Half-Life 2 Tip

[Sepht]

I know a lot of people have had issues with HL2 taking forever to load up.... and I have a few short tips to help

Tip1: Disable the 3d menu, ur game has to load and render all the textures and shaders and renderer for that to work, I went about trying to find it.. Easiler then I thought
go to
Steam\SteamApps\email\half-life2\hl2\cfg\
youll see 2 files, open valve.rc with a text edior(wordpad or notepad)
final line should be
startupmenu
comment it out by putting // in front of it, ie.
// startupmenu
save
( you could also just delete the line)
And now instead of a 3rd menu, youll just have that blured 2d image it used to have during loading for a bg.. cut the load time by a decent bit(i think the entire time you saw that blurred 2d image, it was just loading the 3d menu, that entire segement is pretty much gone)
Enjoy!

Tip2: If you use a shortcut to load HL2(I use a desktop one), you can try applying the heapsize command to it. heapsize allotes ram for HL2. DO NOT ALLOTE MORE THEN HALF OF YOUR TOTAL RAM TO HL2, its in kb though, so -heapsize 600000 allotes 600 megs of ram(don't do that unless you have at least a gig and a half)

ends up looking like this for me
C:\Valve\Steam\Steam.exe -applaunch 220 -heapsize 600000
Also, if you load your game through steam, hit play games, right clock on HL2, go to properties, and in launch options type -heapsize 600000. Same goes for CSS and w/e else u play throught steam that requires performance.

EDIT: In case you don't care about load times and want quicker ingame performance with a few less hitchs. go into your config.cfg (in the folder posted above) and change sv_forcepreload "0" to 1. (again, text editor, save afterwords)

[Cow]

Good, now someone lock this before an arguement starts!

[Sepht]

Originally posted by Cowgoboom@Nov 21 2004, 05:25 PM
Good, now someone lock this before an arguement starts!

That that was rude cow. I spend some time looking for ways to improve performance and load times, and decide to share it with you guys, and all I get is a stupid snide comment on why it should be locked.

Thanks for sharing Sepht! Nice one m8! :thumbup:

[SprigganX]

thats neet i'll try everything myself and see what happens. I'll reply back to see if it works.

[Sepht]

Originally posted by GamesMaster@Nov 21 2004, 05:39 PM
Thanks for sharing Sepht! Nice one m8! :thumbup:

np, I clocked it

w/o 1 and 2. Steam takes 20 seconds to start, i see about 10 seconds of my desktop, and then comes the 1 min game load, and the approx 35 seconds to load the map. total: about 1:55

w/ 1. Steam takes 20, 10 seconds of desktop. Game loads in 20 seconds. w/ map taking about 35 seconds. total: 1:15.


You know how HL2 has that black blank load screen? and then it gets that load screen with the blured image as a background and it says loading in the bottom right?

That entire blurred image background screen time is removed, so yeh, i tried it again, from the monitor click, until the menu is up and working, 20 seconds. instead of about a 1 min.

[Tiger4Ruler]

Actually Sepht that was quite a nice post from you! :thumbup: ;)

[Sepht]

Originally posted by Tiger4Ruler@Nov 21 2004, 06:12 PM
Actually Sepht that was quite a nice post from you! :thumbup: ;)

Thanks a bunch Tiger! :thumbup:

[mikeeegeee]

Is there a command similar to the very popular command with Doom 3 to increase ram usage and make the game look about 10x better?

[Sepht]

Originally posted by mikeeegeee@Nov 21 2004, 07:08 PM
Is there a command similar to the very popular command with Doom 3 to increase ram usage and make the game look about 10x better?

ram usage would he heapsize.. r_lod doesn't do much...

EDIT: What exact command are u talking about in D3?