Cheated by "the industry"

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Have you ever read a review from a game and when you played it it was all disapointment?
Have you ever asked yourself if the reviewers are trying to sell you something instead of “reviewing”?

I have recently purchased Half-Life 2, collectors edition, to celebrate my acquisition of a brand new machine. According to what I read in the web it should be the greatest game of all times, right? Wrong, but surely it is the most unstable one.

The sound of the game constantly stutters and it crashes all the time when saving. Too bad it’s too late now, I should have done more research before buying it. It’s not difficult to see on the web a lot of people having these problems, so if I only had Googled a little before buying I could have avoided wasting money in this crap.

As a software developer I am amazed how certain things don’t work. For example, if you are writing a file when “saving the game”, wouldn’t it be easy to just report the whatever error happened to the user instead of crashing miserably? What’s the difficulty in having a popup window saying "Error while saving: " ? Is catching an exception too hard?

The funny thing it’s the support has asked me basicaly to replace all drivers, check the memory (yes, it’s a brand new machine), and do lots of other stuff while I have absolutely no problem with any other application, including other games such as The Need For Speed: Most Wanted. I think they are using the strategy of asking ludicrous stuff in order to get rid of me, so if I say anything again they ask “Have you completed the previous steps?..”.

#2

Actually the HL2 is a great game and being a software developer myself, you can have hard time figuring out such bugs when you cannot reproduce them…

Also that other games do not crash might not be an indication that everything on your system is OK. Especially if you have a low budget motherboard you could have a lot of problems that only occour, if a software stesses your system in special way (like HL2 might do).

The sound stuttering is afaik a known bug caused by texture thrashing which “overloads” the system bus when swapping a huge amount of textures to the GFX card (something like that) and theres a patch to reduce the effect. Also having a card with more memory (how much do you have?) and reducing texture-details might help. Details

#3

Is there no Log file for HL2 that documents the crashes? Because other engines give back the exception and log it. THe exception window is mostly to small to display the full exception stack. Seems they don’t know how to implement a scrollbar…

#4

Whatever it is, the system catching error situations and reporting them is the very least we can expect from “the industry”. What a piece of crap. If you haven’t bought this thing yet and plan to do it then be prepared to find very stupid bugs.

My machine is a Dell one, with a Core 2 Duo processor, a X3000 IGP, 2GB of RAM. The funny thing is that it runs Soldier of Fortune 2 , which uses the Quake 3 engine, at maximum quality with very high FPS rates. This doesn’t show “how powerful” it is because SoF2 is way too old, but it shows this thing works!

#5

NeedForSpeed:MostWanted works good?
THAT game was definetly not worth its money. Constant lag problems and strange collisions.

#6

I guess that justifies the fact that Half-Life 2 sucks. :slight_smile: It’s not the first time game websites fool me. Another notorious crap made by "the industry"© was Halo, the first. The most incredibly hyped game, when in fact all it had was the same old first person shooter crap, a third class scifi story (those types that have a weird name every five words or so in order to look “alien”: “the people of blaaargh have been at war with the evil bleeergh and his army blorphx from the planet waercluft…”), and very annoying enemies that looked and sounded exactly the same.

But I have to disagree, I think the gameplay of NFS is really good and the game is fun, especially for the GTA-like way of playing.

#7

Older games do not work on any video card, even if it is new. Usually in the README it will tell you what video cards are supported, what cards cause problems, and what cards are not supported. For example, in the game Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, there is a texture problem with every GeForce card (I have had the problem, and by googling, I’ve heard many other people have too). However, it’s easily fixable with a patch. I suggesting browsing the README file and looking to see if HL2 has problems with your hardware, if it does, look for a patch.

And one more thing about HL2 being rated, qoute “the greatest game of all times,” or Halo being rated, qoute “The most incredibly hyped game.” This is the reviewers oppinion, not YOUR oppinion! If the reviewer likes First Person Shooters and you hate them, he rates Halo 2 as “best game of the year.” That’s his oppinion on what the best game of the year is, however, you may think a Need for Speed game is the best. Personally, I don’t think there can ever be a “best game,” everyone has there own oppinions on what the best game is for them, but it can’t be the best game for everyone.

[quote=OverKill]NeedForSpeed:MostWanted works good?
THAT game was definetly not worth its money. Constant lag problems and strange collisions.
[/quote]
I have Need for Speed Most Wanted and I have NEVER had a single problem with it - I get a constanst 60 FPS. Like I said, it could be your hardware. The game may not support what you currently have.

#8

I’m sorry, but HL2 really isn’t a good example of a crappily made game - I could provide you a list if you like. I’m not a fan of the game, but the demo ran beautifully on my sub par system.

You obviously aren’t very familiar with computer gaming. When you listed your computers specs, you didn’t even mention your video card, which with a game like HL2 is more important than your processors and memory (not that those don’t matter…), not to mention that you wasted your money for an overpriced and overhyped Dell( this is what you should be complaining about). New games are developed with the newest video and sound drivers - usually they are faster and perform better - they are trying to provide you with a better product. Is is so much that they require you to go get said drivers? They can’t provide drivers for every possibility and fit your game on that disk.

I agree not providing feedback can be annoying, but I’m pretty sure you can look in the log for that feedback…

I’m not defending the state of much of computer gaming, but most of the things you are complaining about have reasons. At least with a computer game, you can get a patch if its buggy and it likely will repair most of your problems unlike consoles.

#9

A crash is most likely not caused by an exception, but by an access violation or something like that and is not catchable, so this is (problably) no stupid bug like forgetting to write a line of code. Keep in mind that sometimes even the java VM exits with a core dump from thin air…

Have you read the link I provided with suggestions how to fix the stuttering? Any success?

#10

Yes, but that isn’t your problem here. Many people agree that reviewers are lying scum (everyone I know in the industry deliberately does NOT use any particular review to decide what to buy - at the very least, they use metacritic (if lazy) or read 3 or 4 reviews from radically different companies.

That’s why they should all be using java to write their games. No joke. That’s the kind of thing where C (and, by extension - sadly - C++) is bloody awful, but java radically improves the situation.

NB: this would be incredibly good in java if they could just fix that stack overflow exception / out-of-memory error bug from Java 1.0.x which is STILL in java 5 (and 6 IIRC) such that it loses the root cause of the exception, because it’s run out of memory. The one that Cas and I pointed out to Jeff and he said he’d ask about, IIRC. I’ve since seen C++ implementations that guard against this exact problem in the way Cas and I suggested - reserving at startup a small chunk of memory for the memory handler for this particular class of error.

#11

It runs “beautifully” here too, high FPS, until… it crashes.

I did mention it. Besides, what the graphics card has to do with “stuttering problems” and “crashes when saving games”? If you could provide the logic you used to get to such conclusion it would be enlightening.

Half-Life 2 engine is buggy, the evidence is the load of such problems players have been facing since its release. Just Google for it.

Besides, I have no complaints about Dell. No problems so far, everything working fine. The time of delivery from clicking on the website to getting the computer at my home, excellent. I am willing to pay more for a good service.

They could check if certain operations have completed successfully, couldn’t they? And they could report to the user of possible failures, couldn’t they? Crashing equals shit in the code. This is not only about gaming, it’s a matter of well designed software. If that crap were close to be well designed it would at least not fail miserably.

The problem with "the industry"© is that “PC gaming” is some kind of synonym to “put together whatever undebugged untested piece of trash and that will be fine, if it crashes we can always blame the user”.

The suggestions they gave were completely pathetic. All other applications and games are working, and the problem is the computer? I don’t think so.

Wouldn’t that Steam spyware they install together with HL2 be the responsible for installing updates and patches? How many years have HL2 been release now? Haven’t they patched this crap yet?

#12

Well, I’m not in the position to completely defend Valve, but your anger may be a bit misplaced. In the PC wolrd is is nigh impossible to test for every single config. I have run HL2 on 3 different systems, all built using different platforms and never had a single problem ever.

Crashing equals shit in what code? Perhaps the drivers you have? Look, sloppy is sloppy but I have to side with Valve on this one so far.

Well, this one is just plain false. Steam is not spyware. Looking at your system specs, your graphics card is an on-board Intel chipset. Horrible, unstable and no where near the solidity or speed of nVidia or ATI. After reading that both your audio and video are on board, I’d bet a dollar that your problems are due to resource conflict or drivers for the video card. My suggestion would be to go get a real video accelerator and give it a shot again :slight_smile:

-Chris

P.S. Now that I think about it, it probably IS your video card. Read about the “amazing” X3000 IGP: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=1934968

#13

It’d be nice however if on shit cards where the game isn’t likely to work there was a game message saying - “don’t run on this crap, get a real card” or something :slight_smile:

Kev

#14

Agreed, sort of. Then you get into the realm of accusing game companies of pimping one manufacturer over the other.

-Chris

#15

Ah, it doesn’t have to say “get a nice new NVidia card” though maybe it should :slight_smile:

Still, it’d be nice if when you tried a demo of a game, if that worked on your machine the full game was guaranteed to work - on my old shit laptop I can think of few games I demoed, worked, bought - broke. If the demo just looked at your hardware and said “Hey, you’re unlikely to get the best experience with this hardware” it’d be awful friendly.

Kev

#16

[quote=“kevglass,post:15,topic:28791”]
Recent Valve games actually do this. The Lost Coast HDR demo and Episode 1 both moaned at me for having an apparently slow processor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the same for memory and video card.

#17

Ah, well thats brilliant then. The OP shouldn’t ever have the issue again :slight_smile:

Kev

#18

This is not about not working, this about crashing with no explanation. If they are looking for some resource but that’s non existent why not to report it? If some error where found during the execution of something, why not to tell the user?

Reporting the errors it finds it’s the minimum to expect from software.

Well, I never said my sound card is onboard. My soundcard is a Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Music, I think this is good enough, isn’t it? The only thing onboard is the GPU and even so it is hardware accelerated.

Although I was suspicious in the beginning of it, I had no choice but this one (I buy a decent one later), but I have to say, it runs at a very high FPS SoF2 at 1024x768 with all options turned on to the maximum. It runs NFS Most Wanted. SoF2 is not new, but the card is definetely accelerating the stuff in here.

How do you explain that? Just show us the logic.

Blah, blah, nonsense. The drivers for this IGP were a piece of shit when it was released in August, and you can find a lot of fanboys posts all over 3D forums bashing it in the constructively “nViDiA Rulz” style. Some features were not enabled, but now they are. This was not designed to match a high end card, but NFS is running, and running fine.

Again, how do you explain that? Just tell us. And please tell us what “saving the game”, which is my problem, has to do with a graphics card? How the process of saving your progress in the game to HD uses the video board?

How do I see the FPS rate in HL2 for posting a screenshot here?

The funny thing is that I tried to run NFS in my laptop from work, it has a ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility, that runs Guild Wars, for the sake of an example, nicely, and it had some glitches in the graphics! Funny isn’t it? This one runs where some others of some brand required tweaking the options or installing some patches.

As I said, a piece of shit engine + hype-creating media = Half-Life 2 and the other bunch of badly written software.

#19

The funny thing is that SoF 2 gives a message about not enough resources and asks if I want to continue anyway. And it works! :slight_smile: It’s ironic, isn’t it? The game that complains about not detecting a video board with enough memory runs, the one that doesn’t crashes.

#20

Seconded; windows (blame microsoft!) is very good at letting dodgy drivers screw up stuff.

Not that it’s easy, of course, but if you were to blame anyone about lack of transparency in crashes, you should probably blame them - apps usually dont even have acecss to find out why/what in a driver just went titsup.

The OP should go read Mark Rein’s excellent speech at Develop this year. After half an hour of normal, boring, keynote (and a demo of Gears of War), he clicked to the next slide, and without warning the title flashed up in bold:

WHY INTEL IS SINGLE-HANDEDLY DESTROYING THE GAMES INDUSTRY ON PC

…and went on to lambast the crap intel chipsets as being the single biggest threat to the commercial games industry.

I believe there are transcripts out there on the web somewhere. It was fun. Especially when Jason chipped in (no fight, sadly :().