add it in? It doesn't seem overly likely.
FNA developer and game porter Ethan Lee mentioned on Twitter: "Considering an overwhelming majority of titles I see use autocloud I'm hoping sleep mode triggers a transaction and resuming makes it go 'we detected new save data from another PC, do you want to restart the game?' because no way is anyone going into their back catalog for _this_".
Developer Tyler Glaiel (The End is Nigh, Bombernauts, The Basement Collection and more) also seemed unimpressed on Twitter too.
It is more work for developers but hopefully over time it will become something developers think on during development. As players, we can just hope developers find easy enough ways to implement it and share that with others.
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Quoting: mindedieFor unimpressed lets put games on full-blown emulation (virtualization) and save state, problem solved?I fail to understand, but for sure saving the state of a game means having state files of several gigabytes (easilly 10 or more on heavy titles).
when you put the deck into sleep, it will upload the save to steam cloud, then you open the game on the pc and it will use that.
From the developer side, the required step is to load the savegame if it changed when the deck wakes up.
edit:
Still "seamlessly", is marketing thing, as you can't expect to restore the game exactly at the same point everytime just because savegames never worked that way everytime.
Last edited by kokoko3k on 25 January 2022 at 5:49 pm UTC
Quoting: HoriThey mentioned something about it in the initial press stuff. Something about being able to play your game on the Go on the deck, and then being able to pick up where you left off on your computer. Which basically would be just cloud saves. Though the way it works on something like Android or the Switch, where you can put your device to sleep, and then pick it up and the game has been put into the background also kind of sounded like what they might be saying, with synced cloud saves, I don't know why you couldn't just pick it up and go. Though that means when you put your deck to sleep, it won't be really really asleep until the sync is done :PQuoteThis has been announced really close to the release of the Steam Deck, which of course is not ideal for developers who are often already overworked
Amy I missing something? IIRC they already said in the past it would not work out-of-the-box and that some changes might be required. I think it was in the developer Q&A sessions.
Also as someone mentioned, some game saves can get HUGE...
this game support rumble pack , this game support/require memory card.
" this game suport trading cards, this game support dynamic cloud sync"
Quoting: mindedieFor unimpressed lets put games on full-blown emulation (virtualization) and save state, problem solved?
I'm not sure I'm getting your meaning, but while it's off the table, it'd be interesting to see how that kind of things can emerge. I don't expect it for now, nor with the current way things are done, but looking over a project like Arcan, we can see network transparent transition of games could be a reality: even if there is limitation such as LAN only, etc, since most people that send a game from the computer or steam deck to the other one.
Tho arcan is a wild thing and Steam isn't going to support that first, they have bigger fishes to go for, like driver improvements.
Last edited by MisterPaytwick on 27 January 2022 at 8:21 am UTC
Realistically I'm sure it works across all three OSes (since it could also serve to sync progress between desktop & laptop, etc.) but still...a man can dream.
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