Other Steam converting game data

Hi,

I haven't been paying attention for a few months.
When I start a game, Steam tells me
"Converting game contents into a new format"

What is this about?

Regards,

Xir

 

Quick google brings back: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2823801

 

Thanks....
It takes ages on my machine, which is NOT great.

 

Speed is probably a combination of free RAM, CPU speed, hard drive speed and level of drive fragmentation.

 

Its a one time job per game and future downloads wont need the convert, so it will soon be a thing of the past. And on the positive side it means whenever you get a game update it wont be as massive, for example i believe many Unreal Engine 3 based games had huge patches, even if there was 5 fixes it could be 500+ MB.

 

Which are all Sh*te in mine.

 

There is no positive side to converting Chime, it's a game that no longer gets dev support so will never be updated and when you convert it you lose all save data.

RAGE!

 

*sigh*
I suppose I'll just redownload everything on the new machine when it arrives (eventually), was hoping to avoid that, my ISP will probably throttle me if I completely redownload my steamfolder

 

I've no idea how it works but only some titles need to be redownloaded, some only need to be partly downloaded and some don't need a download at all.