Organizing your Steam library

I’ve had a steam account since 2003, so unsurprisingly I’ve accumulated a bunch of games over time thanks to summer sales, winter sales, humble bundles, …
As a way to give users a means to sort and categorize games, Steam introduced categories a while back. You can add arbitrary categories, and have a game in multiple categories, and categories are synced to your account so they appear on multiple devices. The downside is that you have to set categories for each game manually.

Here is where a nifty tools come in hand: Depressurizer (download)

It provides a user friendly interface for organizing your categories, making it easy to mass categories games. But it’s most useful feature is the ability to auto-categorize games. It can do so via various criteria like genres, Steam flags (e.g. “Single-Player” or “Steam Cloud”), Steam tags, Developer & Publisher info, How Long to Beat times, release year, and/or Steam review user scores.

Once automatically categorized it is easy to find games on your library that are Local co-op, or maybe you are feeling like playing a Dungeon Crawler game today, or just want to browse games you have with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating.

I use a unique prefix for the different auto-categories so it is easy to tell them apart in steam. It also doesn’t mess with existing categories, so it’s easy to manage both categories from depressurizer and your own manual ones.

And this is an example of how the end result looks like
in Steam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gaming & Tech

Yeah I know,  I haven’t posted in quite a while. Have been pretty busy with all kinds of stuff lately. so here is a short update on the more technical stuff I’ve been up to in the last few weeks:

– I moved most of the services from my old server to my new server (actually to one of my vmware guests on my new server, si-ka.net is still missing, and I need to forward dopefish.de to www.dopefish.de)
– I set up a gameserver host on a separate vmware guest. While this may not be the best solution performance-wise, it is defiantly the best solution security wise since gameservers require all kinds of strange library crap. And because it is easy, I also set up a Left 4 Dead dedicated server and assigned it to the -si.ka- steam group.

I also started playing a few new games. I got talked into getting “Left 4 Dead”, which is fun in coop and multi-player (solo kind of lacks smart bots on your own team). Then I got GTA4, but haven’t had time to play it yet. And yesterday I had a look at “Runes of Magic” a free MMORPG. It is currently in open-beta, and large parts of it still require translation (in the starting areas, most of the quests are a mix of German/English, if you get in some seldom visited areas, quests and NPC are sometimes in Asian lettering).

Climbing has been coming a bit short lately, I’ll try to get back to that more regularly.