Valve Formally Announces the SteamPipe Content Delivery System for Orange Box Titles

[Shawn Zipay]

Soon, all Orange Box titles will be upgraded to the SteamPipe, a new and improved content delivery system for Steam. The games soon to be impacted by this will be Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. At present, most games on Steam already make use of SteamPipe so this shouldn't be too drastic of a change for users.

The biggest impact will be on server owners and operators.

- You will use steamcmd instead of the HLDSUpdateTool to install/update the server.

- The conversion will entail significant changes to the way the files appear in the local filesystem on the server and client. The client no longer uses GCF files. Instead, most assets are packed up into VPK, and those VPKs are the same on the server and the client. The server no longer uses 1000’s of loose files.

Right now, Valve is testing things out using the Team Fortress 2 beta. They have an FAQ ready to go. Client bugs can be reported through the HLDS mailing list or the TF beta forums.

[K-16]

Hmm... I'm glad the FAQ is as detailed as it is. I realized that those who have client-side mods that use the old way of installing them, and those who wish to install The Orange Box or DoD:Source from their retail discs will have to go through a conversion and additional download process. They warn you should reserve some space to make this happen, and will shrink even more than what you've started when it's done.