Steam has me confused

[Noxid]

Yesterday I installed and successfully ran HL2 and got to Kanal Route before shutting down. I started it up today and it was saying that my game needed an update and that it was only 71% ready. It is telling me it wont be ready to play for 4 hours. I have a 1 mb Blueyonder connection. Whats going on? Such a large download is unreasonable!!!

 

[Chris D]

It shouldn't take that long. It is woefully over-estimated.

How long has it been updating now, how long is left and what percentage is it complete?

 

[^Ben]

Try verifying your gcf's.

And then try exiting steam and deleting the clientregistery.blob and you will get a less full content server.

Sometimes it will give you an initial number like 4 hours then it will go down super quick.

 

[Noxid]

Well its at 72% now but still says around 255 minutes. Im going to try deleting client reistry.blob and see what happens

 

[Noxid]

I did the clinet regitry blob thing and it failed miserably. Well it is now at 73% and only 230 mins away. Ive got to shutdown my comp now and resume tomorrow. Oh well.

 

[Noxid]

Right Ive resumed it got down to around 266 minutes but its now increased to 330 minutes. Im confused. Im downloading at 225kb/s What could be so big?

 

[meganox]

it's a big game. doesn't matter that you've got 1Mb, the server probably can't send that fast. use the Steam monitor and netstat live to see exactly what speed you're getting and if it's really slow change server by shutting down steam and deleting ClientRegistry.blob, hopefully you'll be assigned a different server. please note, when you were playing it the first time it was probably downloading in the background!

also, you must shut down Steam before deleting ClientRegistry.blob!

[edit]and be patient! the reported download speeds and ETA are highly inaccurate, don't get annoyed when they're wrong. go watch paint dry or something

 

[Dumb Dude]

It shouldn't take that long. It is woefully over-estimated.

Thats not always the case, atleast with me. I remeber one of the updates said 8 minutes estimated time. Well, it stayed at 8 minutes, never moved, and I'm positive it took a lot longer than 8 minutes. Heh, oh well.

 

[Noxid]

Yeah Im being patient Got to 75% and 'only' 190 mins

 

[Noxid]

My comp screwed and it sent me back to 50% In 3 hours it has progressed 24%. But it has thrown me off the server saying it is unable to connect. Look this isnt right. According to Steam monitor Im downloading at approx 225kb/s. Now of its been going like this for three hours I must have downloaded enough to probably install over the whole game. These downloads are just TOOOOO BIG.

 

[VirusType2]

My comp screwed and it sent me back to 50% In 3 hours it has progressed 24%. But it has thrown me off the server saying it is unable to connect. Look this isnt right. According to Steam monitor Im downloading at approx 225kb/s. Now of its been going like this for three hours I must have downloaded enough to probably install over the whole game. These downloads are just TOOOOO BIG.

In my opinion, you are having a bad internet connection problem.

Its not downloading correctly.

It never took me more than a few seconds or minutes to download anything from steam and my connection is only average

here is your fix, if you don't know this already, I learned it from my Internet Provider on a phone call last year:

- abort the download

1) turn the power off your computer, and
2) unplug or power off any net devices like for example the cell pipe, firesafe, or printserver)
3) wait 1 minute then turn the cell pipe on,
4) then 1 minute later turn on your fire/print servers and stuff,
5) then boot up your computer and try to download again

I promise you your connection will be faster, unless you have
already done this.
I don't know if it is the main problem, but you should definately do this anyway.
Even if you waited hours, Im sure it would not be finished EVER.

These devices often need to be reset becuase they are very sensitive to interference from things like the weather.

Sometimes my connection is bad or just completely fails, this always does the trick.

 

[Chris D]

225kilobits per second is only 28.13KB/sec

That's dreadful for a 1mbit connection. What you could also do, in case the game files are corrupt, is type steam://validate/220 into your internet browser. It should see exactly what you need then and hopefully resume properly.

 

[Noxid]

I ran it and it resumed for around 30 secs. It has gone down to 72% for some reason. Everytime i boot up HL2 to find out how long its got to run it tells me the game is unavailable. Should I consider a reinstallation of HL2. Becuase some thing is wrong.

 

[Chris D]

I assume you bought it as retail, is that right?

If so, run the installation again and before you open Steam, go to C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\ and total up how many megabytes all half-life 2 and source related (not CS:Source) related cache files take up.

half-life 2 content.gcf
source dedicated server.gcf
source engine.gcf
source materials.gcf
source models.gcf
source sounds.gcf

Mine currently totals up to 3.29GB. If we know what yours totals up to from a fresh installation we'll be able to estimate how long it will take to update it.

 

[Noxid]

3.28GB but i cant find Source dedicated server.gcf . Currently My HL2 installation is saying its 100% OK and Currently. My CS:S is updating. Its 96% and 22 mins away

Thanks for the help.

 

[VirusType2]

In my opinion, you are having a bad internet connection problem.

Its not downloading correctly.

It never took me more than a few seconds or minutes to download anything from steam and my connection is only average

here is your fix, if you don't know this already, I learned it from my Internet Provider on a phone call last year:

- abort the download

1) turn the power off your computer, and
2) unplug or power off any net devices like for example the cell pipe, firesafe, or printserver)
3) wait 1 minute then turn the cell pipe on,
4) then 1 minute later turn on your fire/print servers and stuff,
5) then boot up your computer and try to download again

I promise you your connection will be faster, unless you have
already done this.
I don't know if it is the main problem, but you should definately do this anyway.
Even if you waited hours, Im sure it would not be finished EVER.

These devices often need to be reset becuase they are very sensitive to interference from things like the weather.

Sometimes my connection is bad or just completely fails, this always does the trick.

Come to think of it, If this is the first time playing since installing, I guess it could take hours to update everything. It took 3 hours to download the Doom3 demo. It's like he said they put a cap on your download speed to like 56k. I think after re-installing HL2 it did take a while, not 2 or 3 hours though. Maybe 30 minutes. Anyway I sugest you do this trick anyway. Good luck

 

[^Ben]

I recently did a reinstall and it took about 40 minutes but that's including the SDK and HL2DM.