lifecycle.md

Lifecycle and callbacks

Official background: Steamworks API overview.

Call steam.restartAppIfNecessary(appId) before initialization when Steam should relaunch a production build. Then call init() (throwing convenience helper) or steam.initEx() (structured { ok, result, errorMessage } result) exactly once for the process. Call steam.shutdown() during orderly process shutdown.

import { init, steam, update } from '@node-3d/steam-api';

init();

setInterval(() => {
	for (const event of update()) {
		console.log(event.type);
	}
}, 16);

update() runs steam.runCallbacks() and drains callbacks.pollCallbacks(). Use steam.runCallbacks() plus callbacks.pollCallbacks() separately only when the application needs its own scheduling. releaseCurrentThreadMemory() is an optional Steam cleanup call for long-lived worker threads.

Promises need callback pumping

Methods such as matchmaking.createLobby(), ugc.getItems(), user.getAuthTicketForWebApi(), and userStats.getNumberOfCurrentPlayers() resolve from Steam call results. Awaiting them without pumping callbacks leaves them pending. A simple helper for scripts is:

import { update } from '@node-3d/steam-api';

export async function waitForSteamCall<T>(promise: Promise<T>): Promise<T> {
	let done = false;
	promise.finally(() => {
		done = true;
	}).catch(() => {});

	while (!done) {
		update();
		await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 16));
	}

	return promise;
}

downloadItem() is intentionally different: it returns boolean synchronously to indicate whether Steam accepted the download request. Observe its completion through the download-item-result event returned by update().