Originally posted by Gate:

Request Option: Verify Workshop Content

Valve, can we get an additional function to verify workshop content?

It would hopefully cut down on some of the posts from users about broken mods / or failed downloads.

note: "delete your workshop folder and re-download" has it's own can of worms; so a formal function to check consistency of workshop content would be nice. especially for those of us who use dozens of gigabytes worth of content.

How would Valve go ahead and test to see what still works or not, especially on games they don't make?

This sounds like it can take dozens of full time employees to look at every single mod in all workshops for years without end.

I don't care if the content actually "works", I only care that it's installed As The Author Published It as well as Not Corrupt.

As Valve hosts the Workshop content on their servers, I would assume they store a checksum of the files (and if not, it is trivial to generate). Adding an option to compare the locally stored files against the remote server checksums shouldn't take a decent programmer more than a few hours of billable time. Additions to the UI and then pushing into the QA cycle for feature testing would of course increase the cost. However for utility to end user I think it could be justified.

Bonus points if the workshop would remove files locally that are removed remotely.

Extra special bonus points if there is a button on the workshop item (for subscribed items) to "refresh" or delete local and re-download said item.

Game updates, mod breaks.
Game updates, mod don't breaks.

Mod updates, breaks game.
Mod updates, don't breaks game.

Mod update, doesn't work anymore.
Mod update, it works.

I don't see how Steam gonna manage every single mod, for every single game that has an update that happens, and there people he don't know what they're doing either they break their mods by not reading how to use, or install correctly, download a mod that over laps another that breaks it, or didn't know one mod stop working that needed for rest to work, or etc...

That a lot of testing each time game updates, or when mod updates.

Guys, I think you're missing what I have actually requested. A verification of downloaded content against the content of the published copy to ensure consistence has nothing to do with whether or not a mod works correctly as published. Just that the copy you have locally is *exactly* the same as the one published.

Truthfully, if workshop contents contained an auto-generated md5Sums file we could do consistency checking ourselves, but as it stands we have no way to compare local vs remote. Just pure brute force delete + download and that returns us back to rolling dice. As it is, workshop content handling is extremely opaque to the end-user.

This will do nothing about whether an author has uploaded it correctly (or functionally), just that the end-user has downloaded it correctly, and (hopefully) fully.

Valve please revisit this and pay attention to what Gate is saying.
Or
Give us an re-download workshop content button.

The amount of times I've solved workshop content issues be unsubscribing and re-subscribing to mods has been more than 10. I would love to have that as something I can do in properties or in the workshop page for a game.

Originally posted by SGF:

Valve please revisit this and pay attention to what Gate is saying.
Or
Give us an re-download workshop content button.

The amount of times I've solved workshop content issues be unsubscribing and re-subscribing to mods has been more than 10. I would love to have that as something I can do in properties or in the workshop page for a game.

Not possible to manage, nor will it solve anything as still requires verifying, approve by devs/publisher if there was to be promise by publisher aka meaning time & money required here.

The redownload button would be nice to have yes, only way to redownload, is to unsub, and resub to it.