[botmeister]

The biggest problem with STEAM is that it turns the software it deposits on your computer into a never ending "work in progress", or in otherwords a never ending "beta" version. The problem with a "beta" is that it will unexpectantly change, and when that happens whatever was built on top of it gets messed up, so you cannot build anything on top of it, which means, we'll be forever futzing around with patching our mods to work with the latest version of a work in progress.

I knew this problem would happen right after I first read Valve's description of the wonders of STEAM.

I doubt the intention is to kill our mods, as it seems the free advertising Valve gets from free products such as Admin Mod, etc is a benifit to their sales, instead I think there is understanding of how to properly build and release software. It should be released in well defined and stable stages, each clearly labeld as being "final" or "not final". User can then upgrade to either the stable version, or the unstable version by choice. With STEAM *all* updates are by definition "unstable" and even worse, the updates are *forced* on to the users, i.e., if you choose not to upgrade, you can no longer use the software at all!

The concept of STEAM is not really the problem, since adjustements can be made to it to allow beta upgrades or final upgrades, where users can chose to upgrade to a beta version, or to a final version. The final versions would be released far less frequently, while betas could be released as often as it desired. In addition, STEAM should allow for two version, the beta and the final to coexist on the same computer at the same time. I doubt we'd see such sophistication from STEAM for a very long time, if ever, since it appears the concept of final vs beta was never biult into the product, therefore they will likely have to rework the entire system to allow for it.

I think the ultimate question, is what can we do (or should we even bother) to solve the problem of working on a continuos stream of unstable and unpredictable releases?