Landmark moment in SA gaming...

[J_Th4ng]

Wait for it... WAGE has almost launched their Steam content mirror!!

Big news? You better believe it. From Tuesday next week, South Africans using WebAfrica accounts will no longer have to use up their cap when downloading games off Steam.

And, in order to guarantee this, WAGE have undertaken to add ALL Steam server IP's to their freezone. What this means is that if for some reason your Steam connects to an international server, WA will cover the cost of the bandwidth. Bloody brilliant!!

Check this thread out for more details http://forums.webafrica.co.za/showthread.php?t=3221-14

I downloaded Altitude from Steam last night, and it didn't use any of my cap. So it seems that it's live already, at least in part :D

[J_Th4ng]

I see that no-one is particularly interested in this, based on teh number of replies, but just to keep everyone updated...

A link from the mygaming site:

http://www.mygaming.co.za/news/pc/5580-How-download-from-WebAfricas-Steam-mirror.html


A step by step guide to accessing the Steam Freezone beta

Late last year WebAfrica made an announcement that would go on to become one of the biggest stories in local gaming for some time.

The ISP promised to deliver a local mirror for the massive international online game store Steam. Furthermore, it promised that all WebAfrica customers would be able to use their WebAfrica broadband accounts to download content from Steam without using any of their allocated bandwith cap.

This effectively meant that local PC gamers would finally have proper access to the service and all the excellent special deals and sales it regularly offers, without the associated cost of the bandwidth required that has kept most PC gamers at arm’s length.

As exciting as the prospect is, it was a massive promise to make, and despite a targeted launch date for early February, WebAfrica technicians are still working on delivering what they set out to achieve.

Current Status

The local WebAfrica Steam mirror beta has been running for a few days now, and although it is still a way off from being a user friendly and effective system, it is showing some promise.

The first hurdle is getting connected. Downloading Steam files from WebAfrica’s Freezone is not simply a matter of logging into Steam and hitting the install button on any game you want. Having said that, you will not require the expertise of an IT professional to get it working if you follow our simple step by step guide below.

The second, and more serious problem at this stage is that not everything on Steam is currently hosted in the Freezone. A reported 400GB of content failed to authenticate when being added to Freezone, and WebAfrica is reportedly in the process of redownloading it all. This means that there is a good chance that your desired game/demo will not be available via the Freezone, yet.

Bear in mind that WebAfrica is hard at work trying to optimise the service, and aims to have the entire Steam catalogue on its Freezone as soon as possible.

If you want to start downloading content from WebAfrica’s Steam Freezone beta, then follow the instructions below.

How to get Steam downloads running via Freezone

After reading through the 56 page long forum thread currently going over on the WebAfrica forums, I have come up with this pretty straight forward guide to accessing Steam without using your data cap.

A massive thank you goes to WA forumites PsYcRoW, Vdr, One1Two, pevans_om and others whose research and posting made this walkthrough possible.

1. Make sure you have a WebAfrica broadband account, preferably not their 30GB local account as this will reportedly not be able to access the Freezone. I used a 1GB prepaid international account.

2. Download, install and update Steam.

3. Open Steam, go into File/Settings/Downloads and set your region to Africa. Select OK, close Steam.

4. Download and install a program called SteamWatch 3.

5. Right click on SteamWatch in your Windows toolbar. Select “Settings”, and make sure the “Block Connections” box is selected. Select “OK”, SteamWatch will minimize.

6. Again, right click SteamWatch. Choose “Edit SteamWatch Settings.xml”. A text document will open. Scroll down to the bottom where you will see a list of lines that read something similar to “< address >(IP address, i.e. 41.163.54.32) < / address> ”. Delete all of these lines except for one.

On the remaining line, replace the IP address in between the < address> tags with the following:

“41.185.60.43”

Once this is done, the edited section will look something like this:

< !- - List of IP addresses to allow - - >

< whitelist>

< address> 41.185.60.43 < /address>

< steamwatch>

Save and close the file.

7. Again, right click on the SteamWatch tab in your toolbar. Choose “Stop Steam Watch”.

8. Open Steam. Browse the store of available downloads, and select a few you like. I recommend choosing a few demos to start out with. The Mini Ninja’s demo worked on the Freezone for me.

9. Check the download in the “MyGames” tab. Once Steam connects to an international server, and the download is in progress, right click on SteamWatch again and select “Start SteamWatch”. SteamWatch will now make sure that Steam only accesses content from the IP we entered in step 6. This is Webafrica’s Freezone Steam server.

10. If your downloads do not commence you can try the following:

Close Steam and stop SteamWatch. Go into your Steam folder (default is C:/Program Files/Steam). Delete a file called ClientRegistry.blob. Revert to beginning of step 8.

These steps worked for me, as well as others over on the WA forums. Bear in mind that around 400GB of content still needs to be added to the FreeZone, so if you are not able to access certain files, try a few until you find something that is available over Freezone (again, the Mini Ninjas demo worked for us, and its free).

A good way to ensure that your cap was not used is to login to your Webafrica account usage page. This page will indicate how much bandwidth you have accessed from the Freezone, and how much you have used of your cap.

With the files that I was able to get streaming from the Freezone, I was able to maintain a constant 400kb/s download speed.

After following the above steps, and downloading the Mini Ninjas Demo and Plants vs Zombies, my account reflected 811MB of Freezone bandwidth usage, and 240MB of actual cap ussage.

My personal experience thus far has ben that I have already had Steam crash on me a couple of times whilst using Steamwatch to download games. It's no biggie though, I've not actuallly lost anything. Over the weekend I've downloaded about 15GB of content off Steam (Prototype and Mirror's Edge), all of which came off the freezone.

From my perspective it's all win!! :D

[gr@v1ty]

It looks like its cool for steam users. To explain why the lack of interest; I don't run steam, don't like steam (since the COD days). I'll look into steam again one day only when its ABSOLUTELY necessary. I reckon this should resolve most of the issues that cause people like me to not run steam and thanks for the post/update.

[Phatso]

I seem to have completely missed this thread!

The only reason why I stayed away from buying games off Steam was the bandwidth costs! This makes it PURE WIN!

I look forward to acquiring digital copes of games from now on! :jig: