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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games)

Half Life 2 Stuttering Bug Official 456

Posted by michael from the you're-all-beta-testers dept.
sinner0423 writes "Due to recent complaints on several forums, Steampowered announced they are working on a fix to this stuttering problem in Half Life 2. Usually, a game bug isn't news-worthy, but the sporadic nature of this bug makes me wonder - who else has problems with HL2 pausing/skipping? This site outlines the problem certain users are having in a very clear & concise manner, and also includes some stopgap solutions from Erik Johnson & other Valve employees."
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Half Life 2 Stuttering Bug Official More

Half Life 2 Stuttering Bug Official

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  • Hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lxt ( 724570 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:48PM (#10875951) Journal
    ...one might have thought given the year of so the game has thought to have remained in a workable state they might have come across a bug like this, especially if it's affecting large numbers of people...
    • Valve's Gabe Newell gave the following press release:

      'W-w-w-w-we ap-p-p-pologise for any t-t-t-t-trouble that has been caused-d-d-d by this b-b-b-b-fnargen-b-b-b-b-bug, we are l-l-l-labia-l-l-looking into this and will fix this problem as soon p-p-p-p-p-possible. CUNT!'

  • Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EventHorizon ( 41772 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:49PM (#10875962)
    This bug has been degrading an excellent game for many people--good to see Valve finally acknowledge it.

    Now if only they would fix the "Loading" delays that show up every 3 minutes... it's 2004 already, there has *got* to be some way to stream/cache/prefetch around having to break up the game experience so much.

    • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rodrigogo ( 795954 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:03PM (#10876066)
      GTA San Andreas has done something wonderful to that effect btw - no loading screens at all, ever! Pretty amazing IMHO, considering the level is about 10 times the size of the previous games even with their respective loading screens taken into account!

      • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Haydn Fenton ( 752330 ) <no.spam.for.haydn@gmail.com> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:27PM (#10876210)
        Yeah, no loading screens at all, ever!
        Oh wait, except that one before you can play, oh.. and the ones that come while loading games, and while not a loading screen as such, when entering buildings or starting missions, at times it can take up to around a minute with nothing but a black screen and the name of the place/mission in the bottom corner. And while walking around the map, or more specifically, while driving or flying about the map, sometimes the floor, walls or buildings don't actually load until after you have crashed into them, although that is somewhat more rarer than the above.

        But apart from that.. yeah, none at all. :-p

    • Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 )
      The problem is that, in the end, nobody really cares. Loading seamlessly is hard and raises system requirements quite a bit (since not only do you need to hold two levels in memory at times, but you also need to be loading an entire new level while the player is playing.)

      And in the end nobody's going to say "Well, I *would* buy Half-Life 2. But every ten or fifteen minutes I have to spend ten seconds waiting for a new level to load. So I won't."

      And therefore it doesn't get changed.

      • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by general_re ( 8883 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:29PM (#10876225) Homepage
        But every ten or fifteen minutes I have to spend ten seconds waiting for a new level to load.

        If that was the actual ratio of play time to load time, I doubt anyone would complain at all - I sure wouldn't. But the problem is that it takes quite a bit longer than that, which becomes especially noticeable during parts of the Route Kanal chapter - you cover so much ground so fast on the hoverbike, that there are places where you're loading a new segment every two or three minutes, and then the ratio becomes a rather aggravating three-minutes-of-play-time to one-minute-of-load-time. It's hardly a dealbreaker, and I still love the game, but it's a bit annoying.

        • Spending a minute loading? That's crazy. I really do get ten-second loads most of the time, and I've got an older computer. Even three minutes of play to ten seconds of load isn't that bad.
          • Zorbulator, I get like 2 minutes load time to 3 minutes gameplay in on the hover-thingie. I have rather good hardware, but HL2 likes to load forever.

      • Dungeon Siege does a very good job at loading small bits in the background such that you never see a single delay from the game start to end if you were to just walk around through the entire game world. Its definately possible for some games, but maybe not that practical for a FPS game?
        • I never said it wasn't possible. It is, of course, possible. It's just difficult.

          Personally I found Dungeon Siege to be a brutally boring game after the first few hours. I'd rather they spent that time working on gameplay than seamless loading. They might have created a game that was fun. :P
      • The problem is that, in the end, nobody really cares. Loading seamlessly is hard and raises system requirements quite a bit (since not only do you need to hold two levels in memory at times, but you also need to be loading an entire new level while the player is playing.)

        I'm not sure nobody cares (it's not as if there's much competition in the massively-anticipated games of 2004 stakes), but getting rid of pauses doesn't necessarily mean huge technical hurdles. e.g. Metroid Prime makes you shoot unif

    • Amen to that! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zarathustra.fi ( 513464 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:52PM (#10876734)
      The loading times are awful, and loading occurs way too often. It really wrecked my suspension of disbelief. Example: At the beginning, when you're running to the roof, the game stops to load for 30 seconds or so in the middle of fierce action! How am I supposed to keep my adrenaline up during that time, by slapping myself in the face or what? This is not good game design.

      What I cannot understand is the people praising this game as a whole to high heavens. Sure, the Source engine kicks ass and everything, but what I really expected from a sequel to Half-Life was a coherent story and script. After completing the game, all I had was an aftertaste of a huge railroaded marathon and a handful of loose ends in the script.

      I was left confused and unsatisfied. Props to Valve for making the game, but even the most decorated shell is empty without a good plot.

      Maybe Half-Life 2 is really an introduction to third part of the story, where all the pieces come together. But it makes me a bit unease thinking that all these years I was only waiting for a prologue to the real thing.

  • Stuttering (Score:3, Informative)

    by technomancerX ( 86975 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:50PM (#10875964) Homepage
    I experienced this, but moving my sound card up a pci slot and deleting an extrra sounds driver that XP installed seems to have corrected the problem.
  • I noticed the stuttering, but for me it's just a second or two, nothing serious. The "loading" screens are far worse, and I doubt those are going away.

    The big problem for me was texture corruption. I'd have random colored triangles on apparently random textures. Finally tracked down a fix - turn off "Catalyst AI" in the Catalyst Control Panel (apparently it's an ATI-only problem), which required that I *get* the Catalyst Control Panel.

    Bah.

    On the other hand, I just finished the game, and it rocked. If

  • Mind you, its the first time its crashed all day and I've been playing it solid since 8.55 am this morning !

    does it mean, that he had slept whole night?!

  • Hyphen!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:51PM (#10875974) Homepage Journal
    Half-Life 2, not Half Life. Sorry, I am being picky. :)
  • First, Valve knocked it out of the park on this game. It's absolutely the most incredible game I've played in years.. I'd even venture to say I'm as hooked on this one as I was on Doom way back when.

    Although I didn't experience the stuttering bug others are, I have noticed how great Valve has been supporting this game. They communicate regularly (sometimes individually) and are really standing behind their product. Too bad other companies don't follow their lead.

    • I think the most interesting thing to note about HL2 is the fact that it does an excellent job of giving the *illusion* of emergent gameplay. For the uninitiated, emergent gameplay is a hot topic in gaming right now, and is basically a fancy term for the idea that the solutions to a given problem in a game should only really be limited by the creativity of the person playing it.

      What makes HL2's design so interesting is the fact that while many of the puzzles and levels appear to allow the player a lot of c

  • Problems, uh-oh (Score:2, Informative)

    by comwiz56 ( 447651 )
    This will delay my purchase of the game. As the last link shows, these problems have been evident even in the E3 demos. Why didn't valve fix this?
    • It's not a problem that happens all the time, only when entering a new area. Given that the main game is single player, I don't think it really detracts from the game any more than the loading times. It's really a minor flaw that most companies would never even come back to fix. I guess it keeps things from being 'flawless', but there is so much going for this game that something small like this is not something to get excited over.
      • It can detract from the gameplay. Expecially if the game decides to crash right after you enter that area. This happened to me a couple times, at the same exact spot. It was quite aggrivating. Then there was the time the game forgot to load part of the level, and the menus were messed up so I couldn't save and reload.
    • BTW, how do you know you will be one with the bug? There are over a couple million already playing the game without problems.

      I've had zero problems, and been playing/using steam for years, no problems.

      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.

      I'm amazed most people didn't just delete the files and try again. oh wait, thats one of the fixes. Then the other people with problems are even sma

  • I just thought it was my hardware... (Score:3, Informative)

    by unwiredmatt ( 780760 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:53PM (#10875985)
    I've seen this a couple times, mostly right after It loads a part of the game, but it isnt that annoying. The biggest problem I have with halflife 2 is that it takes close to 13 minuites to actually load the game...
    • This is because the game loads an actual map to show behind the main menu. I got the following fix from the PA forums:

      Go into your Steamapps folder, open the folder that is your user name, then hl2, then gcf, then open the valve.rc file with notepad and add "//" to the beginning of the last line that says "startmenu" or something.

      Works like a charm.

  • Why is this exactly newsworthy again? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jkmiecik ( 242175 ) <slashdotdoesntne ... m ['add' in gap]> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:53PM (#10875988)
    from the you're-all-beta-testers dept.

    Yawn. Every Linux distro gets released bug-free, right? ...Usually, a game bug isn't news-worthy, but the sporadic nature of this bug makes me wonder - who else has problems with HL2 pausing/skipping?

    Well, you sure linked [rage3d.com] a ton [penny-arcade.com] of forums [hlfallout.net], how about you just read those threads? Or perhaps other gamer boards?

    Listen, I know HL2 is the biggest thing to happen to the gaming community in quite some time. I know the controversy surrounding it, Gabe Newell, Vivendi, Valve and a piece of caerphilly [welshwales.co.uk] cheese [newenglandcheese.com]. I just don't see why a bug that is sporadic and what seems like a very minute number of people are having makes the frontpage.

    Yes, I expected to get modded down.
    No, I don't care.
    Yes, I have "been around here for a while, and I know how the place works!"
    No, these aren't the droids you're looking for.

    • Re:Why is this exactly newsworthy again? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lavaforge ( 245529 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:12PM (#10876113)
      Yawn. Every Linux distro gets released bug-free, right?
      Every Linux distro comes with a $50 price tag and no way to legally download it from somehwere else, right?

    • Re:Why is this exactly newsworthy again? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bogie ( 31020 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:13PM (#10876127) Journal
      First off I'm sorry but what the hell does Linux have to do with this? Yea Linux has bugs, so what? Most of the distros out there don't cost $49. Even if they did what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Linux isn't a game and nobody here said "too bad HL2 isn't as bug free as Linux".

      Second and related to my first point this is a major problem that the game obviously should not have shipped with. Accepting your point that all software has bugs that doesn't mean something that was delayed for years and years should be able to ship with such a noticeable flaw. If they had done a public demo this would have been very apparent and could have been fixed. It is completely right to hold Valve's feet to the fire on this. On the topic of whether this is "front page material" I happen to think that it is. Slashdot is news for nerds and most nerds are playing HL2 right now being that its one of the biggest releases of any piece of software this year. I'm sure many of the readers here are glad to hear this info. Yea it could have easily gone in the gaming section but so what? What , you wanted to read yet another article on the Ipod?

  • Tha at..s jjjust t.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by bushboy ( 112290 ) <lttc@lefthandedmonkeys.org> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:54PM (#10875996) Homepage
    discrimina a a tion !

    I also have a bad stu u utter !

  • I do, sort of (Score:2, Informative)

    by kusanagi374 ( 776658 )
    Well, I actually do have that problem, but it's not as bad as it is for some (taking from 5 to 10 seconds to fix itself). For me, it takes 1 or 2 seconds max, and it doesn't happen all the time. But when it does, it's a pain in the ass.

    I used to have that with Doom 3, but lowering quality/resolution would fix it, which doesn't cut it on HL2. I used to have that with Counter Strike Source too, and wondered what was wrong.
  • this raises the question, "how many (known) bugs should be allowed to ship in a piece of commercial software?"

    obviously its in the developer's best interest to hit production as soon as possible (to enter the market for the xmas feeding frenzy). so, some "minor" bugs are apparently considered acceptable.

    i don't think so.

    but some customers, in particular the die-hard fans, apparently are willing to accept some problems on day one and will put up with the problem until a patch is released eventually.

    i wo
    • No software commercial or otherwise would ever get released if the developer was to wait for a zero bug count. Even if they did release something someone would manage to break it. Thats the way of the world.

      And FYI Valve have already released an update.

      So stupid question and wrong assumption.
    • i wonder what the turnaround time will be. probably a few days. too bad its not open-source. we'd have a patch in a few hours.

      Well, if was open source, I would hope that the programmers ignored typical variable and function naming conventions and used all lowercase letters. How many patches (spaced a few hours apart) do you think it would take before the original problem, and all resulting problems from untested patches were repaired?

      Valve has already had a number of years to make this game, and damn nea
    • Go visit the Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 forums, and you'll be amazed at how unbelievably buggy RCT3 is.

      They just released the first patch, which barely makes a dent in the problems.

      Personally, I don't think I've ever seen such a buggy release as RCT3. It makes HL2 seem completely bug-free by comparison. In fact, there IS no comparison.

  • Half Life 2: More important than life itself. (Score:4, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @02:59PM (#10876045)
    A bug in Half Life 2 is perhaps the biggest problem being suffered by the human race in our time. Perhaps every government worldwide, every corporation, every organization, and every individual should stop everything they are doing at this moment, so that all the resources available to mankind can be allocated to correcting the bug in Half Life 2. Otherwise, we are doomed to destruction.

  • I had this problem too and here's how to fix it (Score:4, Informative)

    by illumin8 ( 148082 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:01PM (#10876054) Journal
    I had this problem too when I first installed HalfLife 2 and it was frustrating as hell... Just a little background on my system:

    Intel 875 chipset (800 mhz. FSB)
    P4 2.6C (hyperthreaded)
    1GB PC3200 memory (dual channel, 800 mhz.)
    ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB graphics
    Windows XP Pro SP2

    In other words, this is not a bottom of the line system, and runs Doom 3 perfectly...

    Now, when I first installed the game, I installed it to my D: drive, which happened to be an older 30GB drive that came from my previous computer. I just stuck it in there as a slave drive for extra storage space, having filled up the 120GB primary IDE hard drive a while ago...

    Anyway, I noticed the stuttering always seemed to happen when the system was accessing data from the hard drive.

    I finally went into the Device Mangler (haha... that's what I call it anyways, you might know it as the Device Manager), and checked the DMA settings on my secondary hard drive... Sure enough, it was only using PIO Mode!!! I always wondered why that second hard drive was slow. I tried to enable DMA mode, but was out of DMA channels, so I couldn't.

    Anyway, I freed up some space on my hard drive and moved it to the primary hard drive... voila, problem solved! Now the game plays smoothly and the immersion experience is what it should be...

    This problem seems to be linked to either inadequate DMA support for your hard drive (which can spike the CPU during disk access and loading times), or a hard drive that just isn't fast enough to keep up. Also, because all of the sound in the game is MP3 files that are streamed off of the hard drive, hard drive bandwidth seems to be very important for this game, in addition, I'm sure all of the MP3 decompression makes you take a big CPU hit, especially when they're mixing multiple channels of MP3 audio together at once and outputting it to 5.1 surround.

    This is just a theory of mine, but it worked for me... Put the game on your fastest hard drive, and defragment it... Make sure DMA is enabled for that hard drive, and you should (hopefully) be set.
    • Running out of DMA channels seems suspect, I've never seen it happen. I have had 6 drives in my computer, each on their own IDE channel.

      I have an Intel 860 chipset with one 2.2 GHz Prestonia chip.
    • I have the game running off a 15k rpm 18gig SCSI (Seagate cheetah) - with a adaptec scsi card and still have the stuttering problem. I have a similar system (p4 3.0, 1 gig dual channel, ATI Radeon 9600Pro 256mb, Winxp).

      Although I admit it did get better after I disabled norton antivirus - but now I'm waiting half a second when it loads new textures rather than 1-2 seconds (and sometimes up to 5 seconds)

  • I would think such a bug would be apparent, especially if it is happing on a lot of machines, so did they acutally test the game, or were they just lazy and didn't bother to fix it?

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:03PM (#10876071)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I thought it was stuttering because my computer wasn't fast enough (1.3ghz duron). Mine DOES tend to happen around new audio though. It's enough to be annoying, but not to ruin the game.
    • Has anyone else noticed that it almost always coincides with new audio happening?

      Yup, I did too. Apparently, this is common - or so I read on a couple of boards.
  • if Half-Live 2 was Open Sour.... hey, wait a minute!
  • I don't get much stuttering, but during loads and saves, the game audio stutters and this proves to be very annoying.
  • Good game, bad delivery. Unlocking the game took me 20 minutes, and that was STILL too long to wait after installing several CDs worth of mass. For some, it took a lot longer. The backup thing is great. Points there. The system requirements are a little high, and the ATI/Nvidia thing is kind of shady. However, the loading times and the stuttering kill the game. Its like walking into an art museum with strobe lights and a lot of heavy smokers around. The game could be so much cooler.
  • Have a high end system with the stuttering bug, when I lowered the resolutions from 1024x768 to 800x600 it made it playable during the times that it has stuttering problems.

  • Not news-worthy? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What? News? I thought the point of Slashdot was to post as much random crap as possible and see how much of the internet you could take out.

  • lol (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:29PM (#10876230) Homepage Journal
    When open source applications have bugs in them, people report them to bugzilla or equivalent and wait. If anyone complains people say "they'll work on it, if you want it done faster, do it yourself".

    As soon as the software isn't free all of a sudden its "those bastards releasing software with more than 0 bugs in it!"

    Guess what. The introduction of money doesn't all of a sudden make developers more perfect. They have deadlines, priorities and are imperfect, like other people. Just because software is less than free doesn't mean you can expect it to be perfectly bug free.

    It's also funny all the complaints about half-life 2 have to do with the steam system. Nobody seems to be making comments about the actual game itself. Oh, could that be because the game itself is an indisputably amazing work of art? Sorry warez dudes, you can't get a free ride on this one. For me, I don't mind as its probably the only PC game I will buy for the next 5 years. Half-Life 2 and its mods will probably be the only pc game worth playing for a long time to come. Half-Life 1 lived up to that, and I expect no less from 2. It's worth more than the lousy 50 bucks they charge for it. So quit your bitching. If you don't like the DRM, then crack it, just like you do with all the RIAA and MPAA DRM.

    • Re:lol (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bersl2 ( 689221 )
      So quit your bitching. If you don't like the DRM, then crack it, just like you do with all the RIAA and MPAA DRM.

      You see, if everybody did this, then nobody would be telling them that legitimate customers don't want DRM.

      Let me say that again, so it has a chance of sinking in: Nobody would tell them that legitimate customers have a problem with DRM.

      So to the contrary: keep bitching. You don't have to preach to the choir, and you should direct the bitching at the right people, but staying quiet is the abs

    • Re:lol (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Number_1_Bigg$ ( 771467 )
      Most of those open source applicantions cost a grand total of $zero. If Half-Life 2 was free to download, shipped with source, and not DRM crippled, then you could make the comparison.

    • Re:lol (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Guess what. The introduction of money doesn't all of a sudden make developers more perfect.
      Perhaps not, but I'd say it's fair to say that the introduction of money does all of a sudden make developers work more. They got paid for a job they didn't do, plain and simple.

      Guess what. If a product that I fucking paid for were defective, I'd complain too.

  • It seems quite simple what's causing the stuttering, at least on my PC.

    Remember the deja-vu scene in The Matrix? That's what it is.

    No, I'm not joking. Whenever I hit an invisible trigger that causes the world to change (ie spawn bad guys, spawn helicopter), that's when it stutters for me. The majority of the stutters I get are immediately followed by some action happening.

    It actually makes it easy for me to tell when I'm about to be ambushed. Unfortunately, this takes away the thrill of the surprise

  • Motion sickness too! (Score:4, Informative)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:44PM (#10876313) Homepage Journal
    Some people are getting motion sickness from this game. See this newsgroup thread [tinyurl.com].
    • I've never gotten motion sickness before in any game, ever. Even playing all of the "Descent" games.

      But man, after an hour of zooming through canals in that hover-craft, I was so nauseous I was ready to puke! I had to put the game away, and it was a couple of hours before I was feeling okay again.

      Holy crap!
    • It's not "motion sickness" it's a Simulator sickness that airforce pilots also experiance. There was a long thread discussing it on the GameFAQs Half Life 2 forum, but it's probably been spammed to the 50th page by now.

  • With 2 monitors (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:50PM (#10876349) Journal
    Running two monitors gives me a different perspective on this bug. When the stuttering occurs, HL2 loses its grip on my mouse, and the mouse is free to move into my second monitor. The game pauses until I move the mouse back over the game screen.

  • All Hail The Second Coming of PC Gaming. Or not. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by superultra ( 670002 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:55PM (#10876379) Homepage
    Earlier this year I read in several PC gaming mags about how 2004 was Year of the PC Game; about how Half Life 2 and Doom 3 would set the record straight and reclaim the crown of video gaming from the consoles. Doom 3 was fun, but didn't change the world, and Half Life 2 fully proves why the PC will remain a niche market. One person's comment here on this story tells people to quit whining about the problem because all they have to change their hardware around. That kind of comment - that it's a matter-of-fact that you have to spend hours monkeyassing with your PC to get a game to work - should deeply worry stalwarts of the PC industry.

    Even with fairly rampant Xbox piracy, Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy with Halo 2 was transparent to nearly all xbox owners who legitimately bought the game. Yet, not only are all of HL2's users penalized for the piracy, but obviously the game was rushed through testing. Now, to be fair, testing a PC game is far more work than testing a console. But when that so-called mainstream gamer goes to pick up Half Life 2, they don't give a rip if someone else is pirating or if Valve didn't have the time or resources to check if their game worked. To them, the only thing that matters is that their game takes hours to work, and when it does it does so half-assed.

    Console makers (Nintendo, MS, Sony) keep the publishers in check with quality issues like these. For the PC, there's no one entity at stake if PC games take 5 hours of work to run properly. But Valve is hurting not only themselves but the entire PC gaming industry by releasing games that require anti-piracy measures like Steam and then ultimately don't work.
  • I experienced this as well, maybe 4 or 5 times throughout the entire game. I thought it was just my fragged harddrive, since my specs are decent (xp3200+, radeon 9600 pro, 1 gig pc3200 ram). But now that I find out it's affecting most people... I STILL dont care, because honestly, it's not that big of a deal. Of course I would prefer it not to be there but I never once thought to myself, "Gee this sure ruins the experience, what the hell was Valve thinking, now I'm pissed off and will rate half life 2 poorl
  • anyone else have trouble with a strange "reverb" effect?

    I had problems right off the bat in the opening sequence -- the g-man dialog was so echoey and garbled I couldn't even understand. Really annoying.

    One of the work-arounds I read was to move the soundcard (sb live) to the highest PCI slot possible. I did this and re-installed the drivers but it didn't seem to really help.

    In the end I found the best workaround was to disable the 5.1 sound in creative's contol app and then tell HL2 to use 2 speakers.
  • Isn't this stuttering just the game loading textures into the video card's RAM?

    I have an ATI 9700, and when HL2 did its little autoconfiguration of video options, It set me up to have medium texture detail (smaller, less detailed textures resulting in blurry, pixellated walls but consuming less video RAM). I had no problems with stuttering, but I hated the low-detail textures, as they took away from what was supposedly one of the best looking games in history.

    So I changed the texture detail to high. And
  • Doom3 plays just fine on my 2.0Ghz machine with 512Meg of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro card.

    Half-Life 2 stutters all the time, sometimes badly. I thought it was just because my machine is under-powered for the game, but I definitely exceed the specs, and turning down some of the detail and unloading some services and other applications to free up more memory didn't help the problem.

    Glad to see it's not just me, and is likely a problem wtih the game itself.

    I still think it's a kick-ass game, though.

  • A story of a bug. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SetupWeasel ( 54062 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:29PM (#10876590) Homepage
    I bought my GameCube in the fall of 2002, and the first game I owned for it was Metroid Prime. I got about 7 hours into it, the game froze, and a buzzing sound filled the speakers.

    I thought, "Holy shit! My GameCube is broken!"

    Why? Because I thought that was more possible than a Nintendo game having a bug of that magnitude.

    My GameCube wasn't broken. Metroid Prime did have a bug, a rather rare one, that overflowed a buffer (I believe) when changing areas. the overflow was rare enough that most gamers never experienced it. I was one of the lucky ones that had it happen twice.

    My point is not that consoles can have bugs too. My point is that with the good console game companies this sort of thing is so rare, you can think your hardware died when it happens.

    I assume that PC games will have fatal bugs when they are released, and I also assume that if the game is not popular, these bugs may never be fixed. That is why I don't buy PC games until they have been out a year. How can you get excited about a launch when there is a decent chance you will not be able to play the game?

    By the way, Nintendo fixed that bug and offered a replacement to anyone who wanted it. The Metroid Prime discs today do not have the problem.
  • Why ? Doom 3 worked perfect right our of the box. No tweaks needed, no hardware changes, etc.

    HL2 is a nightmare. I can't even play the damn game. The intro gets 1fps, while all other maps get 80fps. Meaning, I can't even play the game without cheating ...

    Valve isn't being very supportive either, they don't respond to posts or emails regarding the issue. I have tried for 2 days to figure it out.

    If you haven't bought the game yet. DON'T! It is nothing but trouble. I am presently trying to find a

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