Load hangs - getting nowhere

[Pantherfern]

Hey all. I'm really hoping somebody here can help me out.

My wife bought me this game a week-and-a-half ago and I still haven't been able to play it.

The game just hangs at the first door that needs to load up. I get off the train, go through the station, Barney makes his little spiel, I jump out the window and then the door says "loading." And it sits there for as long as I let it. I can't alt-tab out, nor ctrl-alt-del. The only way out of it is a physical reboot.

I have gone through steam's whole process with their diagnostic checks (everything is above recommended) and I've updated drivers/software on everything - audio, video, directX, BIOS. I've uninstalled/reinstalled steam/halflife2. I also went through the process of verifying the cache (a couple of times I think.)

The only suggestion the support site offers is that it might be a firewall issue but not only did I add the appropriate programs to the accepted lists, I even tried running it with both firewalls completely shut down and still got the same results.

Oh, and I also tried the suggested console commands like -nosound -windowed -dxlevel 70, 80, 81, 90 -forcehardware (something, forget the rest). No luck.

One other thing if it helps any; once, during the 100 or so times I tried playing this, I made it through that load door and went through the chase scene, but then it hung on the load door where Alex is.

FWIW, the game runs perfectly and looks great while I'm actually in-game. I play a lot of Oblivion too so I've seen my fair share of stutter and lag and a game that simply drags a system to it's knees until it crashes. HL2 isn't showing any signs of that. It just won't load those doors.

Edit: system is
Asus A7V880 mobo
Sapphire X1600 raedon video
C-Media CMI8738/C3DX sound
110 Gig HD w/ 42Gigs free
NEC DVD-R/W (ND 2500A)
1 Gig Ram (forget the brand)

 

[giant384]

whats your processor?

 

[Pantherfern]

Athlon 2500+ @ 1.83GHz

The listed minimum is 1GHZ and recommended is 1.4. I would think I'm enough over recommended that it shouldn't be an issue.

 

[bbson john]

The minimum is 1.4 and the recommanded is 2.8.


But your CPU sounds Okay.

 

[Destron]

Wow... I feel for you man. You just busted all of the options I would've picked to suggest. If we can't help you, make sure you post your problems in the Steampowered.com forums.
At least you're using Steam - most people that come on here (from what I've seen) sound like they're using a cracked version of the game.

 

[Pantherfern]

@ John: Ah well, according to the diagnostic test I ran via Steam's support pages noted 1 & 1.4GHz for the processor . . . The box says 1.4 as well but that could be low end. Regardless, I've done enough gaming to feel comfortable that this isn't a processor issue.

@ Destron: Yah, I exhausted all the issues I could find listed on support.steam and within several pages of posts here as well, which is why I went ahead and registered to ask for help. I had already spent several days finding similar problem posts/resolutions both here and @ Steam. All the stuff that seemed to work for others has not worked for me.

I really thought I had it nailed down to the BIOS update (because mine was the original, horribly out of date one and the newest version mentioned something affecting DirectX9 operations) but that didn't do anything either. Plus it was a major PITA because the Asus site had the wrong upgrade procedure listed for my board.


Soooooo . . . yeah. If anybody else has any ideas I'd love to hear 'em. I've got a game that I paid for just sitting here. On the plus side, I really want to shoot stuff now after all this so when/if I get it running that'll work out well. I've already emailed steam support twice and have yet to receive any response except an auto-responder linking to 3 topics having nothing close to do with my problem.

 

[Beerdude26]

Probably an autosaving issue. Forgot the actual procedure, so here's a link:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=228067

It's a Mac Forum, so the applaunch id might be different (it ought to be 220 for Half-Life 2)

 

[Pantherfern]

Probably an autosaving issue. Forgot the actual procedure, so here's a link:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=228067

It's a Mac Forum, so the applaunch id might be different (it ought to be 220 for Half-Life 2)

Thanks for the reply.

Tried it. Didn't work.

I will say though, that at least it actually crashed this time with the "HL2.exe has encountered a problem" error box so I could close out of it instead of doing a hard reset.

Keep the suggestions comin'.

 

[HBoss]

I was at that point, where it would crash at the autosave points. After verifying my game cache integrity, I cant even load a new game. I goto load Point Insertion, it loads usually to 2/3 of the progress bar and freezes up.


WinXP Media Center 2004
Pentium 4, 3.2GHz
1GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT

I heard somebody elses guide said something about making your autosave files "Read Only" so they couldnt be writtin to. The auto save points are where it seems like it was freezing for me. But I dont have any Autosave files anymore thanks to the advice given to me by Steam. If youve made it past the first autosave then you might actually have the files.

 

[Laivasse]

This smells to me like something to do with autosaving too. Have you (the OP) actually turned off the autosaves by typing 'sv_autosave 0' in the console?