History

Origin

Steamodd originated with an early version of OPTF2 which itself grew out of a 200 line script I wrote in the early days of the Steam API to find things I could complain about. Since then it has grown into a more and more capable and fully featured module with every version.

It is still a work in progress and the API is subject to change in breaking ways, however as of the 3.0 release I have began using a simple and meaningful versioning system that should make moving to new versions much easier. Major version numbers are incremented when the release makes breaking changes, minor version numbers are incremented when they are not. Meaning that it is safe to upgrade without having to change existing code.

The name

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years and most recently from OPTF2 it’s a good idea to record the meaning behind your project names if they aren’t explicitly indicative of function or you will forget.

Steamodd quite simply stands for “Steam odds and ends”. Even though it’s starting to become more of a robust module it started out as a small and probably not very well designed script meant to be run as a tool instead of a reusable lib.

That’s not to say that the name doesn’t fit, since in addition to the strong implementation of the API it has the recent VDF support and the SIM layer to boast as useful but not exactly unrelated utilities.