If I had a wish for christmas from GabeN or Valve in general, it would be actually meaningful error messages from steam.
If I had two wishes, I would like a community tool to share configs to make games work that require tweaking.
But I’d be very happy if I got better error messages.
I mean, what more do you want from the error? Time? Location? Directory that failed the write? Sector count? It’s pretty straightforward.
Every error steam has given me was easily figured out in the logs. Just like every program.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
If it has over two thousand pages of problem reports, users asking for help, it is a legitimate problem and the logs are not a sufficient help to those users.
What you’re not understanding is how hard it is for an operating system to diagnose a problem with a drive.
You’re expecting from Stream they write a full diagnostics tool so the program can figure out what went wrong, which could range from permission issues or formatting, to failing sectors/drives.
In theory you could make something that works, in reality you’ll be getting false positives, for example: a permission error message while it’s actually a physical write error. The ‘wrong’ message is worse than a ‘vague’ message.
If I can look up what the error was with the disk access, in a log, then steam can do that too. It can parse that, and present it to me. That’s what I expect.
And if that fails, it can at least point me to the correct log.
I can not stress enough that the client tells me nothing:
The only approach I have to solve is, is to use a search engine for “steam disk write error”. That’s it.
Too much risk, I worked with win32 and it was wrong about the reason for failing a lot in the case of drives. If windows can’t diagnose and handle drive failure properly, I don’t think Steam will have a more reliable answer. Again, I’m assuming a vague error is better for them than a verbose error in this case.
Wouldn’t it be better if the error message itself helped you figure it out, so that you don’t have to look into logs? People seriously underestimate useful information in a good error message. Stuff like “Windows encountered an unexpected error” are just not useful.