HalfLife2 play speed getting worst as I play thru the game.

[MikeJYoung]

Hi,

When I started playing HalfLife2 the game play speed was just about fine, on my AMD 3000+ (2Ghz) processor, 512Ram, GeForce FX 5900GT kit.

I am now maybe 80% thru the game, just after the part where you save What's_His_Name from the snipers, and the massive arcing nasty weapon has tried to kill me, it got What's_His_Name directly but didn't kill him, hummm whatever...

Anyway I am finding the gameplay a tad stop & starty, stuttering even, the disk light is telling me of disk access when in_game there was none before, well only when [ Loading .... ] new level, load game or save game etc.

Could this be the Auto_Save, I do many manual saves thru out a level because the Auto_Save has let me down in the past and saves a silly points IMHO. (2 heath surrounded... and the next auto-save is like ages ago ).

So I do have maybe over 150 save files in the game save directory.

Or is it just the game itself, maybe more is going on, the NPC_Citizens maybe taking a lot of CPU...

I was thinking that the AutoSave logic may be stupid and scan the disk for all save names so it can increment the last found !

Or maybe I should de-frag my 80Gb 5%full disk AGAIN, Overnight is the only way even when only 5% full !

Can I purge/backup my save games safely (without messing up the game), down to say the last 10 saves.

Any ideas...

Regards Mike

 

[hi_ted]

Why do you have so many save files? I only use quick saves and the auto save.

 

[CREMATOR666]

150 save files?!!!! Man, you are one paranoid dude....
oh, and his name is Barney (not the purple dinosaur barney, btw)

 

[Atomi]

It looks like this guy hasn't found the joy of quicksaving yet. It's F6 by the way.

 

[MikeJYoung]

QuickSave or ESC save game

Surely these are the same, just a different method of getting there, the ESC save game being disk friendlier eg. you can choose to overwrite, rather than QuickSave auto-increment.

Anyway I am still no wiser as to why the game play was good but it seems to be getting worst as the game progresses !

The reason I save a any given point is like obvious... I didn't like where auto-save was saving it seemed to be at know points rather than timed... Hence as I stated, many times during the game I had the misfortune to die... but whe the game auto loaded to the last auto save, I found myself in a no win loop, eg. very very low health being surrounded by many foes.. and when selecting the next last auto-save it would take me back so far it was frustrating...

Question... Has anybody else found that the game play gets slower as the game progresses.

Mike.

P.S. Come on guys... Keep the messages helpful, not poke_fun_at, jibe etc...

 

[Reaktor4]

In steam/play games, right click half-life 2, click properties, launch options, type or paste -heapsize 320000 then click ok and close. That leaves 200mb ram for background processes which should be more than enough and hl2 should play a lot smoother.

 

[MikeJYoung]

Thanks I will try that...

Do you know what the number actually means ?

Oh I just worked it out the -heapsize of 320,000 will use 320,000 Kb
around 300Mb for heap and leave 200Mb for everything else.

Does anyone know what the default heapsize is ? or how to find out in game, is there a console command ?

I was going to try the -preload parameter this may stop disk access during game play !

 

[Reaper-X]

It's because you have so many save files, the game has to search through each one and find the autosave so it can overwrite it at any point it needs another autosave. The same thing happened to my dad whilst playing Doom 3. Just delete some of your save files or cut and paste them somewhere else and it should solve your problem.

 

[MikeJYoung]

Save files, heapsize or preload !

Again thanks Reaper-X,

I tried each tweak one by one to try to work out the effect, usually I would apply all and be none the wiser as to the effect of each.

So...

Purging or moving the amount of save files made no difference what so ever, IMHO of course.

Question can you turn off Auto_Save, As long as it saved New level position [ Loading.... ] I would like to save at points of my choosing either with [ F6 ] (I am learning... ) or [ Esc ] Save...

The default heapsize I found to be 64Mb btw... after loading HL2 enable console and look at console log.

The -preload command line option, hummmm again I found no evidence of any improved performance due to any pre loading of ALL level dependant stuff...

I believe the -heapsize n gave the best improvement, but this is a tricky option to set, I guess it depends extremely on your PC's main RAM size, what other tasks you have running etc etc.

But I guess there must be a balance to this...

Another issue I may have is that I believe WIN98SE can't reference more then 512Mb, again not sure whether the HL2 code goes via O/S calls to allocate and deallocate memory or does its own thing.

So I have set my -heapsize to half my RAM 256Mb, which is...

-heapsize 262144

where -heapsize n ( n * 1024 = ?Mb) (1024 being 1Kb) etc.

Anyway I think if I can turn off Auto_save I would be happier, do F6's when I need to or whatever, my tough luck if I forget

Fine tuning, this stuff is tricky being so machine dependant, I hope some clever dude out there will create a HL2 Fine tuning guide for the as smooth as possible HL2 gaming experience.

 

[the_lone_wolf]

i think the console command to add to "config.cfg" is cl_autosave "0" to turn off auto save but i think it then doesn't save new levels, although you can start a new game from the start of levels you've "unlocked"

 

[Nutt]

Autosaves shouldn't be the problem. There's just two autosave files that get overwritten when you hit new savepoints. It doesn't check for other saves.

Do you keep your computer on at all times? If so, turn it off for a while. That usually fixes game performance problems for me.