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valve is planning on introducing a new filesystem 4 steam


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It seems Valve is planning to release a new file system for Steam. The new system aims to reduce the huge loading times of Valve games: the slow GCF files have been replaced with NCF files, apparantly much faster and smaller than the current files. Unfortunately, this new system is currently avaible to Red Orchesta only, and it is still under Beta development. Read on!

New Steam file SystemOne of the things that we try to do as a company is really listen to feedback from our fans. An issue that has probably been mentioned the most has been the map load times. For our recent patch we put a lot of work into optimizations to improve the load times. At the same time Valve has been hard at work developing a new file system which can be used with RO. This new file system will allow Red Orchestra to be run directly from the hard drive instead of through Steam caches. This has a lot of benefits, including vastly improved load times as well as fixing a lot of compatibility issues with anti-virus and other software. This new file system combined with the optimizations that we made for the latest patch result in MUCH faster load times (up to three times faster on some machines).

We’re looking for volunteers to help us put this new file system through its paces. This is a beta and as such could have bugs, so PLEASE do not participate unless you’re willing to take that risk. To try the new file system you need to add special parameters to your Steam commandline. You will need to modify the desktop shortcut that launches Steam by adding the following parameters at the end of the commandline [right-click on the shortcut, then Properties and the commandline is in the "Target" box]:

-clientbeta newfs –beta fs

This will launch Steam with the new filesystem for RO. The first tim it will unpack RO to a new directory, and copy all your custom content and config files over to that new directory. Once that is done just launch RO from the Steam UI as usual. For those of you who are making custom maps or mods, we would highly suggest you backup your content before running this beta. Additionally, you’ll need to update any tools that you use to point to the new RO folder. The Red Orchestra install directory will be moving to a new location here:

"<steam install path>SteamAppscommonred orchestra"

Steam is going one step forward, let's hope this new system is deployed to all Valve games.

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I like the ZFS file system and that offers a lot of plusses like a 128-bit file system, it protects all data with a 64-bit checksums and its based on a transactional object model so you get some big performance gains.

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Why would a unix style file system make things faster (honest question)

All unix file systems do not fragment, there is no concept of defragmenting a unix partion. Unix file systems generaly perform better then NTFS as well, but it depends on which you are using.

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Why would a unix style file system make things faster (honest question)

All unix file systems do not fragment, there is no concept of defragmenting a unix partion. Unix file systems generaly perform better then NTFS as well, but it depends on which you are using.

Um... No, I don't think that's how it works.

First of all I don't believe something like a "UNIX filesystem" exists. There's EXT2, EXT3, XFS, JFS, ZFS, Reiser3, Reiser4, etc. and all can be considered UNIX filesystems primarily because only UNIX OSes tend to support them.

Now, please read the Wikipedia article on Defragmentation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation

Take special notice of the "Filesystems" paragraph, and that a number of the more common "UNIX filesystems" have defragmentation tools. They wouldn't exist if these filesystems would never fragment.

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they could just make Steam for Linux that way there would be tons of games on linux, I for one would use linux then

Then they have to rewrite the games aswell

ye and that'd b a lot easier if M$ would free up the directx library's ....

cos then linux could support it (directx)...

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ye and that'd b a lot easier if M$ would free up the directx library's ....

cos then linux could support it (directx)...

If game developers were able to work with SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) they would have a clean API that's cross-platform to boot. They used it for the Civilisation port, and I think they used it for the Unreal and Decent 3 Linux port aswell.

Don't blame Microsoft for the gamemaker's decision to run on Windows only. If Id can get their games to run on both platforms, so can the rest of the world. All it takes is some will and an expected sales increase for them to do it.

Problem is, nobody uses Linux for games, so you no games are made. As no games are made, nobody _can_ use Linux for games. What we need is for Wine to work better so it can play a lot more games, and becomes a viable platform for gaming under Linux. Then the Linux gamer can stop dual-booting and the game developers will see that there is in fact a gaming community out there that wants to use Linux. Only then will they begin to consider making their games run on that platform aswell.

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