Due to the incredible amount of spam that has been hitting the site recently, we’ve changed the comment publishing policy to be moderated before publication. So those of you leaving legitimate comments, don’t fear, they will be published.

For those who haven’t seen the original page you can check it out here.

Now it’s time for the follow up as I finally got around to buying and playing Valve’s new release The Orange Box, which features Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Team Fortress Two and Portal.

I’d firstly like to echo most sentiments that the pack represents amazing value. But one can’t shake the annoyance at making loyal games fork out for games they’ve already bought by not selling a hard copy version of Half-Life 2 Episode 2 in a stand alone pack. I probably would have bought The Orange Box anyway because I wanted to play Portal, but the lack of choice gets to me. (I know I’m being pedantic, I could have bought it off Steam, but I don’t entirely trust the whole Steam process and I prefer to buy the physical DVD)

After the troubles I had with Episode One I’d like to say that everything to do with The Orange Box went smoothly without any crashes or errors but alas that wasn’t the case. Fortunately my problems weren’t as bad as with Episode One.

The two problems I suffered when playing Episode Two were a graphical issue and a stuttering issue. But it should be pointed out that the stuttering problem I suffered isn’t the one that most people have had with Source games.

The graphical problem came up from time to time. Basically every now and then, after a loading screen, some of the textures would become all hyper coloured, instead of their normal colour. Re-starting the game or changing the resolution usually got rid of the problem. I never actually fixed this issue. I figured it was probably something that could be fixed with a video card driver update but I never did anything about it. I’ve noticed on other forums similar complaints but I haven’t seen a solution posted yet.

The other problem I had was much more serious. It came at a key point in the game in the chapter called “The Vortigaunt Coil”. Now for those that haven’t played the game I won’t describe what happens but suffice to say that during this episode a significant event occurs which is key to the entire Half-Life story. Unfortunately for me when this event occurred the entire game froze up and began moving at something like one frame a second with sever stuttering and sound issues.

At first I thought this issue was a re-occurance of the looping sound problem that was common in Episode One. So I followed some of the fixes posted in the Episode One thread but nothing seemed to work. I also tried a solution posted by Valve which suggested that AVG anti-virus which I was running at the time uses a lot of memory and interferes with Steam Games. So I completely un-installed it and still no fix.

Finally I came across a different solution posted on a forum. Turns out the problem comes from having too little ram. I only have 512mb of ram. Adding more RAM would have fixed the problem.

Luckily that wasn’t necessary. Turns out you can fix the problem by changing the “heapsize” which allocates memory to the game.

By adding the following line to the launch options: “-heapsize 256000″ (With out the “”) where 256000 is half your RAM, measured in bytes I was able to overcome the problem and play the game through as normal.

Once I’d overcome that problem the game ran fine the rest of the way through and it was an awesome experience. The final battle is one of the most intense gaming battles I’ve ever experienced.

I still get annoyed sometimes by the inability to shake the notion that your playing the game on rails with all your moves laid out for you. I understand that Valve’s intention is to guide you through the story, but my favourite game ever, Deus Ex presented the gamer with genuine choices at various points in the game. It’ll be a mighty game that eventually finds the balance between these two styles.

Of the other games in the pack I haven’t had much of a chance to play Team Fortress 2 and multi-player games aren’t really my thing. But Portal was great and it was fun to play something different and genuinely innovative.

So all in all that was my experience. Like the other post if you have any feedback, problems, advice or solutions please post them in the comments so that others can use this page as a resource.

Colonel

Here’s a picture of a penguin:

So far, I’ve noticed that this doesn’t support the new tagging system in WordPress 2.3 – which I only actually enabled this afternoon, so it’s not actually quite as useless as I previously thought. Anyway, this is rapidly losing its novelty.

I’m also not entirely sure why I’d use Office as a blogging client… Oh well, it was only $75

The faitful moment occurred in an elevator, safely packed (or so I thought) in it’s case. When two people crushed their way into the lift I was pushed against the wall and poor Palm had it’s screen broken.

Anyway, other party in question has offered to pay for damages so hopefully he’ll keep his word and a suitable replacement will be found.

I’m not going to have as much to do on train trip home though, I might have to read a book…

Note: This post is for anyone who has attempted to play Half-Life 2 Episode One and run into various crashes or problems. In my struggles to get the game working on my computer I’ve noticed many forums with threads started by users who are having problems with the game but answers to these problems seem spread out across various forums. I’ll try to be as logical as possible when explaining the various ways to solve these problems.

Update 20th, June 2007: I’ve added some additional information at the bottom of this post for people who reported a problem with pink and black boxes appearing where walls and doors should be. Scroll to the bottom to read.

Update 20th November 2007: I’ve posted a new thread for Valve’s new release, The Orange Box. It includes my comments on the game and some solutions to problems I had with crashes during Half-Life 2 Episode Two. If you have any issues with The Orange Box or Half-Life 2 Episode 2 then post them there. The post can be found here

A few days ago I finally got around to purchasing Half-Life 2 Episode One. I’m a huge fan of the ground-breaking Half-Life franchise and was really looking forward to playing the game, especially as I had purchased a laptop between now and when I’d played Half-Life 2 and was eager to see the game on a Direct X 9 video card.

However, much to my dismay I found the game to suffer from numerous crashes and it has taken me quite some time to get the game running stably. What I’ll do first is run through the crashes I experienced and the solutions I came up with before giving my opinion and comments.

The first thing I should note, my computer is a Toshiba Satellite M50/L00. It is a Centrino notebook and has a Pentium M 1.7GHz, 512mb of RAM and an ATI Radeon x600 SE which is a PCI Express, Direct X 9 video card.

So onto the problems. I think I can now split my crashes into two problems:

The first problem I encountered almost immediately. After playing the game with out trouble for the first few minutes I exited to change some preferences and found that I could not return to my saved game or start a new game because the game would freeze when during the loading sequence. It didn’t matter if I changed the settings back to how they had been before I had exited, or whether I changed the resolution it always froze with the loading bar on about 75%.

From reading a variety of forums I’ve found this to be a common problem for people with ATI video cards. (I can’t deny or confirm that the problem occurs with NVIDIA or any other video cards) The loading bar will get to about 75% and the game will freeze.

I found that I could sometimes exit the game by pressing ctrl + alt + delete. Other times I had to shut the computer down by turning it off using the physical switch.

Some times I would find that the game would crash and the following error message would be displayed:

Internal driver error in IDirect3DDevice9::Present()

Some people may have had the game crash during actual play and this error displayed. (Again I can’t confirm or deny this)

As far as I can tell the best way to solve this problem is to update to the latest drivers for your video card. You can download these from the ATI website or from your computer manufacturer’s website. This should solve the problem for you. When I installed the new drivers I was able to successfully load the game.

However, because I have a laptop the standard ATI drivers are not compatible with my laptop getting the latest drivers was a little tricky. For those of you with laptops you should visit your manufacturer’s website and download the latest ATI drivers from there. However, as is often the case you may find there are no up to date drivers available from your manufacturer. This was the case for my so I had to use a program called DHmodtool. What this program does is convert standard ATI catalyst drivers for use on a laptop computer.

The program is available here: http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool/ The website has detailed instructions on its use. (Please note that is using this program you will be using drivers that were not provided by your manufacturer and I accept no responsibility for any damage caused by the use of this program and recommend it only so far as it worked on my computer. Your experience may be different.)

Once you have installed the latest drivers Half-Life 2 Episode One should load. However, if you still cannot progress beyond the loading stage there is another method for playing the game. Open Steam and right-click on Half-Life 2 Episode One. Go to Properties > Set Launch Options and enter -dxlevel 81 and click ok. This will force the game to run in Direct X 8 mode. Once you have done this the game should load, however you will not be able to view the Direct X 9 features such as HDR. However, this option will let you play the game if all else fails.

The second common problem that people experience is the game freezing during the action. I played the game two thirds of the way through when it began to freeze with the sound stuck in a continuous loop. Many people have experienced this problem and from what I have read, many have experienced it at the same point I did. You can read about the technical details of the problem here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_engine#Looping_audio

There are a number of solutions to this problem floating around but before I list them I will guide you through how I solved it.

Click on the start menu and select Run. Type in DXDIAG > ok. This will open the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. Click on the tab labelled Sound. Under the heading Direct X Features is a slider labelled Hardware Sound Acceleration Level. On my computer this was set to Full Acceleration. Reducing this slider to Standard Acceleration appears to have eliminated the looping sound freezing problem.

If this doesn’t work try some of the solutions listed at the Steam forums

Those were the fixes that worked for me. A few other things to try, ensure you’ve updated to the latest version of Direct X which can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. Also I’ve come across a few mentions of people having trouble with older versions of Windows so it’s probably safe to recommend that you have at least Windows XP when playing Episode One. I’ve also read people recommending that users with 64bit CPUs ensure that they use a 64bit operating system.

As this is a relatively recent game, having a decent amount of RAM will probably help avoid any issues although I have noticed people with 1gb and more of RAM reporting these same problems.

So to quickly summarise before I add my comments:

If you’re having trouble starting the game and it keeps crashing when it’s 75% loaded make sure you update to the latest drivers for your video card.

This should also help if you receive the following error message:

Internal driver error in IDirect3DDevice9::Present()

If you’ve updated your drivers and still the game freezes when loading then change the launch properties so that the game loads in Direct X 8. You won’t get all the features but at least you’ll be able to play the game.

If you’re experiencing crashing during the game where the screen freezes and the sound become stuck in a loop then try reducing your level of sound hardware acceleration.

Ok so now my comments.

I must say I was so disappointed to find the game so riddled with crashes, 6 months after its release. Granted it appears I’ve been able to find solutions to the problems after purchasing a game I shouldn’t have to go to so much trouble just to play it.

As I searched for the solution to my problems I read many similar stories on forums and also many comments by users insisting it was a problem with the users hardware not the game itself. However these problems appear far too wide spread to simply be confined to individual hardware issues.

Now granted I should have ensured I had the latest display drivers (something notebook users will understand is often very difficult to do) but prior to purchasing Episode One I had played F.E.A.R, a notoriously taxing game with out any trouble or any need to update my drivers.

What made my experience far more distressing was that initially I had to wait two and a half days for STEAM to automatically download updates and patches for the game. Where I live I don’t have access to the fastest internet technologies I was thus disappointed at being forced to download 100mb plus updates. There was no option to play the game with out updates. In contrast when I installed F.E.A.R it asked me if I wanted to update, but when I saw the size of the download I declined and was able to play the retail version with out any trouble. Granted this stance would prevent me from playing multi-player but I don’t really have that option any way because I only have a 256kb connection.

Unfortunately this experience has tarnished my feelings towards the Half-Life franchise. Which is sad because the game itself is terrific and a worthy successor to Half-Life 2. I will buy the next episode as I love the games. But it won’t be with out apprehension after my latest experience.

For anyone else experiencing these same problems please leave a comment if the solutions I have posted worked or didn’t work so as to help anyone else with similar problems.

If anyone knows of any other problems or solutions I haven’t covered please post them here.

Colonel

*Additional Info*

A couple of people have left comments stating that they had problems with visual artefacts when running Half-Life 2 Episode One with the walls appearing as black and pink check boxes. I’ve searched the Steam Support pages and it would appear that they have a solution to this problem.

To see their solution go to:

The solution involves verifying GCF cache files. I hope this helps anyone experiencing this problem. Since I didn’t actually experience this particular issue when running the game I can’t verify how well it works so anyone who’s had the problem if they could comment on whether the above solution works that would be great.

In the Red corner, Firefox 2.0. The open-source contender; risen from the ashes of Netscape. Featuring a new interface, improved feed support and built in spell checking.

And I’m actually impressed by both of them.

IE has taken a dramatic leap forward. Finally the built-in Windows browser has escaped the ’90′s and has a rendering engine capible of more than basic CSS. It behaves more consistently with more standards-compliant browsers and for web-designers it is going to make our jobs easier (once the concentration of IE6 users falls significantly at least).

Firefox, on the web-design side of things hasn’t changed much, but as far as the end-user is concerned it is more polished and should help with further increasing its installed user-base – especially further into mainstream usage.

This battle has been more quiet than previous battles and may actually help to push this section of the industry forward in a positive way.

Related Links:

1. IE7 Homepage
2. Firefox 2.0 RC3 Homepage

A few days ago, I got the link to download Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 and decided to give it another go. This time it downloaded correctly, the MD5 and SHA1 hashes matched and all was good.

The install ran smoothly – except for it not letting me install it on my second hard-drive. Thankfully, Ubuntu is a bit more forgiving than Windows if you move it to a different drive.

It installed remarkably quickly and didn’t require a reboot – a nice feature in the world of Windows reboot-a-thons.

It also managed to detect and automatically install my wireless network card, video card and extra USB ports. However a standard (and common) soundblaster live wasn’t set up until it looked on the internet and downloaded the drivers… But it works now.

The default install of Vista is 7.5GB compared to less than 2.5GB for XP. There are certainly loads of new features, but that’s kind of excessive…

Finally, the Aero Glass interface is very shiny. The faded and blurred window borders and animations are entertaining to play with for a little while, but like those found in the older versions of Windows, I think they’ll find themselves disabled pretty quickly.
Below are some screenshots.

Yesterday morning, it was cold and foggy. The type of morning to sit inside by the fire. By 1 PM it was still foggy – something I’ve not seen before here.

I decided to try out the shiny new Windows Vista and use my brand spanking new DVD burner (which supports +R, -R, +RW, -RW, +R DL, -R DL etc…) to make my nerdy side happy. (no, developing this website doesn’t count as nerdy)
So after leeching 3.2 GB over my internet connection – a 18 hour marathon of excitement and fun – I discovered that either my DVD drive is writing crap to the discs or the Vista ISO had corrupted in the download.

Of the four DVD’s I have burned today; one has been coasterised,  two wont read in the other computer and the fourth holds a copy of Windows Vista which happily returns the error message ’80070241′ – possibly the clearest error message Microsoft have ever invented. At least it has a rhythm to it.

Update: I’ve discovered that the other computer will only read DVD+R disks. And I’m still not running Vista

I use (and recommend) that Wikipedia be used as a starting point for research – instead of starting a search for “beetroot” on Google and haphazardly searching for information a search on Wikipedia will give you a much better idea of what to look for along with some useful data (which should then be confirmed from a different source).

Wikipedia is no-different as far as I’m concerned from picking up a copy of the Encylopaedia Britannica. In terms of its accuracy, I’ve never spotted anything which was completely incorrect – there were minor mistakes, but the beauty of a wiki is that changes can be made.

Speaking to people involved in academia, there is a general feeling that Wikipedia is being used as the sole source of information in research assignments – even at second year university.

But, without people knowing that you have to research a subject through multiple sources – and getting it from primary sources whereever available – I fear that society will get to a point where ‘research’ will wholly comprise a Google search and a quick glance at the result from Wikipedia.

The real concern is that, in time people will blindly accept incorrect information simply because its on [insert popular website here]. For example, people used to believe what they heard in the newspapers because it “has to be true”, this belief later migrated to radio – a famous example being Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. This belief further moved onwards to television and now it is starting to become ingraned to the internet – possibly the largest cesspool of crap humanity has ever invented – and also, potentially one of the most useful ways to share valid information.