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November 21st at 12:21pm
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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