As the Steam sale is currently in full swing, many people will be buying several items of DLC. However, you may find that despite buying the items, they don't actually download, depending on what you were doing on Steam at the time. After buying four items of DLC last night, it happened to me as it has done in the past during busy sale periods.
Previously, a Steam restart sometimes would cure this but in most cases, a cache verify would be required which is both time consuming and will overwrite modifications you have made to certain files, such as sound packs. Since a recent Steam update, this process is no longer needed, and here is how it is done.......
Open the Steam client and click on 'Library' at the top left, and select 'All Games'. On the list on the left hand side, right click Train Simulator 2014 and select 'Properties'. In the new window that has appeared, click on the 'DLC' tab which will then list all of the packages you own.
Scroll down this list until you find what you have recently purchased and it will have a tick in the box, along with the state on the right showing as 'Installed', even though you know it isn't. As per the screenshot below, untick this box and then close the little window.
Steam will then go into a process of validating your install, which will take a few seconds, then the Train Simulator 2014 status will go back to 'Ready To Play'. Follow the steps above once again to being up your list of DLC, and this time tick the box before closing the small window again. This will then force Steam into downloading your purchased content and will usually take a process of Update Queued>Installing>Ready To Play.
It seems that this process has to be done separately (it seemed the case for me anyway) for each piece of DLC, so don't go unticking all of your recently purchased boxes, just do them one at a time. It is slightly time consuming, but nowhere near on the scale or inconvenience that a cache verify would present.
This new feature also means that you can remove different items of DLC from your install completely, thus freeing up room on your hard drive. For instance, a route you no longer play any more, or a route you received as part of a bundle, but never intended to use. You must be careful though, as removing a route from the list will also remove the assets associated with it, which might be required for any third party routes you have downloaded. Cajon Pass for instance, seems to remove the legacy US assets along with it and these are required for many third party routes such as WCML North. Just be careful to only remove what you know won't affect anything else.
As ever, if you have any further questions, either comment below or get in contact with DPSimulation via the 'Contact Us' form on the website by clicking
here.
