Half Life 2 questions

****I'm posting this here because all of the HL forums seem useless****

Hello all... so a year after it's release I finally decided to pick up a copy of HL2. After a few initial problems (I see now why everyone hates steam) with the game updating, finally it launched. Been playing it for a while, and I've come into the area right after the trains/river in the beginning and now there are two areas where the game is crashing, which seem to occur right before a scripted scene. The first is where you crawl through a sewer opening, and the soldiers are standing above you, when I jump into the water thereafter, where a friend says they start dropping things on you, it crashes... so I noclipped past this, and there comes an area soon there after where the soldiers are standing atop a bridge and I assume to continue you must blow up the barrels beneath them stuck in the ground... this also crashes the game... Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

Also, is there a way that the gravity gun can pick up the bodies... code or mod that anyone is aware of? If anyone can help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Scabbed Angel said:

****I'm posting this here because all of the HL forums seem useless****

I'll try and be as helpful as I can.

Hello all... so a year after it's release I finally decided to pick up a copy of HL2. After a few initial problems (I see now why everyone hates steam) with the game updating, finally it launched. Been playing it for a while, and I've come into the area right after the trains/river in the beginning and now there are two areas where the game is crashing, which seem to occur right before a scripted scene. The first is where you crawl through a sewer opening, and the soldiers are standing above you, when I jump into the water thereafter, where a friend says they start dropping things on you, it crashes... so I noclipped past this, and there comes an area soon there after where the soldiers are standing atop a bridge and I assume to continue you must blow up the barrels beneath them stuck in the ground... this also crashes the game... Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

I suppose HL2 is still going through "installation pains" (as I call them) - it usually crashes a lot for a while after you've installed it, until it finishes "streaming" the game to your hard drive (believe it or not, the fact that you can play the game is in no way related to the fact that you have 100% of the game on your hard drive - I actually played a decent portion of HL2 with it only 95% streamed, and it kept crashing on me as well).

Also, is there a way that the gravity gun can pick up the bodies... code or mod that anyone is aware of? If anyone can help, it would be greatly appreciated.

There's Garry's Mod v9, which among other awesome things, gives you a new "Manipulator" gun that lets you pick up and move anything with precision (though, if I remember right, it only lets you pick up and move ragdolls that you've spawned yourself, not ones generated from you shooting at the cops).

Steam has a file checking feature; it'll make sure that none of the files are corrupted. It sounds like there's a glitch in the map or maybe the part of the engine that handles scripting.

As for picking up ragdolls with the gravity gun... just keep playing.

Wildweasal: Thanks alot man! :D This whole Steam thing is really odd to me... I'll check out that mod. Is it just patches that steam is downloading? It seems bizarre that the game I purchased wouldn't be on the ... game I purchased? Heh.

Bucket: Wow, it's been a while since I've been here: What happened to your name?! I'll give that a shot, thanks a lot for your help! :D

EDIT: I await ragdoll goodness. ; )

The ragdoll goodness can only be FULLY appreciated through hl2 deathmatch. Which of course, comes with the game so have fun bouncing people off the wall with the combat shotty!!!

Scabbed Angel said:

... Been playing it for a while, and I've come into the area right after the trains/river in the beginning and now there are two areas where the game is crashing, which seem to occur right before a scripted scene. The first is where you crawl through a sewer opening, and the soldiers are standing above you, when I jump into the water thereafter, where a friend says they start dropping things on you, it crashes... so I noclipped past this, and there comes an area soon there after where the soldiers are standing atop a bridge and I assume to continue you must blow up the barrels beneath them stuck in the ground... this also crashes the game... Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

If it isn't what WildWeasel said, then there might be another way around it. First, you'll want to enable the console if you haven't already (In game, press Esc, go to options, keyboard, click "Advanced", click "Enable console (~)"). Now, load the game if it isn't already and as soon as its loaded press ~. In the upper right it should tell you the map name; you're going to essentially warp to this map instead of through your saved game, so type map [mapname] in the console, which should reload the map. The nice thing about hl2 is that when you load a map this way, it will supply you with all weapons and approximate ammo for being that far in the game. Once this is loaded see if it still crashes. If it doesn't and you get past the crashy part then save over your old game and voila!

Scabbed Angel said:

Also, is there a way that the gravity gun can pick up the bodies... code or mod that anyone is aware of? If anyone can help, it would be greatly appreciated.

There is a way to obtain the blue physcannon (something you'll get much later in the game) which lets you pick up (just about) anything not anchored down, including bodies and very large objects and such and toss them around. Instructions can be found here.

A WORD OF CAUTION: They already mention it in the link above but I cannot stress enough how you cannot use the physcannon on your buggy or hovercraft (if you have either) or on anything involved in a scripted sequence. If it's on one of your driveable vehicles the game will slow to a crawl and most likely crash, for other items things just start getting weird! I have seen some really bizarre stuff happen here, and if that's what you WANT, that's your business. If you want to play with minimum breakage, I'd suggest using the blue physcannon sparingly. For example, you can pull down those huge Combine Gunships and even those much larger combine transports that unload soldiers and fly off. When you do these sorts of things with the blue gun, it will cause a copy to be made or even several. This occurs when pulling anything that isn't a small enemy or standard prop object. The reason the gun acts like this is that its purpose is to only handle soldiers and objects in the citadel (I won't spoil it too much, you'll see what I mean later on). It's worth trying though, so take a peak. To rid yourself of this gun, follow the steps I outlined above regarding map warping.

And while Garry's mod is great, it isn't exactly what you're looking for I don't think. With the above option, you can use bodies as projectiles, etc. Hope this helps.

Thanks guys! After trying a mix of all your suggestions it seems to be working... for now.

I had expected a less buggy game to be honest though... didn't have these problems with Doom 3 ;P

yeah

valve was desperate to include badly implemented havok hackery to look cool in presentations

that's where they fail in hl2. If you want a great game with awesome use of physics, simply wait until every, EVERY game company takes their thumbs out of their asses and realize gfx isn't everything.