cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/73383204
Apparently, Valve keeps getting builds that were never run through Steam at all, which is how games end up with broken launch options or missing depots.
I have somehow seen youtube channels of indie devs crashing out over how these are onerous requirements that they will never financially recover from and this means Valve hates indie devs.
While also complaining that their games/updates are taking too long to get actually screened and published.
I have since concluded that those indie devs are hacks, because none of this seems to be unreasonable in anyway.
As 9point6 says… yeah, most of this can pretty easily be handled by adding another step or to to your build automation process, or just, gasp! Do it manually!
Is… is it really that hard to know what your own games dependencies… actually are?
Genuienly ridiculous that Valve has to specifically mandate that uploaded games, you know, need to actually run, don’t crash on launch… the bar is apparently in hell.
smdh
We have plenty of CI that launches and tests our shit. Before any prod deploy, I always take 5-15 min to click around before running the deploy job.
Like… how often are you deploying if you can’t take the 5 min to do that? If you’re a dev you probably already have the environment up and running.
"It works on my machine"itis has hit the indie crowd!!
I was about to say this just saved some test engineers’ jobs
But then realised it’s an easily written post-deploy test automation stage stuck onto the end of the release pipeline
That’ll still fix the problem it’s intending to solve - games that don’t launch
As long as the developer uses a different PC with a different user account name. Otherwise it can still suffer from “it works on my PC” syndrome because they used resources that are local to their device and not included in the game
I’ve not heard of release pipelines running directly on a dev’s own PC before but sure, if they’re running it on their own PC it’s not the best test. It’s still better than not running it at all which sounds like has been happening
deleted by creator
What’s a depot in this context?
According to SteamWorks Documentation: A depot is a logical grouping of files which are all delivered to a customer as a single group.
In the simple case, that’s probably an EXE and some DLLs plus maybe some graphics/music/etc. files (if they’re not packed into the EXE) for a particular version of the game.
The onions voting simulator wasn’t that bad, come on.
Great!
I would trust my pipelines that much
