Source engine tries too hard

[elrasho]

I was playin HL2 again on HARD last night. I was upto the bit where ur in the citadel and come across them "light" bridges which need u to use the gravity gun to throw energy balls at them switches. Well, on the first bridge if u look on the right below the bridge ull see two panels, one on the right is ejecting these energy balls.

I got a phone call and so decided to leave the game running whilst I was on the phone. I noticed that there were more and more of these balls coming through the panel and after 10 mins the game started to stutter as there were soooo many of these bouncing around the screen. About 2 mins later the game crashes and goes back to the desktop with an error message of "Engine error...."

Pretty funny, ud think the engine would know what its capable of and eventually stop ejecting them energy balls.

 

[605Scorpion]

They're supposed to blow up eventually. (10-30 seconds?) Something's wrong on your end.

 

[elrasho]

Im not talking about the actual energy balls, im talking about the face that there were sooo many on screen that the game crashed. Try it yourself, you'll see what I mean

 

[jimmyjam]

read what was said

 

[elrasho]

I know he means after 15 seconds the balls should blow up, so therefore there cant be that many on screen. I mean that the frequencey at which the balls are ejected increases rapidly, so at first there are say 5 balls ejected within ten seconds, BUT then 10 minutes into the game there are something like 20 balls ejected within ten seconds and so you have ALOT more on screen at the same time.

Give it a try, you'll know what I mean

 

[605Scorpion]

No, there's still something wrong.

 

[Revenge]

Have you actually tried this out Scorpion? Or are you just making assumptions?

 

[elrasho]

I dont think he has. It does work. COuld be a good benchmark for ur sytem, see how many energy balls are on screen before it crashes! lol

 

[TaoFan]

A similar thing used to happen on Doom 2, in the last level when you face the big boss. The boss ejects these cubes all over the place that turn into monsters, and if you leave it alone long enough, enough monsters are generated that cause the game to crash. And it used to happen a lot on my first PC, a 486 with 4mb memory (wow, that's small!)

 

[elrasho]

The game testers that Valve got didnt do a good job testing me thinks. Although to be fair, HL2 is such a massive game it would take years to test it thouroghly

 

[99.vikram]

I think I spent some time there without a crash...but my memory sucks so - off to the lab!

 

[Revenge]

The game testers that Valve got didnt do a good job testing me thinks. Although to be fair, HL2 is such a massive game it would take years to test it thouroghly

I think it's unfair to say they didn't do a good job because they didn't think they'd need to test what happens if you stand in every single spot on every single level for 20+ minutes at a time.

If they hadn't of done a good job testing, Episode 1 would of been about following Alyx while she nagged you constantly to hurry up.

 

[tehsolace]

Perhaps they set it up so that the energy balls ejected at a faster rate so that for those novice players who are having trouble in that spot 5+ min into the game, they'll have an easier chance getting those energy balls since more are coming out... but they didn't put any sort of cap on the amount that could come out at once so it crashes after too long. Just a guess...