Steam’s new API lets devs grant easier save entry to avid players
Valve immediately pushed a brand new house of Steam APIs to handle “widespread challenges” for a recreation’s numerous variations on the platform.
Now, builders can present avid players entry to an older save model of their recreation, and a technique to guard their saves from these earlier iterations. In its weblog, Valve admitted the same old path of was “pretty obscure,” however now lets builders “supply gamers this selection from inside the recreation itself.”
These modifications, it continued, “give gamers extra clear selections in how they need to interact with the sport. Some need to be a part of your beta department the place you might be testing out the newest updates, whereas others could need to play on an older steady construct that they know works properly with their save file.”
Beforehand, avid players would get pleasure from to entry these beta branches on their very beget within the ‘Settings’ tab; now, builders can add a button and textual content to a recreation’s menu that shows what a save a participant has and invite them to affix the beta division. Inside that division, avid players will “see new UI instantly subsequent to the play button in Steam that exhibits the present beta they’ve set, and simply lets them decide again out in the event that they so select.”
As soon as chosen, Steam will reboot and relaunch the sport into beta mode and its participant-chosen save. That save shall be additional mirrored within the recreation’s Steam library on-line web page.
As for recreation saves, Valve stated the model new APIs make it so avid players are requested within the occasion that they’d esteem to peaceful train the older model of a title rather than defaulting to the newer one. It well-known that “nervousness can come up when avid players with dozens or a whole bunch of hours of playtime uncover that their maintain file now not works with probably the newest model of the sport.
By “together with some widespread sense” to their recreation, devs can verify what model a participant’s present save is linked to, one thing Valve stated is primarily a problem for Early Entry video games. Alternatively, they may specify model numbers in save recordsdata or map a model of their recreation to a department ID that “creates a desk someplace in your recreation that’s conscious of which variations correspond with each Steam Beta Division.”
The onus will fall on devs to traipse these 4 APIs into their video video games themselves, and extra recordsdata on them shall be be taught proper right here.