Strife: VE without Steam?

[Lutz]

Forgive me (and point me at the thread) if this has been asked/answered elsewhere, but is there a way to get a copy of Strife: Veteran Edition WITHOUT the Steam and it's constant bullsh*t? (Not that I don't love playing my favorite game of "Updating Steam"...) I would love to simply order a CD and call it a day.

[Quasar]

Lutz said:

Forgive me (and point me at the thread) if this has been asked/answered elsewhere, but is there a way to get a copy of Strife: Veteran Edition WITHOUT the Steam and it's constant bullsh*t? (Not that I don't love playing my favorite game of "Updating Steam"...) I would love to simply order a CD and call it a day.

A GOG Galaxy edition is still in the works; right now it's mostly waiting on contractual issues and is no longer held up by tech stuff as we came up with solutions to those problems while working on Turok and Noctropolis.

[BaronOfStuff]

Love what you guys have done for Strife, Turok et al. so far. Never thought I'd see Strife in particular get a second chance.

[Lutz]

Quasar said:

A GOG Galaxy edition is still in the works; right now it's mostly waiting on contractual issues and is no longer held up by tech stuff as we came up with solutions to those problems while working on Turok and Noctropolis.

Godspeed, mighty Quasar -- godspeed.

[Lutz]

I suspect I know the answer, but because I am itching to play some Strife outside of DosBox, here's a follow-up question.

If the answer to this question is "Yes, but it's technically illegal and/or a violation of the license agreement" then stop right there -- I don't need to know -- but is there a way to divorce a Steam-purchased Strife from Stream, i.e. copy it from the computer on which I bought it (via Steam) and play it (without Steam interference) on another computer?

For the record, I travel a lot for work, and often to places in which internet access is non-existent, spotty, or expensive; not that you would expect a software pirate to admit to attempted piracy, but hey, I *do* have a reason for asking...

[Graf Zahl]

Lutz said:

I suspect I know the answer, but because I am itching to play some Strife outside of DosBox, here's a follow-up question.

If the answer to this question is "Yes, but it's technically illegal and/or a violation of the license agreement" then stop right there -- I don't need to know -- but is there a way to divorce a Steam-purchased Strife from Stream, i.e. copy it from the computer on which I bought it (via Steam) and play it (without Steam interference) on another computer?

The game data is not encrypted, so if you want to play it with a source port supporting Strife nobody can stop you. And since Strife VE's source is released, it should also be possible to recompile that free of Steam infestation. I have no idea how much work is needed for that, though.

[Quasar]

Graf Zahl said:

The game data is not encrypted, so if you want to play it with a source port supporting Strife nobody can stop you. And since Strife VE's source is released, it should also be possible to recompile that free of Steam infestation. I have no idea how much work is needed for that, though.

Load it in Visual Studio and remove the _USE_STEAM_ define. Press Build. What is lost: achievements and lobby-based netplay.

Most people probably don't know that SVE still supports plain UDP-based netplay too, though. Same command line options as are used for Choco Doom. You'll see the usual textlib startup instead of the fancy Steam lobby frontend, obviously.

Great pains were taken to ensure that nothing was too uniquely implemented to depend totally on Steam. With enough work, you could technically make the lobby stuff itself work over pure UDP. What you're missing are Steam's automatic NAT punching and fallback to piping your packets through the Steampipe CDN if it can't get through your firewall directly - those are features implemented in the Steam client and not in any code we wrote.