Just saw BlackDog's post. Gah. 

who was it? His uncle? That is a hell of a thing to be known for. 

Well, on my machine at work, Doom 3 looked nice, but was very samey the whole way through. The composition of the views you would often see didn't seem to be as interesting or generally accomplished in Doom 3. I guess because you spend most of the game in a military base.

I didn't think that all the fancy shadows in Doom 3 really made such a huge difference, apart from making the game feel a bit more solid. The lighting in HL2 wasn't as technically dazzling, but had a much more real world and gritty look. Doom 3 just looked a bit shiny.

Also, I couldn't run Doom 3 at ultra high res with all the fancy stuff turned on, so perhaps I missed out on a few things (the warping effect on glass for one.) I ran HL2 at 800*600 with most effects supported by the GF4 on. Doom 3 I ran at 640*480 low quality settings.

I don't think you need me to explain why I thought HL2 was a better game to play. 

I borrowed a Geforce FX 5700 from a friend for a week or so when Doom 3 came out. I have an Athlon 64, so I ran the game at 800x600 at high quality, which seemed to be the same speed as medium quality. I never benched it. I thought the game was ok.

I have a GF 6800 now, and have since replayed the game. With a higher resolution and double the frame rate (maybe) I found I very much enjoyed sections of the game a more, even that I react differently and use different tactics.

Half life 2 just set itself to run at some crazy resolution with AA and everything going, and it always seemed to be running very fast - 60+ fps I'd guess. Near the end of the game the stuttering bug got horrendous though. After Valve fixes that I'll give it another try. Anybody else suffer from that problem?

I'm thinking that Doom 3 has more room to grow. I'd like to see a cavernous Hell, uh, cavern with 50 odd imps to run around in with. 

Audio Stuttering: Many Half Life 2 gamers are experiencing small pauses or "stutters" when playing the game, regardless of their hardware and/or settings. You hear stutters in speech, sound effects. The problem is that the game continuously loads textures into the RAM whenever you go aroudn a corner or see an enemy. This is not an audio issue, so don't throw away your sound-card just yet. The problem is the engine. This issue has been fixed already via a steam update.
The main change from the fix is the addition of a new command variable: mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware , I will come back to this command in a bit.  

stupid line breaking thing...

mat_forcemanaged texture into hardware
(remove spaces) 

Just thought I'd chime in and say:

- I'm *really* enjoying this game so far. I just got to 'entanglement', i really enjoyed highway 17 and ravenholm was pretty good. I really like the weapons so far, especially the shotgun and the gravity gun, which serves many purposes with puzzles, etc. Maybe I'm dense but I did feel there was a bit of a discrepancy between the very noticeable linearity and how you were for the most part forced into following task by task, but at the same time some of the puzzles have left me frustrated as I had no clue wtf I was supposed to do or where to go.

- I still haven't finished doom3. Got bored after hell. Meh. 

Restart steam and it will auto-update the game as per usual, this could be interresting :) 

I played it last night for about a half hour. While the lag was pretty terrible, everyones ping hovered between 300-400, it was still tremendous fun. The weapons all feel about right, with the exception of the Magnum perhaps. I mopped the floor with that thing, even with my ping and ended up with a score of 40-12, pretty rediculous for as much lag was on the server. I think the server tries to over compensate aim or something because it was rare that I missed with that weapon, and I know I'm not that great of shot.

One moment that stuck out in particular in my mind was when someone was about to toss a exploding barrel, which there is an abundance of, I shot it with the Magnum and it exploded in his face giving me a kill. I thought it was pretty funny.

Anyways I suggest everyone checks it out. An interesting note is they are holding a mapping contest. Entries must be submitted by Jan 15th I believe can be worked on by a group of people. They are looking for some DM maps of course. First place is 5,000, 2nd and 3rd each get 3,000. Not bad, I may considered it after I get done with this semester of school and do a map over break.

I suggest everyone take a stab at it, even as laggy as the game is now. I believe it was just the servers were having too many on at a time, I think it should be capped for the time being to 8 or less, similiar to Doom 3.

Check it out. 

Enjoyed it a lot. Last level has wow factor with regards to architecture / atmosphere. The hovercraft levels went on a bit (*not a fan of driving games). Could have used more interesting hidden sh*t, but that sort of thing just isn't in vogue these days - shame.

Anyway, played, done, deleted, back to Quake1. :) 

Played it at work this lunchtime. There were only 6 people or so playing, but it was utterly brilliant. I so much prefer this sort of thing to overly stressful competition over fun deathmatch found in most other games.

The magnum does seem a bit stupid though. It's like a rapid fire rail gun ffs. The other weapons don't seem too imbalanced though, I got a kill or two with pretty much everything. It's also quite interesting to start with such a potent arsenal. Grav gun, pistol, smg and grenades is certainly a change from axe and the worst projectile weapon :)

The grav gun is such a brilliant laugh. We had some grav gun duels going on, where we deflect stuff thrown at us using our own grav guns, then throw it back.

Does anyone know if you can use the grav gun to grab the projectiles fired with the alt-fire on the combine assault rifles? Can't remember if it was possible in SP before the last chapter anyway. 

yeah, it rocks
tossing barrels around is endless fun ;) 

I was playing the overwatch level earlier and watching someone smack a car wreck down the road with the grav gun and get about 4 kills by crushing players with it. Absolutely hysterical.

yeah catching stuff that other players throw at you is great too, endless fun.

Dont get me started on shooting exploding barrels, it brings me out in giggles of joy :)

Great stuff, but yeah its such a shame about the lag, it does ruin what would otherwise be such a classic mod. And just 2 maps, that could get old fast, luckily both are quite different and require different srats to be successful. 

How glad I am that I bought Doom 3 first...how silly it would have been to save the money for HL2 instead...I mean it seems like everyone is playing Doom 3 and that HL2 is just a boring repetitive game that people aren't even compelled to finish.

On top of that, Doom 3's deathmatch is simply flawless, compared to HL2's overbalanced weapons and scattershot layouts that are nothing more than small snippets of map spliced together with pieces from the single player game. 

pull back your sarcasm, it's biting me. 

My theory is that the internet was invented to allow us to bludgeon each other to death with toilets.

That is all. 

Gonna have to wait till this weekend probably to try out HL2DM -- got Hammer working fine now since I reinstalled the whole ball of wax directly to the C drive instead of through the Program Files directory. 

The lag from the first night is pretty much gone now. What I've gathered is the first night was a bunch of 12 year olds running listen servers and as a result the playing experience was less that stellar. Now that more deticated servers are up it's much much much better. Very smooth and predictable.

I hope they get some more maps tho. The lockdown man, from the prison area is pretty decent. But the second one has rather a rather poor layout but is okay for teamplay games. Hope some kids around her seriously consider mapping for it, or working on a quality mod... such as mine :) 

I recall you talking about the story part of your mod in #tf. Care to give some more info? 

hl2 dm last night and today...
ping was never an issue

its fun DM thats for sure. Even tho I am currently having bad videocard issues that corrupt alot of poly. I CAN SEE THROUGH WALLS!!

yes you can catch the 2nd more fire on the combine standard issue plasma rifle. There are lots of neat little things that can lead to some strategies. Like in a less hectic match you can build yourself a litte bunker and as people get close 1st mode the grav gun and send
parts flying everywhere.

One golden moment I've had so far I worked to get a car all the way up to 3rd floor of a building... (it took a while and Im surprised nobody nailed from behind) then i left it teetering and it happened to fall just the right moment and land front end down on another player. I was awestruck. 

Is huge fun -- played some tonight on an Atlanta server, and it kicked ass. It was so funny, watching everyone wandering around with a big chunk of junk at the ready.

Back to mapping, tho -- anyone know of any tutes for working with displacement meshes? All that I've seen mainly has to do with creating terrain, and I want pipes, dammit. 

actually, it's starting to piss me off quite a lot now.

Does anyone know how to make steam just fucking get updates as they become available AND THEN FUCKING VALIDATE THEM, RATHER THAN WAITING FOR THE TIME I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME?

It seems that Steam is only updating files when I try and run the game, which, as you can imagine, is a bit annoying. When I want to play a game, I don't want to wait 5-10 minutes for fucking updates to be applied... especially not at the rate they are releasing them atm. It seems that EVERY time I try to play, I have to wait for an update. FFS.

And why is it that all the update news is FUCKING OUT OF DATE ALL THE TIME?

There have been about 3 updates since HL2DM was released, and I don't see any updates listed on Steam since the 30th of November. WTF is that about?

I hope Valve get all this shit sorted out soon.

Or maybe I'm just not doing something right... anyone got any ideas? 

and some fucking piece of shit has already registed MY LEGIT Half-life 1 key, so it's either buy another copy of HL from the shops (at the risk that the cd key is also already registered) or UPGRADE to HL2 Silver... but this doesn't seem to be possible at the moment.

Oh, the other option is to mail my HL1 CD and CD key to Valve, at god knows what cost for postage, then also pay a $10 administration charge and then wait for my HL CD to be mailed back to me.

It's a fucking disgrace. 

wtf with the HL1 CD key? You have got to be fucking kidding me. What you're saying is that Steam has made it possible for some twat to stop you playing your own 6 year old game? WTF? 

I can no longer play HL1 online as far as I am aware. Besides, when HL1 is registered on steam, it should unlock some of the other old HL related content, such as Opposing Forces, which I never played.

Whether or not you were taking the piss with your post, Kell, I don't know, but it's a shitty siuation nonetheless.