Poll: So Valve broke HL1...

[Johnson McGee]

2 questions to get a perspective on this:

Why did they do it?
Why do we care?

Why do we care? Somewhat important for questions about where consumer ownership over software ends and publisher control begins, etc.

Why did they do it? is a very good question, removing features just to cut Microsoft out of a 15 year old game is pointless unless they were forced to because of a collapse in licensing agreements or something. If that's the case, though, why haven't other Valve games dropped that support? There's probably an explanation other than dickery that I wouldn't mind knowing.

 

[DoPo]

Erm...buying a new computer for a 15 year old game (OK, few years less - I can't remember which year is the new build from, but still) which one was able to play before?

What I meant was, if he was having issues playing a game THAT old on his PC, it should be time to upgrade. Hell, even most shitty laptops (I hate laptops, ugh waste of money) can play some of the newer games out now.

Well, except for the fact that OP could already play the game before but not any more. And he does have a laptop, so the solution to "upgrade" is "buy a new one" which is a waste of money in a lot of cases.

Have you tried the "-nofbo" command line option yet?

Ah, I read up on that, and it seems that it could be a fix. For the record, FBO seems to be some sort of OpenGL extension that deals with...something to do with frames, buffers and objects - I don't care and I don't think most of you care eithe - if you do, you can look it up on your own. At any rate, FBO is a a feature of OpenGL 3.0+ and apparently seems to sometimes have faulty implementation on some platforms. The flag removes the feature and I'd hazard a guess that it shouldn't have a real big impact on quality, although I only read a description of what FBO is used for normally.

 

[Therumancer]

As far as Valve tinkering with Half-Life goes, that doesn't surprise me as the game is one people still play to catch up on the story and see what all the hype is about, especially with things like Portal(2) being loosely tied into it. Not to mention people find it easy to work with, for creating elaborate mods/their own games like "Cry For Fear" or some of the SCP game projects apparently. People still use it.

As far as the specific changes go, I have no paticular idea, but also wonder how many people would actually be negatively effected by this change, or if it's a tiny minority.

I use Windows myself (because it's there) but as an OS I've never much liked it. I haven't ever played with anything like Linux because I'm lazy when you get down to it. I'm guessing Gabe is probably anticipating a microsoft crash of sorts and trying to get prepped for a great changeover or something.

Who knows, maybe Valve will explain what they are thinking. At the end of the day they are the only ones who can answer the question, the rest of us can just speculate.

 

[The White Hunter]

Wait... Intel integrated? Really?

You might want to consider buying like a 7750 or something man they're like £80 and will change your experience completely given you have a PSU of about 400W...

Here's the obvious question.

Why would someone need a modern video card to play a 15 year old game?

You wouldn't. But then any CPU from the last decade should be able to run the game as he's described on it's own anyway.

It's friggin half life. My phone can probably run it maxed out by now.

 

[The White Hunter]

Wait... Intel integrated? Really?

You might want to consider buying like a 7750 or something man they're like £80 and will change your experience completely given you have a PSU of about 400W...

It's a laptop, they aren't known for being greatly upgradable. Especially if it only has an integrated video card.

Ah thats what I get for skimming topics. Still if I were gonna go integrated I'd go AMD, their APU's can actually y'know play modern games with decent fps at decent settings usually. But then intel has it's OEM monopoly =[.

Can probably run Half Life on my phone tbh though, it should run on his chip. My laptop can run it, and my laptop is a 2.0GHz CeleronM with an ATI 200X integrated graphics chip from like 2004.

Any chip from the last 8 years or so should probably be able to get silky smooth rates.

Actually as somebody above mentioned it could very well be an intel driver issue of some description.

 

[Connor Lonske]

yeah so if you have a laptop and it can't run the game then you're fucked.

put my old post in the spoiler because i didn't read the thread bluh bluh.

your pc can't run hl1 with open GL... does your GPU use shared memory or somethin?

anyway if your CPU is super powerful software should run the game fine. i don't think the game supports multi core rendering which is dumb considering what they've removed but even then each core is normally 3 GHz which should be more than enough to run the game at least 30 fps

if your CPU is shit maybe you should be considering getting an entry level GPU for your computer that's a separate card. the price range for this is around 80 to 120 USD and stuff. pretty cheap, all things considered.

look for a Radeon HD 6670 or 7750. both around 100 bucks and worth the money if you just want to play games both old and new at a cheap price

 

[DoPo]

Wait... Intel integrated? Really?

You might want to consider buying like a 7750 or something man they're like £80 and will change your experience completely given you have a PSU of about 400W...

It's a laptop, they aren't known for being greatly upgradable. Especially if it only has an integrated video card.

Ah thats what I get for skimming topics. Still if I were gonna go integrated I'd go AMD, their APU's can actually y'know play modern games with decent fps at decent settings usually. But then intel has it's OEM monopoly =[.

Eh, I've got an ATI card on my laptop. I works fine mostly but has weird performance issues with some games - some new, yes, but some older, too. I think it's just gimped of some feature. It doesn't bother me too much, since I don't play a lot of games that suffer from it and I don't really game as much at the moment, either. It's still annoying. However, it's better than not having it, so I'm OK with it.

Any chip from the last 8 years or so should probably be able to get silky smooth rates.

True, but the Intel chipsets are notoriously bad at playing games. I actually have no trouble believing they won't run Half-Life, especially since it apparently now uses some "brand new" feature of...OpenGL 3.0. Running any game more than Solitaire on those chipsets may lead to problems. OK, normally, they aren't that bad but they do seem to suffer from random quirks that just don't work with some random games. Even worse, it's only sometimes. I've seen people report they can run a game fine (as in probably, like 30 FPS) but having troubles with a game 5 years older than it.

 

[Rainforce]

Just download Black Mesa and play that.

There is no COOP for Half Life 2. Also, I don't own HL2. Neither do my buddies with whom I play. Furthermore, Source games are more demanding than their GoldSRC counterparts.

HL2 coop is very well a thing: http://store.steampowered.com/app/17520/
works great, as far as I know (played it quite a bit with a friend)

on topic: maybe they're trying to steer away from windows. why else would you remove D3D, of all things?

 

[Requia]

Second is your laptop: How the balls can it not run a 1998 game regardless of integrated graphics? I mean, a smartphone could run this game at this point!
The sad thing, though, is that I kinda know the answer to that question: Intel's drivers are garbage.

I think its actually that the mod he's using was fucked by the half life update, and he hasn't updated the mod to reflect the post D3D removal change.

Overall I call this a reasonable change (its not as if game updates don't regularly break mods), but a change that was fucked up by the decision to make updates for Steam games mandatory.

 

[Adept Mechanicus]

I wish the poll options were something other than "massive dickery," "yippee" and "who cares." Could I maybe pick an option that reads "dickish for reasons explained under Massive Dickery, but not as massive as it seems?" It is a very dickish thing to do, even with the best of intentions (which we still haven't learned), but this doesn't affect nearly enough people to be considered massive. It's not like the entire player base is knocked out of the game. From what I'm seeing here, it's not a very large portion.

Still, people do still care about HL1. It's a part of gaming history. I never finished it because after you break out of the facility only to get forced back underground, it makes it all seem a bit pointless because you're right back in another grey corridor with severe OSHA violations. Still, I can understand why it was great now that I've played 2/3 of it and watched the ending on Youtube.

 

[The White Hunter]

Wait... Intel integrated? Really?

You might want to consider buying like a 7750 or something man they're like £80 and will change your experience completely given you have a PSU of about 400W...

It's a laptop, they aren't known for being greatly upgradable. Especially if it only has an integrated video card.

Ah thats what I get for skimming topics. Still if I were gonna go integrated I'd go AMD, their APU's can actually y'know play modern games with decent fps at decent settings usually. But then intel has it's OEM monopoly =[.

Eh, I've got an ATI card on my laptop. I works fine mostly but has weird performance issues with some games - some new, yes, but some older, too. I think it's just gimped of some feature. It doesn't bother me too much, since I don't play a lot of games that suffer from it and I don't really game as much at the moment, either. It's still annoying. However, it's better than not having it, so I'm OK with it.

Any chip from the last 8 years or so should probably be able to get silky smooth rates.

True, but the Intel chipsets are notoriously bad at playing games. I actually have no trouble believing they won't run Half-Life, especially since it apparently now uses some "brand new" feature of...OpenGL 3.0. Running any game more than Solitaire on those chipsets may lead to problems. OK, normally, they aren't that bad but they do seem to suffer from random quirks that just don't work with some random games. Even worse, it's only sometimes. I've seen people report they can run a game fine (as in probably, like 30 FPS) but having troubles with a game 5 years older than it.

Really? I generally don't have problems with ATI or AMD stuff, I'm running a 4770 right now in my desktop and it's doing really well for a 4 year old card. I'm gaming a bit less at the moment and I'm building a new PC soon, hoping I can get a job and get it built. [rant]I caught a lot of flak from a friend for going with an FX 8350 and a Radeon HD 7870 combo though because "AMD suck" with no regards to some of the benefits for the relatively low cost (whole PC including case, PSU, etc is gonna be £600 and his was maybe £2000, so of course his £1000 i7 and SLI 680's gets him good frames streaming, but at the mid range part of the spectrum the FX8350 is probably the best CPU for the streaming job, and AMD motherboards tend to be packed with features and faster SATA ports for a lot less money (like half the price))... [/rant] It's all about the best tool for the job for the right price. Not to mention I've had a fair few headaches with intel products and even my geforce cards have been sucky.

Yeah I tried running some stuff on my integrated graphics on this desktop, knowing that they're old integrated graphics (like 6 or 7 years i think), and it struggles with bizzare things, like it can run Halo but Typing of the Dead actually casued a blue screen? I'd just call spotty driver support. If you're gaming on a budget and don't want a desktop I'd recommend a console over intelgrated graphics :/

 

[Bad Jim]

Not that I'm trying to defend the evil Valve Corporation for this silly thing, but software rendering actually works pretty well. I'm getting good frame rates at 1440x900 with an I5 cpu, which is the highest I can get for some reason despite having a 1920x1080 screen. There is also much less difference in CPU power between powerful PCs and crappy old laptops than the difference in GPU power, so an oldish laptop should also get a good framerate at a reasonably high resolution.

Of course software rendering does look a little different, arguably worse, because it is point sampled rather than using bilinear/trilinear/anisotropic filtering. But it is playable. If OpenGL is no good for you, try software rendering.

 

[DoPo]

your pc can't run hl1 with open GL... does your GPU use shared memory or somethin?

[...]

if your CPU is shit maybe you should be considering getting an entry level GPU for your computer that's a separate card. the price range for this is around 80 to 120 USD and stuff. pretty cheap, all things considered.

look for a Radeon HD 6670 or 7750. both around 100 bucks and worth the money if you just want to play games both old and new at a cheap price

It's a laptop. Seriously, people, the OP is not that long or confusing to read.

anyway if your CPU is super powerful software should run the game fine.

I've always had the game look shit in software rendering. Runs fine, yes, but it's just ugly.

Really? I generally don't have problems with ATI or AMD stuff, I'm running a 4770 right now in my desktop and it's doing really well for a 4 year old card.

It's just this card that has been annoying. It's a 5470 which I obviously didn't do enough research on when I bought the laptop. I actually was looking at several ones and it was down to just picking which video card I'd pick and for some reason I took the 5470 for another one (can't remember the model number but it was a digit off, I think - something like 5770). Only later did I realise it. Still, as I said, mostly annoying not a huge deal breaker, since it plays most of what I want from it.

Anyway, I'll be building a new PC hopefully in a few months time, a proper desktop now, and I think I'll go with nVidia. I've got nothing much against ATI...well, although I do think nVidia are the leaders in top tier stuff, I'm not really after that. The reason I'd probably go with nVidia is that they seem to have better Linux drivers. The current ones by ATI require black candles and sacrifices as part of the installation. OK...you can also do as much good with just a silent prayer to anything you choose - God, other beings, your shoe, or even Thursday and it would do as much good but it just won't convey the proper mood.

 

[The White Hunter]

your pc can't run hl1 with open GL... does your GPU use shared memory or somethin?

[...]

if your CPU is shit maybe you should be considering getting an entry level GPU for your computer that's a separate card. the price range for this is around 80 to 120 USD and stuff. pretty cheap, all things considered.

look for a Radeon HD 6670 or 7750. both around 100 bucks and worth the money if you just want to play games both old and new at a cheap price

It's a laptop. Seriously, people, the OP is not that long or confusing to read.

anyway if your CPU is super powerful software should run the game fine.

I've always had the game look shit in software rendering. Runs fine, yes, but it's just ugly.

Really? I generally don't have problems with ATI or AMD stuff, I'm running a 4770 right now in my desktop and it's doing really well for a 4 year old card.

It's just this card that has been annoying. It's a 5470 which I obviously didn't do enough research on when I bought the laptop. I actually was looking at several ones and it was down to just picking which video card I'd pick and for some reason I took the 5470 for another one (can't remember the model number but it was a digit off, I think - something like 5770). Only later did I realise it. Still, as I said, mostly annoying not a huge deal breaker, since it plays most of what I want from it.

Anyway, I'll be building a new PC hopefully in a few months time, a proper desktop now, and I think I'll go with nVidia. I've got nothing much against ATI...well, although I do think nVidia are the leaders in top tier stuff, I'm not really after that. The reason I'd probably go with nVidia is that they seem to have better Linux drivers. The current ones by ATI require black candles and sacrifices as part of the installation. OK...you can also do as much good with just a silent prayer to anything you choose - God, other beings, your shoe, or even Thursday and it would do as much good but it just won't convey the proper mood.

I heard rumblings that nVidia are moving away from their linux support a bit though in favour of windows (what with Microsoft using their chips for their new tablets and such). Nvidia definately have the edge in power at the moment but it's not really a huge gap and you do pay for that extra power. I would say that if you're in the UK (I think you are but I can never remember for some people on here) look into something like (screw it I cant remember how to make stuff into links -_-) tahiti based Radeon 7870, since you're getting what amounts to a £250 card for £170-£180...

Spoiler: Heres a link!

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/PowerColor+PCS%2B+Myst.+Edition+Radeon+HD+7870+%28Tahiti+LE%29+OC+2GB+GDDR5+Graphics+Card+%5BAX7870+2GBD5-2DHPPV3E%5D+%2B+2+FREE+GAMES!+?productId=54322

But I wouldn't know about Linux drivers for it, might be worth the extra reading to see if there's any info on it running with Ubuntu or whatever, my friend has a pair of those things in Crossfire and it's a pretty awesome thing for the price, though Crossfire can be off with games sometimes. Their drivers are not always on top for Crossfire, hopefully the 7990 coming out will fix that.

Edit: Forgot to mention I'm considering using Ubuntu but I need to look into the drivers for Radeon cards a bit first, I'm also not trying to push you to a radeon card just thought I'd point out the Tahiti based 7870's as bargains (because they kind of are, should really be called 7930 or something though) but it's all about whats best for the price. I'm trying to build the most powerful streaming and editing/gaming thing I can for £600. Hence the 8 cores over 6.

 

[anthony87]

Valve are busy fellating Linux for some stupid reason or another, this probably fits right into their plan.

But of course, on these forums VALVE CAN NEVER DO WRONG, EVER.

Yeah, Newell had a massive freakout about Windows 8 last year, didn't he?

Eh, whatever. Valve's a game retailer. They're easy to ignore these days.

Oh hai BhaalSpawn. I see that you are still make claims without reason to back it up

How could you tell it was him?

 

[Connor Lonske]

your pc can't run hl1 with open GL... does your GPU use shared memory or somethin?

[...]

if your CPU is shit maybe you should be considering getting an entry level GPU for your computer that's a separate card. the price range for this is around 80 to 120 USD and stuff. pretty cheap, all things considered.

look for a Radeon HD 6670 or 7750. both around 100 bucks and worth the money if you just want to play games both old and new at a cheap price

It's a laptop. Seriously, people, the OP is not that long or confusing to read.

anyway if your CPU is super powerful software should run the game fine.

I've always had the game look shit in software rendering. Runs fine, yes, but it's just ugly.

he didn't say he had a laptop outright in the OP. he said the word laptop yes, but "the problem i have is on a laptop" he did not. however i did not read the thread so shame on me anyways i guess.

also it's hl1. what matters is that it plays and if the frame rate isn't like an xbox 360 trying to play the PC version of crisis.

 

[Abomination]

As far as I can see it'a test to examine what they can or can not remove Microsoft dependent software from their current gaming library. Possibly even gauging consumer reaction to such a move.

It's no secret that Valve is trying to move as far away from Windows dependency as possible. This is just one step in that direction.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Not a fan.

They might have their - proper - reasons, but it's shit like this that makes me go rogue.

It's no secret that Valve is trying to move as far away from Windows dependency as possible. This is just one step in that direction.

I don't mind cutting ties with Satan. It's the lack of a proper solution that annoys me and boggles whatever is left of a sane mind and functional intellect.

 

[Abomination]

Not a fan.

They might have their - proper - reasons, but it's shit like this that makes me go rogue.

It's no secret that Valve is trying to move as far away from Windows dependency as possible. This is just one step in that direction.

I don't mind cutting ties with Satan. It's the lack of a proper solution that annoys me and boggles whatever is left of a sane mind and functional intellect.

Well, when your product is 66% Satan and you want to cut all ties with Satan then you can't just leave any shred of that 66% there.

Do not forget just how much is built around software copyright court cases. Valve can't make a claim of "Requires no Microsoft technology!" when its very first flagship title requires Microsoft technology to run 66% of the time.