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Best way to update your second instance [Arma 3]
Have a second Arma instance and want to update it with ease? Here's how.
Greetings folks,
This post will cover an easy method to update your second Arma instance, or even more instances.
The basic idea behind this, is to have an additional instance of the game in stable branch, while the Steam managed instance is in development branch.
This way Steam will auto-update the development branch whenever possible while the stable branch does not recieve updates that frequently.
To do this a simple program called SteamCLI will be used in addition with my small batch script I wrote.
Why use SteamCLI?:
- Steam Mobile Authenticator Support
- easy to configure due to good documentation
- ensures download to work via checksums and hashing
- sync and mirror features
Let's get dirty then.
Grab your copy of the tool from https://github.com/BytexDigital/SteamCLI/ and check the releases tab for a download of the latest version.
Place the files somewhere on your computer. In my case it is D:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\SteamCMD\SteamCLI\
Next step is to grab my batch script and modify it according to your needs:
You have several values you can change:
Name | Value | Options |
---|---|---|
STEAMUSER | Steam Username | Your Steam Username |
STEAMPWD | Steam Password | Your Steam Password |
A3ID | App ID of your Arma game | by default 107410 unless using special builds like profiling. See Depots for IDs |
A3BRANCH | Branch for Arma | See Branches and for Passwords Arma_3_Steam_Branches public - for default development - for dev branch Depot ID for them are 104711 |
A3instDir | Path where Arma will be downloaded / updated too | a valid Windows path. |
STEAMPATH |
Path to the SteamCLI folder | a valid Windows path |
Once changed to your needs you can run the batch file and it will start to analyze the folder and start downloading the required files.
Depending on your network speed this takes some minutes, so be patient and keep the command line open.
Over and out,
Aebian