Proves that Valve have no idea what it is exactly they are trying to fix..

[Flyingbig]

Until someone from the real world shows valve what is happening there will be no chance of a fix anytime soon. Latest Patch does absolutely nothing to change my game but you know what? I don't care, i have already finished the game with various tweaks and had a great experience but i feel sorry for anyone who was anticipating this "stutter fix"

Anyone actually get anything from this patch?

[GonzoBabbleshit]

i've seen at least 10 posts saying it's completely fixed so stop bitching. Someone from Valve (i forget who) has said if you're still having a problem go to the support section and report it and they can deal with it more personally.

[Flyingbig]

Lets sit back and see, If they have infact "fixed" the sound side of things then it must be a graphics problem and since i have a 64 bit processor, a GF6800 Gt and 1 gig of DDR it seems highly unlikely.

[doomed - uk]

As I say in the news thread, it hasn't fixed it for me and it seems to be harddrive access that causes it. High textures make it worse, medium is acceptable. If Valve allow HL2 to use more memory to avoid harddrive access, then I think that'd fix it.

[f|uke]

Anyone actually get anything from this patch?This patch has completely eliminated all stuttering from my game.
(except for autosaves)

[Flyingbig]

"This patch has completely eliminated all stuttering from my game. (except for autosaves) "

Something tells me you never had the stuttering bug in the first place, i don't believe in the majority saying it fixes NOTHING yet some people claiming its fully worked for them, just doesn't make sense buddy and makes it all the more difficult for valve to work on the problem. http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/

Your telling me you played the first 10 mins of the game with no stuttering at all?

[f|uke]

Something tells me you never had the stuttering bug in the first place, i don't believe in the majority saying it fixes NOTHING yet some people claiming its fully worked for them, just doesn't make sense buddy and makes it all the more difficult for valve to work on the problem.The thing is, theres a number of differnet issues here. Some people are getting a regulard stuttering. I did not have that problem. With me during certain events my computer would pause for a second. Just a couple events that would always trigger stutters:

Before a Breen Speech
Getting in the Buggy (for the first time)
Destroying the helecopter/gunships (i hated that!)Your telling me you played the first 10 mins of the game with no stuttering at all?No. I played through Water Hazard, Ravenholm, and some of Route 17 today, and realized somewhere in the middle that there was no stuttering. When I took out the first gunship in Route 17, I was extatic that, for the first time, the game did not pause at all when I got the last shot in. So much more satisfying.

This patch definitly did something for me.

[doomed - uk]

It seems to me that if it would just stop accessing the harddrive, then it'd stop stuttering. If my harddrive light is on for anything more than a fraction of a second then it stutters. It continues to stutter until the light goes off.

For me, all stuttering is linked to harddrive access. Every bit of it.

My guess is that HL2 tries to stream some data. Perhaps so people 256 megs can play it? I don't know.

HL2 should take advantage of people having 512+ megs, though, and load everything in one go.

[Pi Mu Rho]

Try increasing the heapsize (if you haven't already) - start the game with -heapsize 256000 (or 512000 if you can spare the memory)

[CR0M]

It seems to me that people without the stutter don't really understand what the problem is. Just describing it makes it sound lame and insignificant. Conversely, looking at the demo yesterday without it stuttering once brings home to people like me WITH the problem just how good the game really is when it is playable. Which just makes me angry that I had the whole experience ruined.

Maybe what would be useful is for somebody to make a shaky cam video of the stutter and post it here for the benefit of those who don't fully appreciate how infuriatingly CRAP it makes the game.

If I had a vidcam I'd do it myself. Maybe santa will bring me one.

[^Ben]

I had the stutter and it's completly gone for me :D

[Flyingbig]

I had the stutter and it's completly gone for me :D

lol ...what can you do about these people?

[^Ben]

I dunno, maybe i'll come onto a forum and do an inchoherrent rant about valve and how the sux0r and have no idea about game development?

I had the stutter and now it's gone, simple as.

[doomed - uk]

Maybe what would be useful is for somebody to make a shaky cam video of the stutter and post it here for the benefit of those who don't fully appreciate how infuriatingly CRAP it makes the game.

The stutter page (http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/) gives a link to a video:

http://home.broadpark.no/~krhagen/

[doomed - uk]

Try increasing the heapsize (if you haven't already) - start the game with -heapsize 256000 (or 512000 if you can spare the memory)

Thanks for reminding me to try that. :) I haven't tried the heapsize route and various other options yet as I was happy enough running the game on medium textures and completed it a couple of times before the heapsize option was suggested, then I've mainly being playing Counterstrike: Source since.

[clarky003]

yeh the stuttering hasnt gone for me either, .. and framerates are no where near as good as when i played it in the first 3 weeks,, it must be the memory.. or the compatability between HL2 and my system,, which would explain why it works for some, and not for others.

the stuttering could be certain problems with memory compatibility, depending on your memory, it behaves differently?

thats one idea.. but id really like to see this fixed .. if it is the case.. id rather not start fiddling with my machine because of it.. cause its working perfectley otherwise.. its just a tad frustrating when your trying to enjoy complex kills, with exploding barrels and debris.. i want it to be as smooth as it was 2 weeks ago :( , it drags down to like 10 fps when complex things happen , it just shouldnt slow down that much.

[Epsi]

The real problem I'd guess from Valve's point of view is that there's this problem, which seems to have god knows how many different causes, that they are apparently having difficulty replicating in-house.

If they can't replicate it in-house, they can't poke it with a debugger to find out what's happening, amd they also can't try changing things to see what has an effect on reducing the stutter.

And thread contention... this is when two threads interfer with each other, and I can tell you personally as a programmer that those kinds of problems are immensely hard to track down, as when threads are messing with each other, the problem becomes increasingly non-deterministic, and glitches tend to turn up at random times and having occasionally random effects. It's not pretty.

[Flyingbig]

I dunno, maybe i'll come onto a forum and do an inchoherrent rant about valve and how the sux0r and have no idea about game development?

I had the stutter and now it's gone, simple as.

If yours is fixed then you didn't have the same stutter as me and everyone else so well done, whatever it was you were experiencing is fixed but as for the Sound Stutter issue it remains UNFIXED. Get it? Your inability to realise whether you had the Sound Stutter issue is your problem.

For your records i wasn't ranting, i was making a point that valve don't know what it is they are trying to fix simply because they obviously can't replicate the problem in house. If they could then they obviously would have spotted it during development and fixed it before release and every reviewer would be mentioning the stutter in their reviews as a negative point to the the game experience.

[giant384]

i dont have the stutter any more at the beggining of teh game where breen is saying his speech

[holligan]

I dont really 'experince' the single player side of things,but i had some serious stuttering problems on multiplayer until i got this new patch.I havent had any problems yet.

[dragonflyr]

Is this all you do !!??? ... trash people who have problems??

You've said in multiple post's that you "help" people, and then you make idiot comments like the below.

Hey ^Ben ... basically, you're an ass.
Sorry .. it is childish.... but true.

a LOT of people are having REAL problems that they've been fighting with for weeks .. why don't you friggin give them a break and truly "help" or keep your a-hole comments to yourself and shut the F up.

Guess what?? This whole HL2 process has NOT been smooth.. bottom line. It worked fine for me once I got to a location with broadband. But after all is said and done, when you caugh up $50+ for a game you should be in for a relatively smooth ride. You should NOT have to jump thru a bunch of hoops to have a good playing expirience.

^Ben = ass. Because of his NUMEROUS posts like the below.

Originally Posted by ^Ben
"I had the stutter and it's completly gone for me "


Flyingbig
"lol ...what can you do about these people?"

^Ben
"I dunno, maybe i'll come onto a forum and do an inchoherrent rant about valve and how the sux0r and have no idea about game development?
I had the stutter and now it's gone, simple as."

[CR0M]

The stutter page (http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/) gives a link to a video:

http://home.broadpark.no/~krhagen/

Ah, thanx, yes the linky works now :) tried it earlier but it was broken.
The stutter is indeed there, but not the best example to show. The intro and first breen speech are much much worse, so are the highway 17 levels. Overall though the worst stuttering occurs when a character speaks. These can freeze the game for up to 4 or 5 seconds.

Flyingbig, alledgedly Valve have finally located somebody nearby (woo, ONE person - they must have looked real hard) with the stutter problem and they are getting the machine in to look at it. Alledgedly.

[^Ben]

dragonflyr if you actually look through my post history with helping people that isnt the case idiot.

Oh and I went on the defensive in that post because he was suggesting that I was an idiot who didn't know what he was speaking abouy.

I've probably been one of the more active members trying to help people on this board so please kindly get a clue and stfu.

[Flyingbig]

i dont have the stutter any more at the beggining of teh game where breen is saying his speech

Yes did notice that there was no stutter when Breen's speech starts and when the ambience music plays as you step out of the train station for the first time but i had already fixed this by setting hl2.exe to low Prioirty under task manager so yeah thanks valve, i no longer have to ctrl alt delete out of the game and set it to low priority. Nice to see progress though, at least it shows progress in the right direction. Also when barney is talking to you and the scientist comes on the video screen it used to stutter quite alot there for some reason and that is now gone but again this was already solved with the low priority solution. Fact remains that the issue still remains and it stutters on at least 10 ocasions during the first 5-10 mins of the game for no apparent reason other than it has difficulities playing sounds. Waiting patiently.

[Flyingbig]

dragonflyr if you actually look through my post history with helping people that isnt the case idiot.

Oh and I went on the defensive in that post because he was suggesting that I was an idiot who didn't know what he was speaking abouy.

I've probably been one of the more active members trying to help people on this board so please kindly get a clue and stfu.

It's not your fault to be honest, you obviously have not experienced the stutter to the effect others have so its not fair to give you a slagging but there was no need to go on the defensive about something that does not effect you. Your game works fine so go play.

[Voldos]

the patch helped with the start (helped but didnt solve) ware gman and breen talk etc, but then the stuttering reapeared in full force when the combine asks u to pick up the can

i thought it a bit odd since it never used to stutter at all there...also i swear my load times get longer every time i start a new game O_o

[Cole]

I wanna see anyone who complains about the stuterring problem go through the few million lines of code for source and HL2. Then find the problem. Find what part of the coding is messed up. That itself right there takes days. Then go through and keep on going in and out to see if it worked. You relize you found the wrong area of coding and go back an research.

Trust me, try doing that. It's a bit harder than it seems.

[Flyingbig]

I wanna see anyone who complains about the stuterring problem go through the few million lines of code for source and HL2. Then find the problem. Find what part of the coding is messed up. That itself right there takes days. Then go through and keep on going in and out to see if it worked. You relize you found the wrong area of coding and go back an research.

Trust me, try doing that. It's a bit harder than it seems.

Not as hard as releasing a game that hasn't been properly bug tested and charging £40 a pop. Give me that sort of money and i'd happily shift through code all day. I have been patient though, i have waited a whole month and i am getting really impatient now. To be honest i think i have got my £40 worth out of CS alone but its the principle that counts now. The amount of fustration and disappoint of not being able to play the biggest game of my time is something i don't want to happen again, especially after forking out near a grand on a new PC. Kick in the balls if ever there was.

[Varsity]

Something tells me you never had the stuttering bug in the first place
Who is this dick?

[doomed - uk]

I wanna see anyone who complains about the stuterring problem go through the few million lines of code for source and HL2. Then find the problem. Find what part of the coding is messed up. That itself right there takes days. Then go through and keep on going in and out to see if it worked. You relize you found the wrong area of coding and go back an research.

Trust me, try doing that. It's a bit harder than it seems.

In my experience, the stutter bug is caused simply by harddrive access during the game. I suspect this is true for most people, perhaps all with the problem.

The game appears to load most of a section of a level, then allows the player to move around and the game then stutters as it loads the final parts of that section.

If Valve made it so that the game loaded all the content for any section of the game in a single load, then there would be no stuttering.

I've asked Valve about this possibility, although it's too near Xmas to expect a reply.

I'm not convinced it would be a complex fix as you'd simply tell the game to load the files in one go, and not part now and part later as it seems to do right now.

[Flyingbig]

Who is this dick?

Thats Sir Dick to you. What hole did you climb out of? Wasn't your mothers thats for sure.

[Helixxxer]

OK, for God's sake, will someone please explain to me how to change the heapsize. And no, SIR, -heapsize 256000 doesn't work, at least not in my console. Is there something else you have to do first?

[KagePrototype]

OK, for God's sake, will someone please explain to me how to change the heapsize. And no, SIR, -heapsize 256000 doesn't work, at least not in my console. Is there something else you have to do first?

Right click Half-Life 2 in Play games, then add it to the launch options.

[wick]

Im still getting the stutter, its not as bad towards the beggining of the levels but once there are gun shots or combine radio noise it stutters. Makes battles tough to play, and I know my hardware is capable because Doom 3 demo runs super in high quality. Too bad Doom 3 isn't the game I want to play.

[RonnieDobbs]

When you say Stuttering how many seconds does this last?
For me its like 15-30 seconds and then the game unfreeze for a few more seconds then repeat as described.

Hopefully this patch will give me a little taste of HL2.

[wick]

For me it will only stutter a second or two. Mostly when a sound is played for the first time. Always happens when I switch weapons and fire off the first shot. I tried firing a shot in an area with no enemies and it still stuttered so Im sure its not caused from alot action on screen.

[RonnieDobbs]

patch didn't work for me, my videocard is my bottleneck

looking to buy a MSI FX5950 for my Xmas Gift to Me.
:D

[WhiteZero]

Studdering is caused by multiple things. Their not going to fix it with just a coupple patches. Each time they seem to fix it for certain people (certain hardware combos).

[^Ben]

Well atleast they are actively working on it.

[Flyingbig]

Studdering is caused by multiple things. Their not going to fix it with just a coupple patches. Each time they seem to fix it for certain people (certain hardware combos).

If i remember right you have never experienced the stutter so why you even on these forums never mind adding to this post? Don't tell me, you have the stutter right? ;)

[doomed - uk]

Is there anyone out there who has the stutter but has no harddrive access during it?

For me, both always occur at the exact same time.

[xiphrex]

Yes since this update Ive been having the annoying problem and it seems that its sound related slightly because along with the game stuttering, the sound stutters aswell. Strange thing is it affects even CSS so I am trying to find out what valve did in this update to try and put it back because quite frankly I will do with little autosave stutter and beginning of level stutter without this gameplay affecting stutter.

[WhiteZero]

If i remember right you have never experienced the stutter so why you even on these forums never mind adding to this post? Don't tell me, you have the stutter right? ;)
I don't have to have the problem to know what causes it.
I've probably read about 50 different threads about this so far. And people with all kinds of difference combo's are having it. Then, some people with slightly different combos have it fixed with a patch, and then many still have it.

It's elementary, my dear Watson.

[clarky003]

HL2 turns my system into a 386 :/, at the moment,, and ive got 2 gig of Ram now.. (no change) but its defiantley resource access, compatability based problems.

perfectley functioning 2.8 ghz processor.. and 9600xt, 256mb aswell so should run great on top settings... it did for nearly a month. Bring back the old days.

[Shinobi]

about the harddrive access thing...


in my case when the stutter occurs, it's always in the exact same places, there is no hard drive access at all, and when I check my system task manager, the CPU usage history says the CPU was running at 0% during the stutter,, it's like a delay in the whole game engine or something....

at first I thought maybe it's some sort of validation point in the game or something,, but offline mode (and every other fix suggested on any board) didnt help

[Albrek]

Flyingbig, now i dont mean to flame or troll or anything here, only my second post, and yes I have had and do have a studdering problem again.
Id like to kick it off by asking what your problem is Flyingbig? you rag out Valve saying they have no clue what they were doing, then when people say no, its been fixed in alot of cases, you go on and TELL them they never had the problem and are full of it, because your specific hardware combination is still producing the problem. How would you know they never experienced the problem? what kind of authority are you on it? clearly there are alot of issues you experience that no one else wants to.

Now that that's out of the way, <ill post my pc stats below> When I originally purchased the game, I had a slight studdering problem in speech, and sometimes in framerate aswell. The first patch intended to fix this did solve the problem for me. Recently I have had one of my RAM chips die, so im running on half as much RAM now, and have turned the options down respectively, but am now getting the Studder problem again! I've already finished the game so it doesnt particularly bother me, but my point is that obviously there's MULTIPLE causes to the ONE problem (yes this has been said before) and Valve's patches thus far have only fixed some of them.

Hopefully itll be fixed soon though, i want to play through the game again as soon as i sort out whats going on with my music (for some reason, I never had any music through the whole game)

Now lets all be happy and have fun on boxing day :P :cheers:



P4 3.4GHz 0.9 Micron
Abit AA8 3rd Eye mobo
Geforce 5750 PCX
1GB DDR2 RAM
200GB 7200rpm HDD
and a hella lotta power and cooling :)

[Flyingbig]

Flyingbig, now i dont mean to flame or troll or anything here, only my second post, and yes I have had and do have a studdering problem again.
Id like to kick it off by asking what your problem is Flyingbig? you rag out Valve saying they have no clue what they were doing, then when people say no, its been fixed in alot of cases, you go on and TELL them they never had the problem and are full of it, because your specific hardware combination is still producing the problem. How would you know they never experienced the problem? what kind of authority are you on it? clearly there are alot of issues you experience that no one else wants to.

Now that that's out of the way, <ill post my pc stats below> When I originally purchased the game, I had a slight studdering problem in speech, and sometimes in framerate aswell. The first patch intended to fix this did solve the problem for me. Recently I have had one of my RAM chips die, so im running on half as much RAM now, and have turned the options down respectively, but am now getting the Studder problem again! I've already finished the game so it doesnt particularly bother me, but my point is that obviously there's MULTIPLE causes to the ONE problem (yes this has been said before) and Valve's patches thus far have only fixed some of them.

Hopefully itll be fixed soon though, i want to play through the game again as soon as i sort out whats going on with my music (for some reason, I never had any music through the whole game)

Now lets all be happy and have fun on boxing day :P :cheers:

Yep i see where your coming from and to be honest as you said their are different combinations producing the stutter i and believe that gamers are experiencing different levels of the stutter and this could possibly be why valve are getting headaches trying to get to the bottom of it. The most severe stutter has not been solved and i consider my PC to be a decent rig representing the GF6800 range while this guy,

http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/

.. is representing the ATI X800 range and he flat out states that this patch done NOTHING for him. Put 1 and 1 together and i can honestly say the stutter has not been solved. Sure some gamers who might have been suffering from a slight stutter now and then have found something in the new patch but that doesn't help us ones experencing the more severe end of the problem. I admit as i have done that the patch improved the game performance so much that i was able to take out -heapsize 512000 and scrap the low priority (task manager) nonsense i was forced to use before hand but it has not solved the problem 100 percent so therefore in my eyes valves claims that the stutter was fixed was not backed up.

Merry Christmas!