I wonder if anyone has messed with hl2 command line options to get it to run better? I've got a few commands in mine but it still hitches loading data on occasion and is very annoying, this is what I am using :

-novid -heapsize 1024000 -cl_forcepreload 1 -dsp_enhance_stereo 1

So im giving it a full 1gb of ram to play with (I have 2gb in my pc) and telling it to preload everything yet it still hitches??? Does anyone more in the know than I am know of any other useful parameters to add? Oh the dsp enhance parameter makes the stero panning sound much better btw! 

runs like ass on my pc on level loads. The hitching is a huge problem. It's infinitely worse with more recent Source games.

I only have 512mb though :( I also have a crap onboard sound chip. Once it's loaded it all runs fine, but this problem absolutely shitted on my experience of the game.

Luckily, I had played it at my old work and it ran fine on a system that also had 512mb ram (but a proper dedicated soundcard) and had no hitching issues.

I hate source. 

So the problem has to do with the sound? Wow, I never knew that. 

Found that this little gizmo works wonders for latency performance, decreasing and sometimes halting the stuttering completely: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/PCI_Latency_Tool/1105467085/1 

You know what that means - it's time to move over to the dark side and finish that Doom 3 map, beotch. 

Source saves memory by only caching the first eighth of a second of all sounds. It plays that eighth while it loads the rest of the sound.

That means that it's constantly seeking on your disk for sounds.

I dunno if it was ever proven that that's what causes the hitching, but that's the leading theory at least. 

that's a nifty tool, but i was wondering what else will be affected by changing the pci latency? and if it could be bad for other things? 

Didja get my e-mail? 

I corrupted some files and thus need them again...

dmc1.zip
pg2.zip
phantasm.zip
rcoldmaps.zip

=( 

You can get the last three from FP via Fatty's and Tronyn's sites. 

Thanks a lot! 

as I downloaded most of the quaddicted side before it crashed....

http://members.home.nl/gimli/dmc1.zip 

Thanks a lot to you too! 

Who said Legos had no scientific merit?

http://acarol.woz.org/ 

Sometimes we are considered as geek... but this man is over standing the geek concept !! In anyway, respect to him: building a calculator using "Legos" is pure art... 

re #10850.

nope, didnt get an email from you... 

I broke down and downloaded "Lego Digital Designer," which for the uninformed is lego's new virtual lego building software which lets you build stuff out of infinite legos without having to actually own any.

At first I thought, "how could they do that when it would sort of eat into their sales of actual physical legos?" However, it seems that this Lego Digital Designer lets you actually order, ie with money, the exact set of bricks you used to build whatever hideous masterpiece it is that you built. So, if you construct some crazy thingajig and just have to have it, you can buy it and have those bricks all show up in the mail for what I assumed would be a tremendous fee. I worried very much that I'd emerge from my apartment two weeks later, scruffy and unkempt, having spent upwards of a thousand dollars on a large, colorful, and fully articulated Baneblade or something.

It turns out I was wrong about all of that. Lego apparently decided instead that to stop this from eating into sales of actual sets they'd just make the software completely awkward and useless, and only include the boring common bricks you can't build anything remotely interesting with.

I placed like two bricks and a wheel and uninstalled the whole affair without remorse. I guess, for now, there is no substitute for the original. 

Agree.

We here at the tower of koth bought a bunch of Lego games cheap, including a builder ( don't know if it was the latest, but similar to what you describe ). The actions to get even an ordinary brick of an ordinary color into an ordinary location was a protracted feat of counter-intuitive key bashing. I think my greatest achievement was to successfully open a hinge.

Conversely, some cherished Lego was retrieved from a parent's garden shed and we set about constructing "some crazy thingajigs". No comparison. We're going to take pictures, then dismantle the Lego and safeguard it for the next generation. 

who of us played with Legos as a kid? So far, I know of myself, Lun, and Kell... 

Were the only toy i really ever played with from about 4 years old, to 16 years. I still take them out from time to time.

The 1200 piece black car still holds a place of honor on my top shelf. 

Around here (sweden) I think you can just safely asume (unless they're terribly old) that everyone played with lego and if someone says otherwise you'll have to try to figure out what cave they were raised in. 

Strong lego trimmer here, but as most of my greenhat toys are gone. But I can remember it gave me as much joy as Quark! 

The 1200 piece black car still holds a place of honor on my top shelf.

The race car??? I built that too! <3 

Tinker Toys AND Lincoln Logs -- Oh My!

I even had Giant Tinker Toys and could make a robot the size of my mom that would love me more than she ever would ;-) 

building cars and jets and rerigging toy guns to shoot out eye punturing things. As for legos, I never got into them.