Force Steam to go offline with a very basic script

[boothegoo]

Hey all, I've posted this in response to a previous old thread in regards to forcing steam offline however as pointed out it was best if I started a new thread for people to view and respond to.

I've made a much more elegant way to force Steam into Offline mode than unplugging your network cable ever damn time.

It's switchable so you can turn the force offline mode option on and off easily. Here is a link to it.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CKKN0SF6

For those curious how it works this all it does. To force offline mode it copies a steam.cfg file into the steam install folder.

To undo this it just deletes the steam.cfg file.

You can enable it and disable it by to separate desktop icons. It's incredibly basic and I went to effort of packaging it into a MSI to make it easy for other to benefit from it.

For those interested in the code here it is.

The steam.cfg files contains;


BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable
MinFootprintAutoRefresh = disable
ForceOfflineMode=enable
BootStrapperForceSelfUpdate = disable
FullMemoryMinidumps = disable
BootStrapperForceClientBootstrap = disable
EngineInSameProcessAsClient = disable
CachePreLoaderMode = disable
ActivityLogFile=Steam.log
ActivityLogEnable = disable
ActivityLogConsoleOutput = disable
ActivityLogCreateMode = append
ActivityLogFlushMode = flush
ActivityLogGroup = disable
ActivityLogContext = disable
ActivityLogDate = disable
ActivityLogTimestamp = disable
ActivityLogElapsedTime = disable
ActivityLogThreadId = disable
#ActivityLogGroupNameWidth = disable
ActivityLogGroupNameWidth = 12
#ActivityLogContextNameWidth = disable
ActivityLogContextNameWidth = 20


The BAT to put steam into offline mode contains this;

C:
For %%I In (C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z) Do If Exist "%%I:\Program Files\Steam" Copy "C:\Program Files\Steam Offline Forced\steam.cfg" "%%I:\Program Files\Steam\steam.cfg"


The BAT to return steam to normal and stop it forcing offline mode contains this;

C:
For %%I In (C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z) Do If Exist "%%I:\Program Files\Steam" DEL "%%I:\Program Files\Steam\steam.cfg"

So for those who understand it they can see the code is increadbly basic and pretty premative. The thing I've really done is put it into an easy to use package for the average steam user to be able to make use of without having learn coding.

So far I can find no other example of this being done so hopefully people find it useful. I just made it for myself and some mates who needed something to do this but if others can use it too then great.

Please if you have any comments, surgestions, or even objections to the tool feel free to reply to the thread and I'll keep checking the halflife2.net forums to respond to everyone.

 

[Blakeb155]

I don't get it..

all you need to do is click 'Account > Go Offline' to use offline mode..

Whats all this achieve?

 

[Stormy]

It takes all of your account details and sends them to russia.

 

[boothegoo]

What it means is for those people who don't want steam automatically going online just because they have a network connection. It's a major pain starting steam then telling it to go offline every single time.

For example you just want to jump on an offline game quickly but steam opens up online automatically and starts downloading an update for that game. You then can't play the game until the update finishes downloading.

Or maybe your internet is shaped to horribly slow speeds cause you went over your download limit and instead of just being able to open steam quickly to play some offline games you have to wait 10 years for steam to go online and then finially after its finished logging in you can tell it to go offline.

Not everyone will find a use for this I know, but there are some out their that might find this really useful. I've layed the code out in front of you to read so you can see yourself exactly what it does. With the code you could even write the scripts yourself. Only took like half an hour to put it all together anyways. But yes, if you think you will find this useful please feel free to download it.

 

[Hectic Glenn]

I see where you are coming from. Although another solution is individually settings each Steam game to not update, I believe you occasionally get them forced upon you after a longer period of time. Would I be right in saying that after X amount of days, Steam requires you to go back online (if only for a brief time) to make sure everything is working properly?

I guess the alternative to this is starting Steam with your internet connection disabled...which is a bit silly. There isn't a button on the log-in screen saying 'start in offline mode' which there should be.

Interested to know if you've had a good response from this boothegoo? Occasionally there are some useful mods for Steam which crop up which I wish were officially supported.