Anyone played Half-Life 2 yet?

Coqui said:
Slight lockups but I'm sure:
a.) would get better with the 9800
b.) would perform better if I turned down the AF and AA to halfway.


All good stuff to know.

What about your processor speed and memory? I'm only at 2ghz and 512mb.
 
theacoustician said:
Be careful if you're playing a warez version ... apparently Valve purposely released a cracked copy with some back doors in it to find out who's stealing the game and go after them ... or something.

Thats the worst urban legend I've heard in a long time.
 
Shamelessly ripped from genmay:

*Some of these tips require adding parameters to the command-line, to do so, open up Steam, open up Play Games, right-click on Half-life 2, goto Properties. Then choose launch options. You can add or remove commands here.

*Some of these tips require the in-game console: To access this, click on Options, then Keyboard, then Advanced, then check the box marked "Developer Console". You can access the console from now on, by pressing the tilde (~) key.

Tips from Valve Developers

For people that are running into the bug on startup that looks like:

"Map Version is 0, expecting 19"

Try this to see if it works:

1. Go into your \Steam\SteamApps folder.
2. Rename the file called sourcemodels.gcf to something else.
3. Relaunch the game.

This is going to require a redownload of this file, but if you want to get playing tonight it's probably the best path. There are a couple of people now that were in this situation that were fixed this way.

As soon as we possible we'll release a fix for this that will not require this workaround.

Please let me know if this does or does not fix this specific problem for you. Just shoot me an e-mail at [email protected]. If this does fix it, it would be useful to get copies of a couple of the renamed (bad) cache files. - Erik Johnson, Valve Software

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For people that are having issues with sound stuttering, there is something that would be useful to get some feedback on.

Bring up the console (Options --> Keyboard --> Advanced --> Enable Developer Console) and type in:

snd_async_fullyasync 1

This is likely to eliminate the hitching, but some sounds could play slightly out of sync. The delay in playback would be roughly the same as the seek time of your hard drive.

Give this a shot and either reply to this thread with feedback or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. - Erik Johnson, Valve Software

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Tell Steam to remember your password. As long as you have everything downloaded, you shouldn't have to connect to play. This is true for the single-player game and any LAN games. - Gary McTaggert, Valve Software

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You can use "-refresh N" for instance on the command-line to manually set your refresh rate - where N is the refresh rate you want, for e.g. "-refresh 60" for a refresh rate of 60 etc. Use common sense and don't put something your monitor can't cope with. You can also do "-width N -height N" to change your resolution manually - for e.g. "-width 1280 -height 1024" etc Also, if you want to use a non-standard aspect ratio, you can set r_aspectratio directly. - Gary McTaggert, Valve Software.

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Another thing that you can try is to add the command-line option "-autoconfig" one time to force the default configuration for your card. I wouldn't leave that on the command-line more than once that as it will cause your video savings to not get saved. - Gary McTaggart, Valve Software

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In case anyone else is feeling a bit nauseous by the weird default fov (75) in the game, do this: hit ESC, click on keyboard, click on advanced, check the "developer console" tab. Press the tilde (~) key to bring down the console, type "sv_cheats 1" without the quotations, then type "fov 90" without the quotations. Now you have a normal fov, no more motion sickness. - Me

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"cl_showfps 1" - Typing this at the console will display your fps meter.

"cl_showfps 2" - Typing this at the console will give you a smoothed frame rate, which is slightly more readable.

"bind tab +showbudget" - Typing this at the console will bind the Tab key with the "+showbudget" command, which will give you some in-game profiling. You can change it to a different key if you wish.

cl_forcepreload "1" - This parameter is availabe in the config.cfg file in your \half-life 2\hl2\cfg directory, it's under SteamApps. It's default is "0", set it to "1".

sv_forcepreload "1" - This parameter is availabe in the config.cfg file in your \half-life 2\hl2\cfg directory, it's under SteamApps. It's default is "0", set it to "1".

cl_smooth "0" - This parameter is not available in the config.cfg file in your \half-life 2\hl2\cfg directory, it's under SteamApps. Add it and set it to "0".

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Use "-console" on the command-line to avoid loading the in-game start screens (which looks pretty but takes longer to load).

If you guys are experiencing alot of stuttering problems or it takes a long time while loading in between zones, try these: Do a defrag and lower your sound quality to either medium or low, if those don't work, lower your texture quality. - Me

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Getting the game to load as much of its self into memory as possible also helps a lot; to do this, right click on Half-Life 2 in steam and select properties, then click launch options, put in "-heapsize 256000" without the quote marks. For the number, choose half your total system memory, in the examples case, its for a system with 512megs ram, you should use 512000 for systems with a gig of ram. - BioHazard, Nvnews.com

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If you're still getting sound stuttering, or popping, or static after the above (which should help with HD pauses, but not the sound pauses), then change the following setting in config.cfg - eliminated sound stuttering completely for me.

snd_mixahead is originally set to "0.1"

Change it to a higher number - the number will vary by PC, but for me it was:

snd_mixahead "0.4"

That'll fix it - if it doesn't, set the number higher. If you set it lower than the default setting, the popping/stuttering gets much worse,

With the above, that should fix it. - BioHazard, Nvnews.com

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To set Steam to offline mode so you don't need to authenticate with Steam everytime you want to play a singleplayer or lan game, do this, unplug your dsl/cable cable or disconnect your modem connection. Close Steam completely and then restart Steam, it will ask you if you want to go into offline mode, say yes. Now you are in offline mode, you can reconnect your internet connection and Steam will stay in offline mode. You can now load up Halflife2, CSS, whatever and play singleplayer or lan. NOTE: THIS ONLY WORKS IF YOU HAVE ALREADY UNLOCKED THE GAME. If you want to set Steam to go back online, just close it and restart it again.

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If you want to backup your games (HL2, HL Source, CSS etc) to cd or dvd, you can rightclick on the game in Steam and choose backup, if that doesn't work or crashes for some reason, go to Start > Run and type in. "steam://backup" without the quotes.
 
i'm running it on a barton 2500, 512 megs of ram, gf4 ti4400 and its by far the best game i've ever played both in looks and plot, its just so damn real, even on my pos vidcard...no slowdowns either (except at the load points)
 
JulianDelphiki said:
i'm running it on a barton 2500, 512 megs of ram, gf4 ti4400 and its by far the best game i've ever played both in looks and plot, its just so damn real, even on my pos vidcard...no slowdowns either (except at the load points)

good to know. thanks
 
The game is incredible IMO. Great environment, excellent character animations, good gameplay and outstanding physics thanks to Havoc. I was playing it on a GF4 Ti4600 at 1024x768 with 2x AA and 2xAF medium details. I bought a PNY 6800GT for $320 last night and overclocked it a bit. Runs great at 1600x1200 with maxxed settings and 4x AA/AF. Very impressive game overall.