Half Life 2 Stuttering Bug Official

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."

Comments

Hmmm....

[lxt]

...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...

Re:Hmmm....

[moonbender]

1920x1600? What kind of display do you have? I doubt there is any device available for less than, say, a thousand bucks that can make use of that kind of resolutions. Oh, many CRTs will display it all right, but their phosphor coating won't be designer for anything above 1600x1200 for a 21". If anything, higher resolutions would result in some sort of anti-aliasing (aka blurring). Or am I wrong? I'm not a display engineer after all... Or maybe you simply do have a very expensive display. :)

Re:Hmmm....

[cortana]

HOW long as the concept of checksumming data to detect corruption been around?

Re:Hmmm....

[neko9]

from This site - Vampire: The Masquerade, which is based on Half-Life 2's Source engine is also reported to have the same stuttering issues.

looks like engine problem.

Re:Hmmm....

[JPriest]

Especially in gaming these checksums are needed to prevent people form modifying the files to cheat online.

Re:Hmmm....

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

getting a slightly corrupted file off of Steam isn't something that you can really plan for

You're right, you can't plan for it to happen, but you can safe-guard yourself against it before you even run into it:

man md5sum

Re:Hmmm....

[Zorilla]

that you can ditch the water skimmer and then get stuck after playing for 20min and finding a point where you need it but cant go back to get it

God damn! You, too? That pissed me off so bad. I actually got all the way to the ramp attached to the elevator with pulley cables and washing machine puzzle before I got stuck and it said, "A.I Disabled" after screwing around for a while trying to figure something out. It appeared no matter what game I loaded from there on, even if I started a new game. Backing up the savegames and reinstalling did the trick, though. After starting a new game from that chapter, I had a pretty big smack on the forehead after I saw the swamp boat RIGHT THERE! Did I actually miss that?

I was having too much fun in the beginning of the game to think about the tedium of walking the super long distances to get there. I assumed I just broke the game, because that appears to be something I do a lot. I've broken Painkiller, Star Trek: Elite Force 2, Ultima 7 (not hard to do, but I didn't do anything wrong) and Strife to a point where I can't continue in the game. Plus, I sooner assumed the helicopter and radiation sewage crap was just an obnoxious point in the game rather than needing a special tool to get past it (think really unfair games, like Contra Adventure where there's three hard bosses in a row). I had already spent a half-hour trying to play lumberjack with the blue plastic drums getting past the first radiation pool.

If you ever need a playtester, I'm your guy, as I seem to be really good at breaking software :)

As for the stuttering, I'm pissed that I had to switch back from my kX Project Drivers on my SBLive! Value back to the mediocre (but reliable) official drivers. I hope any fixes that come out will remedy it.

Re:Hmmm....

[moonbender]

That's the third reply stating that CRTs will display very high resolutions - I'm aware of that. You can also print 4pt fonts on a 350 dpi printer. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Your Sony E400 has a dot pitch of 0.24 mm, (a) that means there are monitor width / 0.24 mm ~= 1650 phosphor dots horizontally, (b) which sets an upper bound for the resolution the monitor can display.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm by no means an expert (unless having basic knowledge on how a CRT works makes me one), so both (a) and (b) could be wrong. So feel free to address those, but please don't just tell me how you're happily running your 15" CRT at 1800x(400*Pi). ;) No offense intended.

On a sidenote, I've also never heard of being limited to a certain color-depth when running a CRT - not as long as you're talking about more than 1 bit, ie black and white. The CRT just gets analogue color values (voltages, in fact) anyway, so color depth as a bit value is really a feature of the graphics card and operating system. Unless you were talking about signal/noise ratio of the analogue monitor connection limiting the color precision or something.

Re:Hmmm....

[GeorgeMcBay]

I unlocked the game at 8am 16/11/2004 (GMT), and was playing 15 minutes later. Not had a single crash.

I had a similar experience. Installed via Steam and it worked fine right away. However... there are known, verified problems with the standard installer for people who got the game the old fashioned way, so neither your nor my experience here makes a bit of difference if this guy ran into those installer bugs.

Wow! you must be racing through the game very quickly and missing lots of the gameplay if you find it loading content every five minutes.

I've been going through the game at a leisurely pace and there are quite a few stretches of game where the loading comes even quicker than every five minutes. It is somewhat inconsistent though.. Sometimes you'll go 10-20 minutes without a reload, then sometimes you seem to be reloading every 3-6 minutes. It does seem a bit excessive, IMO.. but not a deal breaker.


Not seen that at all on the Ravenholm level. I'm quite surprised you say that, as the map boundaries always seem to be far away from the next/last monster. I've not played the entire game yet, but I certainly didn't see it on the map you talk of.

I know exactly what he is talking about. On the part of Ravenholm where you need to position the platform so you can jump across to the roofs.. and there is a little courtyard with one of those spinning metal things you can control with the gravity gun. There is a door portal in that area that triggers a level load and if you happen to not go exactly the right way the first time, you'll walk around in a circle that causes the level to load again, and then if you back up a bit? Loads again... Annoying little spot. FWIW, that's the only one like that I've seen in the game so far (I'm currently pretty deep into the antlions part).

In any case, Half-Life 2 is absolutely an amazing game and I suggest it as a must buy for any PC gamer, but the original poster's problems are all pretty valid. I disagree that they are bad enough to merit waiting 5 years to play the game.. but then I got lucky and wasn't hit by the annoying installer bugs either...

Finally!

[EventHorizon]

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!

[rodrigogo]

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!

[Haydn Fenton]

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!

[general_re]

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.

I just thought it was my hardware...

[unwiredmatt]

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...

Why is this exactly newsworthy again?

[jkmiecik]

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 a ton of forums, 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 cheese. 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?

[lavaforge]

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?

[bogie]

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..

[bushboy]

discrimina a a tion !

I also have a bad stu u utter !

Half Life 2: More important than life itself.

[rice_burners_suck]

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

[illumin8]

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.

Re:The Irony of Half-Life 2

[Tokerat]

Suppose someone tries to install this game in the combat relaxation tent in the middle of Iraq so our troops can play. They can't install!

Nothing like guns and violence to take your mind off the war you're fighting in...

Re:Bunch of THUGS!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you turn around and blame Ford when you get ticketed for speeding 30mph over the limit? Do you turn around and blame Wal-Mart when you burn your the chicken you were making for dinner? Do you blame the local hardware store when you hammer a nail through a water pipe?

Yes.

lol

[Apreche]

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:The Irony of Half-Life 2

[jtmas83]

Since in every HL2/Steam/Valve thread on Slashdot Steam seems to get blown out of proportion, let's take a moment to review some of the good qualities of Steam:

• Steam allows automatic patching, so once a bug is found and fixed, it can be applied immediately; no more having to search for patches.
• You can install the games on as many computers as you want; you just can't play them on more than one computer at a time.
• Steam allows for a delivery system that I think most people (those who have high-speed internet connections, anyway) would agree is much more convenient than having to buy CDs from a store and then having to make sure that you don't lose or damage the CDs.
• And the most important of all (that so many people seem to overlook or forget): After activation, you do not have to be connected to internet to play the Steam-based games; just start Steam in off-line mode.

I'm sure there are more.

Look, I hate DRM controls as much as the next guy, but I realize that many software companies feel that they need to use such measures to try to make sure that they get rewarded for their work. All that I'm saying is that of all of the DRM/activation systems I've encountered, Steam seems to be the least intrusive and most flexible...and it has a few added benefits for the users as well (i.e. instant patches).

Motion sickness too!

[antdude]

Some people are getting motion sickness from this game. See this newsgroup thread.

With 2 monitors

[Henry V .009]

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.

As repeated once before

[aepervius]

In 5 years, once the activation server is down, or in 10 or whatever, what you got is a pretty coaster because you can't activate your legally purchased game without a crack.

OTOH about your points : * you can automatically patches if you program for it. That msot game except MMOG don't do it isn't because of a technical ground, but rather a money/marketing ground. So no advantage here. * I can install normal CD on many computer as I want, and only play on the one I have the physical CD. No change either here. * Delivery isn't as convenient as you say, if you do not have a broad band, or a nice DSL. Heck with a 26 modem I can order something on an online store and it is delivered at home. But Steam would be unusable on such a connection.

I am sorry, but you are overplaying the advantage a lot. True this is a new mode of delivery for those which want the game on the day retail begin to sell it, but do not make up things out of thin air. This is pretty much the only advantage, the rest is only nice for the company selling the game.

A story of a bug.

[SetupWeasel]

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.

Amen to that!

[Zarathustra.fi]

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.