Well that escalated. *Headdesk*

[davidgillon]

One of the companies I buy computer games stuff from was having a sale, so Wednesday evening I picked up a couple of add-ons for one of my games and went to install them.

Run the installer for the first one and it falls over.

I run it again and pay more attention to what it's saying.

Ah, it's trying to install to drive F. Drive F is the drive that died last month. Fortunately I'd copied my Steam library folder from that to my new drive G before that happened.

So I look at Steam to see what folders it thinks I have. And it says C only. I thought I'd set up the new one on G via Steam, but apparently not.

So set up a Steam folder on G to point to what's already there.

Steam: there's nothing in that folder. *Headdesk*

Check the original game in Steam: Steam thinks its not installed.

Okay, I'll run the installer for the full game. (Wince)

Steam: It's already installed! But I'm going to check every file, and then delete them and install them again!! Even if they're unchanged!!! *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

This took it from about 8PM until 5AM. (It's the biggest game I own)

Thursday morning, try and install the new add-ons. Still trying to put them in F. *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

So I have a look at the FAQ on the company's website - if something similar happens, it's probably the registry. Try app X from company Y's website to fix it.

So I try that, it resets the registry, new add-ons install. Yay!

Then I notice a few files seem to be missing. The game stores its files, those from the original provider at least, in zip files (it calls them something else, but they're zip files), and runs them directly from the zip, no need to extract them. But if you want to use a third party mod to those files, such as a reskin, you have to unpack the zips so the files can be directly addressed. Over time I've done this for every zip in the game, that's several hundred zip files. Steam has carefully gone through the game, deleting and replacing every zip, and deleting, but not replacing, every file that's been extracted from them. The third-party mod files have been left alone, but without the extracted zip files they won't work. *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

I'm almost impressed. Steam has been clever enough to realise that some of the non-zip files in the game folders are from third parties, and some are copies of the files in the zips, and that there's a difference. It just hasn't been clever enough to realise they might all be there for a reason.

If you want me, I'll be extracting zip files....