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Instead of attacking the game as many clueless people do why not sit back and try and figure out whats broken or not working as it should, it takes less time.

Oh I've tried. My god have I tried!

I've tried drivers old and new, I've tried formatting (several times), I've tried shutting down any programs that may interfere, I've tried messing with the Windows virtual memory and scheduler settings, I've tried every god damned command line option available in Source and I've tried changing hardware (memory, CPU, graphics card both ATI and Nvidia, sound card, motherboard).

I'm out of ideas, and so are everyone else with this problem... have a read.

It's also worth pointing out that this is a problem consistent across all Source based games (even non-Valve ones) for those unlucky enough to experience it. And common for all of these people is that no other games are exhibiting these problems, it's only the Source engine. But our hardware's a fault... Of course it is.

This page shows the game as being $29.95. When you click through though it only allows you to purchase the package. My guess is it will be up standalone around the release date.

It is according to this page: http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=package&SubId=469&cc=US

They added a way to transfer HL2 and Episode 1 if you've already bought them. See this link. Also worth noting is the free copy of Peggle Extreme you get when you preorder.

Have you tried the new version of Steam? My computer is 5 years old and runs it just fine. Try downloading the beta, it's really light weight >20mb used at a time. Just in case people don't have the link... http://steampowered.com/

set hl.exe to low priority, this should fix it.

more on it here.

If you didn't listen all the way to the end, it is worth repeating -
PSYCHONAUTS IS AVAILABLE FROM STEAM REALLY CHEAP! If you don't buy it, you have forfeited your right to ever again complain about lack of originality and fun in games.

While you are at it, so is Vampire: Bloodlines, which with the unofficial patches is a really good game these days, the new Sam and Max episodes, and Bioshock, (but if you haven't already heard about the last one and how good it is you are probably dead).

The original journal entry already had comments that poke holes in twitter's claim about those numbers, which is probably why it became inconvenient and forced him to switch to his sockpuppet account instead.

Ironically, the same story in Heise.de has a link to another one about a gaming convention in Leipzig drawing all-time record attendance. I suppose it's possible that DX10/Vista will hurt the gaming industry, but with the game release cycle being 12-16 months, I'd say that will be apparent later on.

Here is a direct link to the original Valve survey, which amusingly enough shows Vista as having an even larger market share among Valve gamers as it has overall (8% vs 5-6%). That means Vista's market share among gamers has been increasing at a rate of about 1% per month since it was released, which is even higher than XP's uptake vs. Windows 98/ME. I can't even begin to imagine what the relevance of Christmas and back to school as claimed by twitter is for gamers who probably switch OSes only when they switch their $3,000 boxes anyway, but I'd say that 8% share is actually not bad in that segment. That share will probably start growing more exponentially as time goes by.

Welcome to the Trolled By Twitter Club, Zonk.

• id doesn't understand the GPL
• but JC definitely understands the GPL!
• but maybe JC wasn't involved directly with this
• look! JC didn't actually know

That's weird, because Doom is already on Steam.

I think Steam is about the best case scenario we could hope to expect. Yes they keep track of what you're playing and for how long, but they use this information to benefit game design as well. Check out the fascinating Half Life 2: Episode One statistics for an idea of how Valve makes the most of this technology to observe players' in-game behaviour to assist in designing future products.

Another thing I love about Steam is the generosity of distribution model. You can download any paid-for product as many times as you wish, no matter how huge it is. You can also compact installation data to CD or DVD-sized archives for your own storage if you don't want to wait to download it. You can have your registered copy installed on multiple computers simultaneously and can play on any of them one at a time. If you own 12 Steam games you can install all the games on 12 computers and have 12 people each log in as you and let them each play a different game. All this without wearing out your media or drives (and yes, there is an emergency offline mode that lets you play while your network is down).

The biggest flaw, of course, is that the EULA refers to you as the "Subscriber", not the "Owner". I seriously hope that my money won't go to waste if Steam folds. When 3D Realms' Triton, a similar distribution system, went under, they untethered purchased games so that they became fully owned by the purchasers.

Yeah you're right, light grey on dark grey is good too: http://support.steampowered.com/ is a good example

Xfire stats are only 'better' if you're only interested in Xfire users. As a clear example: XFire lists the minutes played for Counter-Strike: Source to be 4.5 times the minutes played for Counter-Strike 1.6. The by-game listing on Steam (http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stat s) shows that the reverse is true for comprehensive stats on everyone who plays those games -- the old Counter-Strike is played more than its Source equivalent by a factor of 3.6.

I'm sorry but I'm going to have to call bullshit. Check out the statistics: http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats Currently Counterstrike and Counterstrike source make up around 8 billion minutes of play time per month. Steam has 3,046,980 unique players per month on average, and I'd hazard a guess and say the 95% of them play CS at least some of the time. Counterstrike is an 8 year old game, and it is still getting that level of play. Sorry but there is no way that SMB has had more play time.

Vista seems a little more popular among gamers, almost 6% are using it:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

but only 1.42% have DirectX10.

How about you buy the great games made by the same people? You have the fantastic Psychonauts, a hilarious game with fantastic artwork, available cheaply everywhere in the world from Steam. You also have the new Sam and Max series for more adventure heavy games. Haven't played any of those episodes yet, but reportedly also fantastic.

Don't sit there and complain about lack of originality in today's games market. There are PC games out there just as good as the golden classics you remember, please buy them and give the makers an incentive to continue!

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html It's a plain-as-day numbers and percentages survey of who has what on their computer. The user base is obviously from gamers, but it's the closest we're going to get short of getting something like connection statistics on Google or something. The short story? Less than 6% have Vista. Out of 350k responses.

Average unique players per month: 2,981,465
source: http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats&cc= US

Due to Steam, I became introduced to, and subsequently purchased, two excellent games that I would otherwise have not even likely known about: Psychonauts and Shadowgrounds. My Steam games list currently contains about 20 titles.

Half Life 2: Episode one Milk it while its hot

From the Valve Stats page, Ep1 took on average five and a half hours to complete.
I remember playing original HL for ages, HL2 even took a while - but Ep1 was a complete waste.

Ep2 promises longer sessions.

Well, if it tells you anything, Valve reports (at their website) that they had over 2 million unique users last month alone. That's the lowest I've ever seen it (I've looked a number of times; it's somewhat interesting.). It's usually more like 4 mil. Anywho, when you consider that Counter-Strike is 9 years old, and they STILL have 2.5 million users per month, you know damn well that's it's more popular than just about anything else. (Consider that Wow is the only game other than CS and games made by Nintendo (And then only like six of them.) that topped 7 million sales, ever.)

You insensitive clod!

Why would Valve want to distribute open scientific research via Steam?

It will be interesting to read Dr. Gordon Freeman's research on quantum mechanics from the Black Mesa Research Facility...

Hmm... It would appear that you are correct. I thought you would be dead wrong but it was only my own sample that was skewed. Most of my friends don't use on board audio and I thought that would reflect somewhat on the general population. However it appears that out of the steam population that agrees to take the hardware survey only 12 or so percent use soundblaster sound cards.

See the steam hardware survey for exact numbers.

Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change.

Bull. I spend £600 on upgrading my current system a year ago, and it'll run Vista just fine. True, I "only" bought 2 250GB drives, Athlon X2 4400, motherboard, 7800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a 500W PSU, but for another £300 or so I could've thrown in case, monitor, optical drive, sound card, keyboard/mouse and speakers then, and could definitely get it all now for less than £1000. The PS3 is slated to cost about £450, the Wii costs £180 and the XBox 360 is £280, for a total of £910 *if* you can find the Wii and PS3 for retail and don't have to get scalped on eBay.

I've read the "Vista capable PC + Vista = all three consoles + games + change" thing a few times, and it's simply wrong.

Any desktop bought in the past five years is going to cope with your average e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and so on in its sleep, and most will do things like photo editing and video editing for those with digital cameras/camcorders too.

Now, I'm impatient, but transcoding an hour-long home movie of my daughter's birthday (or whatever) takes too damn long on my PC for my liking. I don't do it enough to warrant a serious investment in hardware for it, but a 5 year old desktop is going to absolutely suck for it.

So the short answer is: I doubt Vista will ever have enough penetration into the serious gaming market to make a difference.

I remember when people said the same thing about XP. There was no reason to upgrade from Win 2k (or even 98), WPA was an egregious violation of privacy, etc etc. A quick look at Valve's Half Life 2 survery results shows that 88% of HL2 players are running XP SP2; XP is used by 97% of players.

Now I don't know whether or not Vista will gain a significant share of the gamers market, but I do know one thing - it's far too early to be predicting that it never will. Serious gamers are well used to dropping serious money on serious hardware, and mostly have a serious thing for eye-candy and modding their machines. If there's one thing Vista definitely supplies, it's eye candy. Any "serious" gamer already has a machine that's perfectly capable of running Vista, so that won't be an issue.

Left4dead is a game being developed by Turtle Rock which is pretty much exactly the game you are describing.

Here's an article:

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/left4dead/news.h tml?sid=6163983&mode=previews

Here's the teaser trailer:

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=game& AppId=944&cc=--&skin=0

It'll be available soon.

Another example of just because you do it doesn't mean that lots of people do it.

According to the valve hardware survey about 1 percent of respondents uses windows 2000.

http://www.steampowered.com/

it takes more time for a release

Really? What was the gap between Win95 and Win98? Between Win98 and Win2k? Between Win2k and XP? Let me give you a clue.

I'm not debating that Vista has taken a metric shit-load of time to drag itself to RTM (we didn't use to call Longhorn Longwait for no reason), but your assertion that each release takes longer than the last is demonstrably false.

there is really very little motivation for the average user to upgrade from XP to Vista

There's very little motivation (beyond not wanting to feel that their computer is old and out of date) for the average user to upgrade from any given OS to any other. Most people do not upgrade their OS, they upgrade their PC and use whatever OS comes with it. They upgrade their PC as and when they feel that their current one is too old and slow for their needs; that varies from person to person. Even some gamers are still using Win 98 (see Valve's survey, scroll down to/search for "Windows Version"), and gamers are the group most likely to upgrade their OS.

Is anyone else convinced that this will be the last version of Windows as we know it?

I'm not convinced that it will be, but I concede that it might be. Don't expect Windows to go anywhere any time soon though, it's far too popular (as much as we might hate it) and makes MS far too much money for that to happen.

Civ 4 is $50 and Civ 3 is $30.
The latter seems quite high for a 5 year old game.

Civ 4 is $50 and Civ 3 is $30.
The latter seems quite high for a 5 year old game.

When you complete Steam's registration process, you create a Steam account ("Account"). Your Account may also include billing information you provide to us for the purchase of Subscriptions. You are solely responsible for all activity on your Account and for the security of your computer system. You may not reveal, share or otherwise allow others to use your password or Account. You agree that you are personally responsible for the use of your password and Account and for all of the communication and activity on Steam that results from use of your login name and password. You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account.

In other words, once you get the game, it's yours. You can't sell it used. And the more games that move to this kind of system (or to Steam itself) the fewer used games there will be in existance.

Here's a link to Steam's guide to the above-mentioned "Offline Mode"

My Steam account was stolen (even with a ten-alpha/num character PW) and i've had no recourse as of yet for games I legally purchased.

• Someone used a keylogger
• Someone used your personal computer account.
• Someone used a hacking beam on your computer.

"The whole calling home thing is the copy protection to make sure that you are validated to play the game."

The Phantom Game Service is anticipated to be the first end-to-end, on-demand game service delivering online games...

It's a bad sign when the lies start in the first sentence.

Defcon is for you. Online play, but scores just disappear after each game. No ladders, no high scores, no score history, no levels, nothing. Plus, the whole point is to blow everyone up, so there's not a lot of room for griefers (what are they going to do, *not* launch their nukes?). It's not an RPG or anything, but it's the first online game I've ever been able to enjoy *every* game, not just when I happen to fall in with decent people.

The aspect of games that most fools place first on their judging criteria is in-game graphics, which HAS to be even more retarded than judging by a game's box art.
Look at Battlefield 2. EA didn't even fix their weapon draw bug (switching to secondary fire shows you holstering and drawing the same weapon), which has existed since BF1942.
Look at Counter-Strike: Source. People who like Source better than 1.6 don't realize how in Source you can spray violently and land headshots, not to mention their new market system for weapons, which is probably one of the stupidest things that have been implemented.

Demo version? End of October?

How about now?

I suspect the demo version is simply the retail version without a key - the emergency-download-mirrors email I was sent by Introversion a few minutes ago has FileFront as one of the mirrors. Download from there if you like - I guess the other mirrors are equally public...

The manual is available on the Steam website - usefully, it also contains information on building your very own fallout shelter, survival kit and fallout suit, and on surviving a nuclear blast if caught out in the open.

Duck and cover, everyone!

Now, to stock up on Jammie Dodgers. Do Jaffa Cakes count as a viable alternative?

Luckily, It will be a server-side variable so yes it's optional: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.p hp?s=&threadid=489878

I'm not sure whether or not to enable it on the servers I manage though, we'll try it out for sure. But in the end it's the players that decide if it stays or not. Guess we'll have a vote on it :)

They do gather sales data on pistols, and they are put into their own section. But the Desert Eagle is the only pistol worth buying, since the USP/Glock (which you start with for no cost) is sufficient that you wouldn't want to spend $500 dollars on the other pistols. As a result, the deagle is the most-bought pistol and shoots right up to $930 from $650. The other pistols have gone down in cost, but not by a lot (yet).

I like how you interpreted "pistols and everything else" as "desert eagle and everything else". Just goes to show how dominant the desert eagle is in the minds of CS players.

http://www.steampowered.com/stats/csmarket/?r=1&so rtby=price_change_percent
Take a look. Night Hawk .50C (the deagle) is projected at $930 (from $650).

The article stated that they arn't including pistols in their market...

...can be seen here: http://www.steampowered.com/stats/csmarket/ Though I agree that forced mods stink, the change to the game will likely be insignificant.

Found a link - http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=game& AppId=1520&

Interesting side note regarding Steam... here in Australia the boxed copy of HL2 is AU$110 in EB Games, while on Steam it's a lot cheaper. The Source Premier Pack is US$60, which includes HL2, Episode 1, Lost Coast, Day of Defeat and a bunch of other stuff, while there's a minimal HL2 Pack for US$30. With the exchange rate the way it is, US$60 ~ AU$80, which makes things significantly cheaper.

It blows my mind that the boxed HL2 is still so expensive here... but at least there's another option. Steam and other systems of its ilk could become increasingly popular if local prices are ridiculous. The only downside is the massive download for the game, which sucks doubly in a country like Australia with its download limits. Ugh.

Interesting side note regarding Steam... here in Australia the boxed copy of HL2 is AU$110 in EB Games, while on Steam it's a lot cheaper. The Source Premier Pack is US$60, which includes HL2, Episode 1, Lost Coast, Day of Defeat and a bunch of other stuff, while there's a minimal HL2 Pack for US$30. With the exchange rate the way it is, US$60 ~ AU$80, which makes things significantly cheaper.

It blows my mind that the boxed HL2 is still so expensive here... but at least there's another option. Steam and other systems of its ilk could become increasingly popular if local prices are ridiculous. The only downside is the massive download for the game, which sucks doubly in a country like Australia with its download limits. Ugh.

Have you tried tech support? They are way too helpful when I need it. You might see if there's a problem that has to do with your location, especially if you connect through certain universities. I haven't been having any problems with downloading games or content.

If you connect through a router, try here

If its after buying a game, try here

Other applications can sometimes prevent connection aswell; the test here can help identify if your running some that may cause conflicts

Server status can be found here, I have it book marked. If there's no bar; there's no service.