HALF LIFE 2 TROUBLESHOOTING/TWEAK THREAD!

[PlasticJesus]

- Want to play offline? 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.

There are an awful lot of folks over at HardOCP and steampowered that are a bit upset because they can't get this to work. Some even theorize that there is a conspiracy against us dial-up users.

It's possible that a few folks are looking for this 'Tell Steam to remember your password' business, not realizing that they've already seen that option and it was selected by default.

Six hours later and mine's finally working. Could have got it working 5 hours and 59 minutes ago if i used my head.

Some of what I did was surely unneccesary but I did this:

-deleted ClientRegistry.blob
-launched Steam; this resulted in a real update from 0 to 100 percent and produced the screen where you get the 'Tell Steam to remember your password' business; this creates a new ClientRegistry.blob and puts it right where it's supposed to be
-closed Steam
-disabled modem
-launched HL2 and got the offline play option
-hit offline play and it was just fantastic

I don't know why I went through this nine yards of crap with trying to get my firewall to block Steam or disconnecting my phone line. I guess sometimes I'm not real smart.

Haven't heard any discussion here. Maybe I'm our only dial-up guy or maybe the only guy that want's to play offline.

 

[ROTC1983]

Anyone have any idea for this? As soon as I get into the teleporter at the beginning and the weird screen looks at me, the screen goes white, loops, and then my vid card craps out and I have to manually reset my computer? Any ideas?

 

[0roo0roo]

some speed tweaks for really old cards
fog_enable 0
mat_bumpmap 0
mat_mipmaptextures 0
mat_specular 0
r_decal_cullsize 1
r_rainsimulate 1

http://maps.tjfweb.com/content/view/69/53/

 

[0roo0roo]

and i dunno, the game is freakishly stable on my oc'd comp with a lousy 9000pro overclocked too.. switched res and vid settings a load of times during game play, thats generally a recipe for disaster for most games, but it survived

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo

Originally posted by: Bumrush99
Is anything overclocked in your system? I had the exact same problems on my rig, and until I put everything at default, the game continued to crash with a BSOD every 30-60 minutes. If that is not the case, make sure to relax your memory timings in the BIOS and see if that solves the problem.
EDIT: After reading this entire post, I may try relaxing my high end corsair to cas 2.5.. I'm not ready to give up on Ultra speeds with my 6800GT, everything else has run perfect before HL2 shat on my supposedly stable system

yea his problem is rather hard to diagnose. if he has a friend that iwll let him borrow their videocard for a test swap..that might be good 1600+ is rather slow for halflife 2 though.

Nothing is overclocked. Look up a couple of posts, I fixed it. It was bad RAM! :|
It doesn't play too bad with the 1600+, can't wait to get a 3000+ to replace it though.

 

[KeithP]

Well I solved my freezing problem (mentioned above).

I did two things; first I defragged the HD, second I disabled Panda AV. I have also left the sound at medium as a preventative measure.

-KeithP

 

[LocutusX]

Anyone know how to disable the annoying intro movie? referring to the Valve logo.

 

[Hammer]

i have the skipping sound issue. turned it down to medium quality, no luck.

 

[warcrow]

Originally posted by: LocutusX
Anyone know how to disable the annoying intro movie? referring to the Valve logo.

us "-console" in the command line parameters for the HL2.exe start up.

 

[ROTC1983]

Originally posted by: ROTC1983
Anyone have any idea for this? As soon as I get into the teleporter at the beginning and the weird screen looks at me, the screen goes white, loops, and then my vid card craps out and I have to manually reset my computer? Any ideas?

Sorry for quoting my own post, but does anyone have a solution to this before I just reformat and start over?

 

[WannaFly]

I Must be lucky, HL2 runs nice on my system (settings mostly on medium):
1.4Ghz Athlon
512MB 2100 DDR
ti4200 w/64MB

Played it for a few hours last night, cant wait to get home to play tonight!

 

[Dorkenstein]

Will having more than a gig of RAM make a difference in playing HL2?

 

[LocutusX]

Originally posted by: warcrow

Originally posted by: LocutusX
Anyone know how to disable the annoying intro movie? referring to the Valve logo.

us "-console" in the command line parameters for the HL2.exe start up.

Actually, I want to keep the animated city/river background... just want to skip the Valve logo (animated head). But, I've noticed there is an .AVI file in the HL2 directory tree. Let me try renaming it and see what happens...

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: ROTC1983

Originally posted by: ROTC1983
Anyone have any idea for this? As soon as I get into the teleporter at the beginning and the weird screen looks at me, the screen goes white, loops, and then my vid card craps out and I have to manually reset my computer? Any ideas?

Sorry for quoting my own post, but does anyone have a solution to this before I just reformat and start over?

This is exactly what my first symptom was, except it happened to me on the train (when the screen went white and the whistle blew). Try testing your memory.

 

[slightlyhuman]

Originally posted by: LocutusX

Originally posted by: warcrow

Originally posted by: LocutusX
Anyone know how to disable the annoying intro movie? referring to the Valve logo.

us "-console" in the command line parameters for the HL2.exe start up.

Actually, I want to keep the animated city/river background... just want to skip the Valve logo (animated head). But, I've noticed there is an .AVI file in the HL2 directory tree. Let me try renaming it and see what happens...

any luck?

 

[WannaFly]

speaking of the valve logo, i dont think my comp has the right codec, it says something like "Cannot pay video, cvid:video not found" and its just a white screen, but I hear te sound, oh well.

 

[LocutusX]

Originally posted by: DP

Originally posted by: LocutusX

Originally posted by: warcrow

Originally posted by: LocutusX
Anyone know how to disable the annoying intro movie? referring to the Valve logo.

us "-console" in the command line parameters for the HL2.exe start up.

Actually, I want to keep the animated city/river background... just want to skip the Valve logo (animated head). But, I've noticed there is an .AVI file in the HL2 directory tree. Let me try renaming it and see what happens...

any luck?

unfortunately, it did not work. hl2 always re-creates that annoying Valve.avi.
even when i used Virtualdub to edit the avi and make it 1 frame long, it deletes it and recreates the original.

 

[LocutusX]

Originally posted by: WannaFly
speaking of the valve logo, i dont think my comp has the right codec, it says something like "Cannot pay video, cvid:video not found" and its just a white screen, but I hear te sound, oh well.

it uses Cinepak. i'd assume that HL2/Steam installs that for you. or maybe they assume it's part of Windows, which it might be.

 

[gorcorps]

If you have DivX or any of the codecs, get rid of them. People have been having problems. If not, than you're screwed...jk but thats all i know

 

[Dorkenstein]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Will having more than a gig of RAM make a difference in playing HL2?

Anyone? Thanks.

 

[LocutusX]

I doubt it... because mem usage on my 1GB ram system is well shy of a gig. "Peak Commit Charge" is only 866something KB. I've played games in the past which have actually hit 1000 and gone beyond... Far Cry for example

 

[tehDeviLwithiN]

Sorry if this is a dumb question but does any one know how to get 5.1 speaker config to work with Hl2? i have it set to 5.1 speakers in the audio properties in windows but in the game its set to 2 speakers. will the windows config take precdence over the Hl2 app? when i set 5.1 sound in the game theres no sound coming out. ive checked all the cables and plugs at the back and everything is connected properly. i have a sound blaster live with logitech z640 speakers. the reason im concerned about this is really the "why" it doesnt work rather than sound quality. any suggestions? Thanks

Edit: ok the thread has been updated nevermind

 

[warcrow]

Steam Client Update Released
November 19, 2004, 11:03 pm · valve
A small number of Half-Life 2 customers have been experiencing problems while playing the game, and we have traced these issues to corrupt Steam cache files. We've released a Steam update to help resolve these issues. If you have been experiencing problems such as crashing during gameplay or startup of Half-Life 2, please restart Steam and then click on one of the links below. Steam will then automatically verify your cache files. The verification process will take roughly five minutes to complete.

To validate Half-Life 2 click here

To validate Counter-Strike: Source click here

To validate Half-Life: Source click here

We're also investigating a solution for the sound skipping problems a small number of users are running into. We'll have a solution for this as soon as possible.

LINK!

 

[JonnyBlaze]

anyone know a fix for this? everytime i start the game, it says failed to start video mode twice, then starts in a window. then i can set it back to any res i want and play. it happens every time. i have a 9800 pro with the newest drivers.

thanks

JBlaze

 

[JonnyBlaze]

Originally posted by: warcrow

- You can use "-refresh 60" for instance on the command-line. You can also do "-width 1600 -height 1200". Also, if you want to use a non-standard aspect ratio, you can set r_aspectratio directly.

this dosent work for me. is there anything special i have to do first?

thanks

JB