A significant number of games on Steam can literally just be ctrl c ctrl v’d into another directory, snd still more or less work, or be made to work if you … configured Proton through Not-Steam,.for them.
Mostly only games on Steam that have some kind of always online DRM are going to throw a shitfit in that scenario.
People seem to forget that Steam and Source were built from the ground up to support what is I guess now the ‘old school’ way of modding a game: you just literally throw more shit into the game directory, edit what is already there, etc.
You can add /any exe/ external to Steam, to Steam, and run it via Proton. … /any exe/.
I’ve managed to get fucking Cascadeur working on Linux, via Steam/Proton, lol… there are a few games I tinker with where the model or anim ripper scripts only work on Blender 3.6 for Windows… So, download Win Blender 3.6, add to Steam/Proton, run, install Windows only plugin. Voila! Bit of jank, but it does work.
Any game that somebody has figured out how to do the equivalent of… some kind of script extender, to enable mods to do more kinds of stuff?
The way those work is they basically hijack or replace the original game exe.
Any game that has been reverse engineered to this extent, you can get to run independent of Steam.
I’ve done it with CyberPunk 77, NewVegas, etc, toying with my own mod making attempts. Its not too hard to futz with configs and launch arguments to launch straight into the main CP77 exe, just skip the launch/loader thing.
You can actually just do this kinds shit for quite a lot of games.
I’ve never actually tried this but presumably I can just download the games on Steam and then uninstall Steam and the game should still work right as long as they’re not even the steam folder. After all you can put games on Steam so presumably you can take them off.
Really it’s just install the game, copy the local files and apply the steam crack (for most games), maybe repack it into a nice packed executable with some lightweight compression of the files for easier storage.
I suppose the worst thing would be to manage the exceptions to the rule, games that use other drm, or that maybe need some tweaking for the steam crack to work,nor maybe need to create some extra folders to work. But for most simple games it should me enough.
Imagine having an entire library of modern games on cartridge. Look up what game to play, grab it from the shelf, No DRM, put it into a cartridge bay and hit a switch, and the computer copies part of it to RAM and runs it. Just like N64, but 10,000x bigger.
People do keep trying to make modern “retro style” consoles. But the problem is they always have limited processing capacity so they’re always quite niche. Also the price of having to put everything on a cartridge of some kind would probably mean you wouldn’t get indie games on the platform.
I’d imagine indies could release “special editions” with physical SD cards sent out for collectors and fans about a year after release. There’s some indie games where I’d definitely buy that.
And even if the cartridges didn’t have DRM, so what? They already made a lot of their money
I think, most if not all games would need to be installed on the computer, as they are made like that. Running them from an external cartridge would be slow/problematic.
But at least I think it would be easy enough to have a way to mass generate rips for our steam libraries to burn on cd/dvd/blueray or to store in external drives. Then just have them installed like they were gog installers.
Somebody needs to invent a way to rip your entire library on steam to portable installation cartridges so you just plun-n-play them
A significant number of games on Steam can literally just be ctrl c ctrl v’d into another directory, snd still more or less work, or be made to work if you … configured Proton through Not-Steam,.for them.
Mostly only games on Steam that have some kind of always online DRM are going to throw a shitfit in that scenario.
People seem to forget that Steam and Source were built from the ground up to support what is I guess now the ‘old school’ way of modding a game: you just literally throw more shit into the game directory, edit what is already there, etc.
You can add /any exe/ external to Steam, to Steam, and run it via Proton. … /any exe/.
I’ve managed to get fucking Cascadeur working on Linux, via Steam/Proton, lol… there are a few games I tinker with where the model or anim ripper scripts only work on Blender 3.6 for Windows… So, download Win Blender 3.6, add to Steam/Proton, run, install Windows only plugin. Voila! Bit of jank, but it does work.
Any game that somebody has figured out how to do the equivalent of… some kind of script extender, to enable mods to do more kinds of stuff?
The way those work is they basically hijack or replace the original game exe.
Any game that has been reverse engineered to this extent, you can get to run independent of Steam.
I’ve done it with CyberPunk 77, NewVegas, etc, toying with my own mod making attempts. Its not too hard to futz with configs and launch arguments to launch straight into the main CP77 exe, just skip the launch/loader thing.
You can actually just do this kinds shit for quite a lot of games.
I’ve never actually tried this but presumably I can just download the games on Steam and then uninstall Steam and the game should still work right as long as they’re not even the steam folder. After all you can put games on Steam so presumably you can take them off.
It shouldn’t be that hard. I may look into this.
Really it’s just install the game, copy the local files and apply the steam crack (for most games), maybe repack it into a nice packed executable with some lightweight compression of the files for easier storage.
I suppose the worst thing would be to manage the exceptions to the rule, games that use other drm, or that maybe need some tweaking for the steam crack to work,nor maybe need to create some extra folders to work. But for most simple games it should me enough.
Imagine having an entire library of modern games on cartridge. Look up what game to play, grab it from the shelf, No DRM, put it into a cartridge bay and hit a switch, and the computer copies part of it to RAM and runs it. Just like N64, but 10,000x bigger.
People do keep trying to make modern “retro style” consoles. But the problem is they always have limited processing capacity so they’re always quite niche. Also the price of having to put everything on a cartridge of some kind would probably mean you wouldn’t get indie games on the platform.
I’d imagine indies could release “special editions” with physical SD cards sent out for collectors and fans about a year after release. There’s some indie games where I’d definitely buy that.
And even if the cartridges didn’t have DRM, so what? They already made a lot of their money
I think, most if not all games would need to be installed on the computer, as they are made like that. Running them from an external cartridge would be slow/problematic.
But at least I think it would be easy enough to have a way to mass generate rips for our steam libraries to burn on cd/dvd/blueray or to store in external drives. Then just have them installed like they were gog installers.