half-life 2 headaches

[rdlaing]

hi folks,

well i downloaded the half-life 2 demo and was surprised to find that it ran beautifully on my machine.

so I ordered the Half Life 2 bronze package from Steam, downloaded it for an hour or so, and now have my own copy of half-life 2.

First of all, it wiped out my demo, which I wasn't finished playing and was very amusing, but no big deal.

The main problem is I can't get half-life 2 to run without graphics corruption/glitches. I've tried lowering all the settings to below the recommended settings for my system. I updated video and audio drivers. I have no progs or antivirus running in background.

I get occasional crashes. The graphics seem to not be drawing right, I have purple boxes everywhere and vector lines. Sometimes walls flicker and become invisible. Stun batons on the bad guys show up as vector graphics. The sky shows up as a grid. Objects you can kick around and pick up show up as boxes.

I can actually play the thing, it usually doesn't crash and I can shoot and run around and the sound is ok, but the graphics are messed up. I'm not sure what to do and I don't know why the demo would work fine but the game doesn't.

I have a slightly older rig:

win xp
ati radeon 8500 128 meg ram
120 gig seagate hrd with 8 meg cache
512 megs system ram
amd xp 21000 cpu
asus a7v333 motherboard w/ onboard c-media sound.

I wouldn't have purchased the game if it didn't work so perfectly as a demo. I'm happy cranking down the high end graphic fearues to play the thing, but I want to get it to where it won't crash and there are no weird purple boxes and invisible walls and other graphics glitches.

thanks for help!

-- rd

[Horsepwr]

Make sure you have the latest drivers loaded for your ATI card. It really made a difference for me.

[Redline]

He said he's tried new drivers.

Does the game start out like that or does it happen after 10, 15, 20 minutes? The only thing I can think of is the graphics portion of the download is corrupted.

[DragonNOA1]

^Possible, but checksums should have found it. Anyway, you could delete steam and everything and then reinstall and redownload (if you have a day to wait and test it out). And just to reiterate, get latest chipset drivers.

[Jaggannath]

Checked the steam website to see if others have had this problem??

[Force Flow]

Not having a DX9 capable card could be contributing to the problem.

The minimum requirements include a DX7 capable card, but the preferred requirements include a DX9 capable card.

[rdlaing]

Hi all,

sorry I was away from comp a few days and couldn't reply sooner.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Here was the solution:

The first problem was that the game files were corrupted and needed to be re-downloaded. This is why I got crazy purple boxes and lines on the screen. Steam provides a tool for checking the integrity of the files:

http://steampowered.custhelp.com/cgi...i=&p_topview=1

Once you go through and click each one, next time you logon to steam it will automatically download the correct files.

The second problem was that I had updated my audio drivers (c-media/asus on-board) and video card drivers (ati radeon 8500) through the manufacturer websites. Since I had done this I thought everything was up to date. What it needed though was to use Windows Update and check the 'hardware updates" section, then download updates that were available for the sound card and graphics card. I have no idea why this worked and why these are more up to date than the manufacturers.

Now Half-Life 2 plays great (can't crank up the graphics settings though, my system can't handle it). Merrily swatting manhacks, piloting an airboat, and learning about how troubling instinct can be to the ideal society and its benefactors.

---rd

[Hi Ho]

Have fun! I too was surprised to find that my system ran HL2 so well. I run it with all settings at max. It's amazingly beautiful. Not to mention, great game play.