best practice for a VM to deal with game libaries?

[cholzer]

Hi everyone!

I've been using unraid for over a year now and I'm super happy with it!

An issue that is annoying me more and more are the insane sizes of PC games and their patches.

Currently I copy the install folder of a game from my main rig to the other 3 gaming PC's to avoid re-downloading the entire game on each client, or re-downloading the stupidly large patches (I don't have fast internet) on every client.

 

While that works it does not fix the issue that on my main rig I frequently have to wait 60minutes for a patch to download before I can actually play (again, slow internet). And the main rig must be started when my son wants to grab a game from that rig for his PC.

So my idea is to utilize the VM feature of unraid to deal with that.

Goal:

• have a windows VM where all launchers are installed which keep all my games up to date
• the install folders of the launchers are exposed to the LAN so that clients can pull the install dir of the games

 

What is the best way to achieve that?

I'm especially puzzled by how to have this VM store the game library on the array as game launchers don't accept network shares/drives as game library location.

 

Thanks in advance! :)

[dodgypast]

Map an unraid share as a drive and then point steam at that drive.

 

I've done it with steam, YMMV with other clients.

[cholzer]

1 hour ago, dodgypast said:

Map an unraid share as a drive and then point steam at that drive.

 

I've done it with steam, YMMV with other clients.

Origin, Uplay and the EPIC Launcher did not like that last time I tried which is why I'd like to go a different route.

I suppose I could use the unassigned devices plugin and then passthrough a disk to the VM and share it from there to my LAN. Don't need any parity for the game library.

Edited January 5, 2020 by cholzer