• Anyone else find the Steam download time estimator annoying?
    2 replies, posted
Say I start the download halfway, the time left-counter starts at 0 seconds and keeps going up, providing no useful information at all for quite a while. They should just look at the current download speed and divide the amount of data left by that, together with some "local" averaging, i.e. not the whole data set of download speeds (as is the case now I think, I don't know the exact mechanism). Edit: how is this dumb?
Depending on what you are doing those number can easily change. I could start a download and get quite good speeds and then start streaming a 1080p movie, lowering the speed. I think it'd can be kinda hard to make it accurate
Microtorrent gets it right. Why can't Valve? It makes no sense to have a system that takes 40 minutes to give accurate data about downloading a certain amount of data. As an estimating system, it fails horribly at the moment. [editline]7th September 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=mopman999;37577107]Depending on what you are doing those number can easily change. I could start a download and get quite good speeds and then start streaming a 1080p movie, lowering the speed. I think it'd can be kinda hard to make it accurate[/QUOTE] That's what the local average is for. So you don't get IE situations ( "Download ready in 4 seconds- no wait 2 years, uhhh let's say a month and call it even?") [IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17216535/Untitled.jpg[/IMG] Here's a hypothetical situation where the blue line represents what IE does (or did), it uses one data point to estimate time left. Very inaccurate A better estimate would be to take the average of speeds in a certain time interval (red lines). I.e. not ALL of the data points, because that could lead to a bias due to the downloadspeed accelerating in the beginning.
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