Call be a n00b if you will....

[Denny]

But what are all these "Source" releases everyone's talking about? Are they like better versions of the originals? And if so, how are they better? And what's this "Steam"? Is it like Punkbuster for the HL engine?

I mean i know these are totally newb questions. But in my defense, i've never played online, and only played the SP games, Half-Life, Opp. Force, Blue Shift, They Hunger. I guess i've just been out of the Half-Life mix for awhile.

It's an awesome game, and i'll definitely get HL2, but the to things i mentioned above, are like big unknown worlds to me.

[MusicMan]

www.steampowered.com

[TruB]

HL2 uses source as game engine..

CS use uses hl1 engine.. and CS source.. will use HL2 engine.. simple as that..

stream.. cant say its like punkbuster.. it lets you buy and download HL2 and its mods.. you must also reg at steam to be able to play.. even if you buy the CD or DvD for hl2

[HangFire]

Steam is the reason you'll go back to only playing single player.

[Maleficus]

Don't forget to mention that Steam is a royal pain in the ass if your on 56k. >

Its buggy, crashes often, downloads crap you don't need/want (hundreds of megabytes worth - even when you tell it not to), makes it slightly harder to modify games (since it hides all game assets in one big file that is its own format, and you need special tools made by hackers to get to anything), it will "preload" games you don't want, etc, etc.

Some people, those on broadband mostly, love it because it simplifies certain things - takes the thinking out of playing a game for them. Others hate it, for the reasons stated above and others.

Source is just the name of the gfx engine Valve made for HL2.

[Huntkillaz]

i'm a 56k user also but i have to say:

1) it use to be buggy and crashing often, but they have seemed to stableise it

2) The only time my steam downloads stuff is when it's updating itself or a game that i have told it to update when and update is released.

Also it never preloads new games

3) those .gcf files yes do have the entire game packed into them and yes they don't have any tools and that u have to hack them. but they are awesome for any 56k user why?

because they contain the entire game within so all you have to do when u either have to reinstall steam or windows is burn those gcf files to cd and load them back after saving urself so much download time

[sPlOrYgOn]

Originally Posted by Maleficus

Source is just the name of the gfx engine Valve made for HL2.

actually it's the name of the game engine..
the graphics engine is made by valve and the physics engine is havoc..

[sfx1999]

And I think they still use the Miles Sound System by RAD Game Tools (the people who made BINK Video). I learned that because one of the HL2 files was unencrypted and it had a video file in it.

Also, I think Valve learned their lesson when people complained about CS:CZ precaching without their consent.

[TruB]

Originally Posted by sPlOrYgOn

actually it's the name of the game engine..
the graphics engine is made by valve and the physics engine is havoc..

true.. but havok is not just the one who made the physics.. valve help out a big deal to develope version 2.0..

[MarD]

Heyyo,

Yeah, steam was horrible, but now it's bearable. I do like how steam does put it all in the gcf file, cause it's like a big backup you never need to worry aboot. So let's say you download a custom gun model for the mp5, you hate it, just delete it and there you go, steam just loads the default mp5 model.

The friends system would be nice... if it worked properly. When you log into steam, it doesn't log you into friends at the same time.. why? who knows, but what I know that is if you're logged into that friends thing, it auto logs you out after a bit cause there's not enough servers to keep it running on all steam accounts. So I don't even bother with it, I just use xfire.

It also feels like the games are more laggy, especially for older machines. You see, that steam program can sometimes take a lot of memory to use. Usually dormant it's like 1KB, but when active it can leap up to more than your explorer at 19KB, which's annoying, but shouldn't be a problem with newer computers like mine, but I can get pickey cause my cpu is only a AMD Athlon XP 1900+

So yes, there's pro's and cons to steam, and some of the games. (CS 1.6 is really weird, it's like they rewrote the handling for all the guns, makes it impossible for us CS 1.5 and down users to get the hang of CS 1.6 right away... in fact, I'm still trying to cope ).