Hi! I'm another member, and your problem isn't computer spec-related at all. Unfortunately I don't know what could be the cause of the problem, perhaps you have an overly ambitious firewall blocking steam packets? At any rate it's not your computer or age of your graphics card. That's just stupid.
Where's the video of that game with the liquid particle blood and the ships flying through the cloth banners? You sure as hell can't run that without a PPU, that's for certain. Was it an e3 vid? I forget. It was nuts. The plane-crash demo doesn't hold shit to that.
Limitations of the source engine unfortunately. Still it's great fun to play with the two different movement dynamics going on - running next to a tank or defending from one.
Sourceforts has been updated today with a lot of bugfixes, new features and media updates.
It's a fun little mod, try it out if you haven't already:
www.sourcefortsmod.com
1. There's no such thing as a non-modular engine. Class-based object-oriented code isn't just the industry standard, it's all there is outside of Fortran or Qbasic. Calling the engine modular is like selling a car on it's awesome 'replaceable tires' features.
2. Source is quake2 with skeletal...
Memory allocation is part of the game code. DirectX has a built in system to recache game media when memory allocation is lost but it's pretty iffy. Run HL2 in a window if you must tab out. Then it should run fine.
All you need is gcfscape and the vtf photoshop plugin so you can open vtfs in photoshop like any other format.
May also like to find the vtf explorer shell plugin so you can see vtf thumbnails in explorer.
After nvidia's TI-line deabacle, I'm pretty wary of nvidia cards. They got burned by producing a card that lasted too long and had to pay developers to lock out older generation ti-line cards.
That doesn't exactly bode well for built-in longevity of future nvidia cards.