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Half-Life Games Make Steam Compulsory
Thanks to PlanetHalfLife for clarifying that you will soon need Valve's Steam technology installed to play any Half-Life engine title online. According to the site, "...sometime in the near future, Valve will be releasing an update to Half-Life that will require you to convert your old WonID CD-Key into a SteamID", and Valve's Erik Johnson explains this means "...you'll have to have ['digital content platform'] Steam installed to play the most current version of Half-Life [online]." Although he clarifies that "...no, you do not have to pay for Steam", and PlanetHalfLife points out "you should still be able to play HL through third-party server browsers", this is still a major change for Half-Life engine games such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Day Of Defeat.
A group of friends and me play Counterstrike every weekend. A fair few people are having a lot of problems even getting Steam to work properly, let alone play anything.
I know Steam is beta, but it's damn near complete and released (expected to coincide with the HL2 release). For those friends who want to join our Counterstrike game, they're going to be screwed if Valve don't fix some of the fundamental problems with the service.
Why are companies so insistent on placing hurdles in the path of gamers these days? Why ruin what otherwise -- going by all the videos and previews -- looks like being a fantastic experience?
Clueless.
If you're holding WinXP on a machine just to play HL2, you might want to keep that partition because anyone I knew that got HL to run under Linux said it ran like ass, which is dissappointing on a 2ghz. Personally I'm holding out on HL2 for a month or two at least hoping for either decent evidence it'll run on current hardware without an issue under Linux, or valve does something good for Linux, like make the game play in it themselves. Doom 3 has got my money on release day, at least ID cares about my choosen platform.
Must admit I'm not an expert on HL's engine, is it openGL or directx based? OGL at least WILL run through some, if needed, ugly hacks though...we'll see what there is to work with eventually I guess...Game looks good, it'd be a shame if I can't play it.
I've had some success running Half-Life in the bog-standard Wine which comes with SuSE 8.1 - to get around the CD check problems, just update Half-Life to a vaguely recent version. The check got removed aeons ago.
:-)
It ran pretty well with my G400 in OpenGL, although there were occasional graphical glitches (probably more due to drivers and my rubbish motherboard than Wine or Half-Life).
As you asked, Half-Life has multiple output thingies. There's software rendering (which is surprisingly good), OpenGL (which is 'standard' now and is the most compatible with recent mods) and Direct3D (mainly for compatibility with odd 3D cards and their substandard Windows drivers, I suppose).
And Steam? I've no idea. I've never used it, and I'm still unsure what it's supposed to be. The 'subscription' system sounds horribly expensive, and used normally it's just another download system - what's it really for?
Anyway, I'll be buying Half-Life 2 as soon as it comes out - in a good, old-fashioned physical form. I doubt it'll initially work well under Wine, if at all - a very recent DirectX sounds as if it's mandatory. That's what I keep Windows 98 around for.
i've been running HLDS servers for 3+ years. here's what i think of steam:
... 15 minutes (with a cache already downloaded) and is still going. I'm not going to wait for it to finish
:(
:) and I wanted to migrate the server to it asap. But it was so unpleasant I gave up on that idea immediately. I've tried it a dozen times since then, and my distaste has only increased. Maybe I'm just a luddite. :(
Well there's a number of things. In no particular order:
The cache prevents me from messing with some maps - this is probably the main thing for me as server admin that bothers me. Too many maps have bad/limited/broken spawns. E.g. the default map oilrig has 27 T spawns (including a couple right next to ct spawn) and 10 CT spawns. You end up with telefrags if you have as few as 20 players and teams are 11-9
The steam client (both players and server) slows my whole machine down and takes 125MB ram - just for the gui.
Starting up server or client takes a LONG TIME. I just timed them both: I can start playing cs 1.5 in about 10 seconds. Steam CS took
I prefer a server application that doesn't require a GUI. If you need to run it as a service, e.g. via daemontools it can be done but it takes a lot more memory than the current version and gamehost crashed trying to run it.
I don't like the riot shield or new rifles but that's personal. However it DOES annoy me that they added new crap in but the hostages STILL can't swim or climb ladders, vehicles are broken (you often die if you crouch in one, etc.), and other glaring bugs are vigorously not being fixed.
Server performance was bad compared to 4.1.1.1 HLDS - cpu usage was about 4x as much on an empty server, and my ping was higher (right now 20 on HLDS compared to 50 on steam)
Lower FPS on my client (staring at a hostage on italy I get 80.0 on CS mod (maxed), but only 64-66 on steam.
Massive HD footprint - not an issue for most people but I only have an 8GB HD
It is not fun to use - the UI is ass, its slow, it just seems like a bad app, I reminds me of freeware from Bulgarian websites. I keep expecting it to crash.
I was really excited about it - I was one of the thousands of people that starting running it 2 hour before it was supposed to be live a few months ago, causing them to cancel the beta
in addition, from another professional server operator:
"I'm on half isdn, thats 64K (not 128 as ful isdn is) bidirectional. Only marginally faster than a 56Kmodem, i also have limited hours in a month and if you go over those hours the ISP dump you like a hot turd. downloading and re-downloading HLDS because stream is stupid enough to corrupt its own files isn't an option. I've just been screwed out of a hobby i quite enjoyed for no particular reason and it bothers me. I've no option to reinstall anything even because i can't keep any backups or installers since its all web junk.
i don't want to install the client. I never have wanted to install it. I dont like it. The only time i did install the client was on a virtual machine and it was a bitch to work with even then, bad ui, slow and badly laid out if i did display the information i wanted to know. I really don't like it. I also don't want to get patches using steam, i want executables which i can cut to cd and use again on a different machine if i need to, autoupdate isn't something i want to use and i dislike being forced to use it like this.
steam means that every time i want to boot up a server and test a new build i'll have to have my internet connection open, i'll pay for that connection and i'm not happy about this at all."
and from one of the authors of adminmod (the most popular and almost compulsory addon if you have an HLDS server):
"Yes, I have ADSL, but I would prefere to only have to download it once so I can just use the CD to install HL and copy any other files to a friends computer without having to re-download everything. It also means if I break it I wont have to redownload the whole sodding lot. And if I am forced to use Steam I might just give up on HL1 and wait for HL2 (or try and revive LANGames.net)."
The info on the address to send it to and so on should be in the readme.txt file, which you can access without entering the CDKey (because you aren't prompted for the CDKey until you run the game iirc). Otherwise it should be posted online somewhere, and it's done through Sierra, not through Valve directly.
-PainKilleR-[CE]