Recently, Valve has rolled out a new Steam client that overhauls the download page and storage manager. The newly designed downloads page features a “new implementation” that has been “visually redesigned for clarity and ease of use”, making it much more user-friendly.
According to the Valve announcement:
- When a game/update is actively downloading it will now display the total progression completed for the download or update. Previously the progress bar would only display the downloading content progress but not the disk allocation process which would make an update appear completed when it was not.
- Any partially completed downloads/updates in queue now will show a faded progress bar and percent completed next to it to clearly display its current state.
- A new (i) icon next to the game’s title will reveal a tooltip displaying the types of content that is included in that update. Types consist of: Game Content, Downloadable Content, Workshop Content, and Shader Pre-caching. This icon only appears if the update is not solely game content.
- The download queue is now fully reorderable using drag and drop.
- The context menu for the actively downloading item now includes an option to launch the game when the download is complete and an option to suspend download throttling (if enabled) for the duration of that download.
- The “View News” button is now a “Patch Notes” link that will open an overlay to the most recent relevant patch notes for the game. This will only display for games that have entered patch notes into the new event system. The patch notes link will only show up on updates, not fresh installs. For workshop updates, a page of subscribed items ordered by update date can be accessed by selecting “View Updated Items” from the context menu.
There have also been changes made to tooltips, it makes them much more informative, plus tweaks to storage management to enable players to mount library folders on read-only drives and lets you see each drive individually. You can even see at a glance what kind of content you have installed, as each drive is broken down into individual categories: games, DLC, workshop, and the helpful “other” option.
For the full list of changes, you can reach them by clicking here.
