Steam nuked my HL2 installation!

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:08 pm

Is it a known trouble that Half life 2 can be nuked by a forced steam update? I tried to play today and I had to update for "HL2 deathmatch" (which I will NEVER ever use) and the graphics are all bugged! There are lots of missing or misplaced textures and the game is stuttering. And I have a AMD64 3400+ with a 6800 ultra and 1gb RAM! The last time I played was december 15 or something like that. The only new thing is the forced update. I give the big middle finger to Valve.

baron calamity · Post by **baron calamity** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:14 pm

Hey, I had that happen with CS a few times. I thought they had fixed that. Good old steam.

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:31 pm

What did you do? Is a reinstall enough?

Eduardo X · Post by **Eduardo X** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:39 pm

martindemon wrote:What did you do? Is a reinstall enough?

If you reinstall, it will nuke it again.
Have fun with Steam! It hates you and your gaming dollar.

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:46 pm

You mean that, with my present hardware and most recents drivers, I must wait for them to resolve the troubles they created in their forced update?

I HATE steam now; I only strongly disliked it before. I am shelving HL2 and I am killing Valve in my head; I'll never buy another game from them again and I'm serious.

(edit)
Their support is almost nonexistent; no email address to send questions. They don't want me to tell them they have a problem.

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:57 pm

I just saw in Valve forums that LOTS of people, almost everyone seem to have the same problems and they still force us to update. They are not morally right. Perhaps in the contract that I accepted, they have the right to deny me of playing or anything but I paid 100$ to have this collector edition and I can't play it now because they are beta testing stuff on me. This is very ... steamlike. Here is a new work I'll use.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:00 pm

martindemon wrote:I just saw in Valve forums that LOTS of people, almost everyone seem to have the same problems and they still force us to update. They are not morally right. Perhaps in the contract that I accepted, they have the right to deny me of playing or anything but I paid 100$ to have this collector edition and I can't play it now because they are beta testing stuff on me. This is very ... steamlike. Here is a new work I'll use.

Of course, not everyone has these problems. I was just at a LAN party, where we all had to have the HL2 deathmatch updates (helpfully provided by Steam), and no one had any problems. Big fun was had by all.

But people without problems rarely post as much about problems as people with problems. So you probably didn't hear anything from the million people that didn't have any problem at all.

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:04 pm

What is your system? Do you use a Nvidia card? What drivers? Windows XP SP2 updated? last DirectX official version? Anything special?

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:09 pm

martindemon wrote:What is your system? Do you use a Nvidia card? What drivers? Windows XP SP2 updated? last DirectX official version? Anything special?

P4 @ 3.2GHz, ATI 9800 XT, 1GB RAM, WinXP SP2 updated, latest DirectX.

I would guess that it's an nVidia issue. Which would be surprising. Are you overclocking anything (doesn't sound like you need it, but people have done crazier things). Does nVidia still release non-certified drivers to their customers (mind you I never had a problem with them or their drivers)?

Edit to add that Smoove_B does have an nVidia system (5900 I believe), and he also had no problems.

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:40 pm

I overclock nothing yet, but I had planned to, which is the reason why I have DDR500 memory

But right now everything in running on normal speed. I have the last release version of every drivers I use. Well, I did not check for a few days but I was alright. I'll just check it to be sure but I'm 99% positive here. I'll play something else now and come back to HL2 when I'm reformatting and reinstalling all. Thank you for your help.

naednek · Post by **naednek** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:56 pm

martindemon wrote:You mean that, with my present hardware and most recents drivers, I must wait for them to resolve the troubles they created in their forced update? I HATE steam now; I only strongly disliked it before. I am shelving HL2 and I am killing Valve in my head; I'll never buy another game from them again and I'm serious.

(edit)
Their support is almost nonexistent; no email address to send questions. They don't want me to tell them they have a problem.

It's not a force update, you have an option to turn that off. It's on by default

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 12:14 am

Ok so that means a reinstall and a disable would do it. Thank you very much! Where is the checkmark? I looked on the Steam menu in "settings" and did not find any "auto update". Can I install HL2, disable auto load of Steam and be OK with that? Or is the option very well hidden?

naednek · Post by **naednek** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 12:52 am

open up steam, go to play games. Right click on the game you want to play, go to properties, and you should see an option to have it auto update or not

naednek · Post by **naednek** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 12:53 am

you can also backup the game onto a cd or on your HD that way you don't have to redownload. But since it's already messed up now, you still will have to download, but in the future you wouldn't have to

Freezer-TPF- · Post by **Freezer-TPF-** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 1:11 am

naednek wrote:open up steam, go to play games. Right click on the game you want to play, go to properties, and you should see an option to have it auto update or not

Word of caution - on my system, that setting for autoupdate constantly gets reset when the game crashes, an update gets applied, and other random times. If you put HL2 on "manually check for updates," it might not stay that way and reset itself to automatically update. If you really don't want to ever update, be sure to kill your internet connection before you even start Steam. I finally gave up and just let it update automatically.

Also, I don't know if this link will still be helpful, but if you have a borked install you can try to have Steam validate your cache files (and redownload them if necessary). Here is the validation link:

http://steampowered.com/index.php?area=news&id=351

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 2:08 am

Thanks a lot guys, I'll try that next friday if I can.

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 9:48 am

RunningMn9 wrote: Edit to add that Smoove_B does have an nVidia system (5900 I believe), and he also had no problems.

It's true -- no problems with HL2 on an NVIDIA 5900. HOWEVER I did have problems iwth City of Heroes -- sounds very similar to what you're experiencing in HL2 (corrupted textures, etc...).

After reinstalling the O/S, drivers, patches, etc... it would seem the problem was the video card. As soon as a new card was put in (same type, different MFG) the problem went away.

The really strange thing is that it ONLY happened in City of Heroes. Every other game ran superfine. But I cannot deny the evidence. Not sure if that's an option for you (swapping in a similar card), but it's worth investigation.

YellowKing · Post by **YellowKing** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 9:53 am

The fact that a lot of people don't have problems with Steam doesn't change the fact that there are many out there who can't play the game we paid for because of it.

Heck, I can't even play Half Life 2 anyway, because it's so bugged that it crashes every five minutes on my system.

And no, there's nothing wrong with my computer - I've played dozens of games on it over the past few months and HL2 and Steam are the ONLY pieces of software that have given it problems.

martindemon · Post by **martindemon** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 1:27 pm

I paid my video card 850$ and I don't plan changing it for at least 1 year, like I always do. My card works fine with all the hundreds other games I have, and HL2 worked fine the last time I played it. Same with Doom 3; I finished it and it never crashed. In fact, my system never crashed and that's the first time I have a problem with it, which makes it 99.999999% sure for me that the problem is the Valve patch. Anyway, it's not so impostant as I have lost most the interest I had with HL2 because of the vehicles. I think I'll do some Morrowind soon when I have time.

gorham09 · Post by **gorham09** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 4:46 pm

Isn't there a way to run steam in offline mode, for those who don't play multiplayer and/or don't have broadband connections. Wouldn't reinstalling it and setting it into permanent offline mode solve the problem?

How do you do that anyway?

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 5:10 pm

YellowKing wrote:The fact that a lot of people don't have problems with Steam doesn't change the fact that there are many out there who can't play the game we paid for because of it.

Agreed - but how is that different from paying for some other random game that doesn't use Steam that doesn't work on some small percentage of systems?

Unless you're contending that Steam has increased this percentage? I haven't seen data one way or another. I just don't know anyone personally that has any problems at all with Steam or HL2.

Declaring something a lump of crap or not isn't so much a matter of how it runs on YOUR system, as it is a function of how many systems it runs perfectly fine on. Every game has customers who purchased the game, only to find out that there was some catastrophic problem with their setup and the game.

Comes with the PC territory.