Audio Problems with HL2

[luckyjan]

Got a reaction from gabe today.. Well kinda. Not a reaction to my audio complains but well... read.

attached this picture

Got this reaction (yeah i admit i did smile)

From: "Gabe Newell" <[email protected]>
To: <xxxx@xxx>
Subject: RE: this is valve for me
Date sent: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 23:17:12 -0800

None of us wear suspenders

 

[noby_95]

Hi there,

i tried all recommended fixes before (defraging, setting variables, heapsize, mouse filter off, reducing sound quality up to reinstalling windows xp and buying antother GB of Ram).

This is the only fix that really greatly improved the stuttering for me. It only stutters now hardly noticeable when it austosaves. Please valve let us disable that damn autosave please!!!!!!

This is the trick:
I went into the bios and disabled all components that i dont need (Serial Port, Parallel Port, GamePort) and also disabled Assign irq to usb ans Assign irq to audio.

Thats it! Next i will try to remove some cards i dont need out of the system. But first i am of to playing HL2 at last!

 

[Darthb0b0]

Not necessarily a Creative issue

Its easy to fix but the solution is always a poor one.. You have to go into your audio slider dx bar and bring it all the way down to no hardware acceleration.. Creative devices have sucked for years.. I own an audigy 2... This should be happening for you in all fps that have large texutres.. for me it even happens in cs some times when I shoot a window then immediatley jump through it to break it. (This only happens in office becuase of the shattering glass.) The only solution may be to either buy another gig of ram or get another sound card..(Im not even sure the extra gig would help.) If you notice sometimes the xbox even has this problem... Anyone have a real solution?

I have a Philips PSC706 sounds card (read some really good reviews on it and wanted a non-Creative card) and I still have the exact same issues. I have a P4 3.4 Extreme Edition, 1gb ram, 6800 ultra, and I get this at 16x12, 12x10 No AA, 2xAA and 4xAA. No difference.

 

[Gargi]

....

Thats it! Next i will try to remove some cards i dont need out of the system. But first i am of to playing HL2 at last!

I'm not willing to reassemble my computer to play a game. Therefore I exspect a patch to get a bugfree game I've paid much money for!

cu
Gargi

 

[Garindan]

Thanks grant666uk and Tommieh, never knew about that imageshack! Nice

Shame still no fix :dork:

 

[efilflah]

OMFG


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: "Yahn Bernier" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We've made some progress but I don't want to post anything until we're
sure of the steps to fix it. Don't want to create a wild goose chase if
it's not the underlying issue.

We will definitely post our findings as soon as we are sure they are
accurate.

Thanks for your patience,

Yahn

-----Original Message-----
From: Lukic Aleks [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 8:08 AM
To: Yahn Bernier
Subject: Video/Audio Stuttering

Hi Yahn

Any news on the stuttering problem? Seen in thread
http://www.steampowered.com/forums/...id=1550180#post
1550180

Also thanks a lot for actually posting in there. It seems a rare
occasion now that someone from Valve actually bothers to inform the fans
loyal enough to post in Valve's own forums.

Is there anything I can do to help?

My specs:

Asus P4B mobo
P4 1.7Ghz
512MB PC133 SDRAM
60Gb 7200rpm ATA HDD
Radeon 9800pro Omega drivers
Creative SB Live!

All latest drivers installed including mobo/chipset

Thanks a lot!

Cool_Al


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



response in like 5 mins!

Source: http://www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=176237&perpage=15&pagenumber=56

 

[luckyjan]

finally they live

 

[wasted]

they dont want to create a wild goose chase? hell, people are almost selling there grandma to see if that makes the stutter go away

 

[BlackMesaDude]

but its good they responded,, shouldnt take them to long geting a fix up.

 

[TuSeiSkeefoso]

Did you guys turn off the mouse smoothing.
It helped mine immensely for some odd reason.
Now Im still getting stuttering at autosaves. *shrug*

 

[Finnegan]

I was thinking at first that playing the game was like being in an espisode of Open All Hours. Before i said that to my brother he told me that apparently someone has put a pic on the net and changed the face of Dr Brain/ Mister Brain or whatever his name is to Ronnie Barkers face as Arkwright his character from that comedy show. I thought that was hilarious.
If anybody hasnt seen the show before and deosnt know about it the main character in the comedy is a shopkeeper who has a stutter lol.
Peter.

 

[mgdpublic]

Is there anyone who has 512mg of RAM and DOESN;t stutter? I want to make sure it isn't memory. I play on pretty high settings.

 

[tEd]

from steampowered forum

Originally posted by [3e]^voodoo
The stuttering audio is caused by decompression of the Audio files

Download GCFScape "A utility that lets you extract the .gcf files"

Go into your "Steam\SteamApps" Folder and open "source sounds.gcf" it should open with GCFScape, then locate the "Sound" folder and extract it into "Steam\SteamApps\[email protected]\half-life 2\hl2"

Now your game should run fine.. ^voodoo

That fixed it for me , its worth a try

 

[danceej]

 

[Gobuchul]

I tried the GCFScape fix too and it made no d-d-d-d-d-d-d-difference.

 

[Pippinator]

its obviously not a fix for everyone, but at least it seems to be helping some people.

i'll go try it now

 

[Pippinator]

I presume it means put the sounds folder INTO the hl2 folder, and no extract all the audio sounds to the hl2 folder itself hehe

 

[Pippinator]

If extracting them works for you, and all you have left to worry about is the autosave stuttering, then

"I believe if you change the auto save files located in your half-life2/SAVE folder, it disables the autosave feature. Change only the files that have autosave in the name to read-only. There are 4 of them."

 

[ÜberJumper]

Efil:

I have locked up several times with the symptom of audio stuttering. In my case, graphic objects also go missing in game if the lockup/stuttering continues. For example, in the teleporter room, the entire teleporter assembly, Alyx included, will vanish.

If the stuttering doesn't recover, a blue screen will result, and at least twice it's indicated a problem with my nVidia drivers.

Complicating this is that the stuttering/lockup also happens if I disable audio in the game (-nosound 1). It's also independent of any graphics settings, and occurs in DX7 mode as well.

There may very well be a couple of issues happening with the symptom of Audio Stuttering occuring.

 

[ilove64]

I'm not attempting anything anymore unless it works for a majority of people.

 

[Pippinator]

extracting audio didnt work.

pah hurry up valve!

 

[Moolicious]

New Resource for Stuttering Problem Info

Hi,

I have created a site that contains all of the information on this issue that I have seen to date. The site also contains my correspondance with Valve, some theories about the cause, as well as a demo file and config tweak that can be used to test and easily reproduce the stuttering problem for troubleshooting purposes.

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

I would appreciate it if people could post this on the Steam Users Forums as I am still waiting for my account to become activated.

Thanks.

 

[danceej]

Extracting the Audio tip from GCF files helped me somewhat, its playable now but its not perfect it still stutters but not on every new sound like before, more when a new music track loads in or theres a big ambient sound or effect, the voices also stutter less.
I think Valve should look into this area, i still wont play it till its fixed but the tip is a step in the right direction.

 

[NiteX]

I have an audigy 2 ZS and I had pretty much perfect sound right up to the part when your in the car and you come to an 18 wheeler and you get out and then there is a fonky gate blocking the road I grabed a battery and plugged it into the weird looking thingy inside the building to the left. Well I go up to the fonky gate and start picking up shit with the gravity gun and then I started throwing it well I noticed the sound for when you throw the object was messing up. Other sounds started messing up as well. So I hit escape and tried to quit. When I clicked quit a little message poped up saying "Untitled". The only way I could quit was by typing quit in the console. Any one else have this yet?

 

[donald_wong_ooha]

No spoilers please.

 

[Squeetard]

This thread must be visible from outer space by now.

 

[luckyjan]

Hi,

I have created a site that contains all of the information on this issue that I have seen to date. The site also contains my correspondance with Valve, some theories about the cause, as well as a demo file and config tweak that can be used to test and easily reproduce the stuttering problem for troubleshooting purposes.

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

I would appreciate it if people could post this on the Steam Users Forums as I am still waiting for my account to become activated.

Thanks.

Nice work!! Posted it on steam.

 

[Squeetard]

BTW, Does this happen with both Sata and IDE hard drives?

I have sata, and it appears that anyone who actually mentions it, has sata also.

 

[Sie]

Moolicious

I've made a post about you're info page about this problem over at the steampowered.com forums

Cheers
Sie
(Stiesto)

 

[Sie]

Its been mentioned in the past that people with IDE drives suffer fom it too.

 

[luckyjan]

Its been mentioned in the past that people with IDE drives suffer fom it too.

I can almost not believe that there are ppl out who don't have this problem at all.

 

[what!?]

How is it struggling to load textures? Jeez, it autosaves/loads every few minutes (it takes forever too). Is their algorithim for this O(2^n)? Did monkeys write it? Doom 3 & Farcry & UT2004 don't have any problem with this. When users with over a Gig of RAM and 128 mb plus video cards are having problems with memory allocation, something is seriously wrong.

How was this not noticed before????????

 

[Sie]

The other variable is that it could be something in Steam that is causing the problem.

I decided to redownload Steam again but kept my HL2 files. Once I'd reinstalled Steam, I put the HL2 files into the new copy.

Now, the game still stuttered but it was stuttering in different parts. For example, in G-Mans speech, he would always stutter on the word "again" bit now, he doesn't. He stutters a few words before every time.

Very odd considering the actual HL2 game files are the exact same ones from my old steam installation, just copied across.

 

[akula]

The problem is present in the Source engine, so I don't understand why more people didn't notice it when CS: Source was released.

 

[ilove64]

"Aside from these isolated drops in frame rate, the game is otherwise perfectly smooth."

That was from the website and I have to disagree. I get below 60 fps in most areas, including indoor and I have done everything to rectify the problem. I know it can't be a hardware problem because I get smooth sailing in Doom 3 and Far Cry. Here are some pictures

Just to let you know, I play at 1024x768 at 4x AA and 8x AF with a GeForce 6800 GT, 3.2 Ghz P4 HT, and 1 gig of DDR400 RAM

 

[Squeetard]

Ya, I've noticed some memory allocation problems too. By the time I got to the end of the air boat level, my framerate was in the low 20's. It seemed everytime I hit a new load area it would get slower. So I saved the game and quit/restarted it. My framerate was back in the 70's.

 

[Spicey]

Very Disappointed

Yep, same problem here guys. Stuttering sound, tried evrything to correct it, nothing works!. 6 years in the making and a bug a BIG as this isn't spotted ;( . The game is unplayable in it's present state. A damn shame, I will take it back for a refund, I've had enough. :angry:

Abit BH7
P4 3ghz
Leadtek 6800 NU
Audigy 2
Hitachi 7200 SATA 7200 HDD
Windows Xp SP2

 

[Doppleganger]

Lo guys.

Hey guess what?!

HL2 also does an 'Arkwright' impression when it plays the sound as well on my pc! (XP2500+, 1 gig of ram, SB Live/Nvidia Soundstorm, 9800 Pro). Not as bad as some of the guys here but enough to piss me off especially when I think how much I've been looking forward to playing this game.

BTW keep those doctored images coming danceej, palefire and Tommieh. Fekking hilarious.

 

[ilove64]

You know what's funny? I concentrated more on the FPS of the game than I did the game itself.

 

[G-Mans Luv Child]

Hi guys, I'm knew to this forum, having the same dodgy sound problems as everyone else! I do have a very noobish kind of question though, if anyone can help. I've looked everywhere for more up to date drivers for the sound card i use, I realise it's a crappy one but it's worked fine before on every game I own including Doom 3, Vice city, Rome Total War...you get the picture. So, my question is this:

Can anyone tell me where to find recent drivers for a Creative SB Live! card, it's the kind ya get with a Dell Dimension machine....please don't flame me for having a crap system, it's not my fault.

Operating System: Windows XP Professional
System Model: Dimension 4600i
BIOS: Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1.10 A07
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 510MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Graphics Card Radeon 9600xt