Half-Life 2 (PC)

[Concept]

They have illustrated that as annoying publishers are for creative freedom they do tend to get the product out of the door to a specified time frame.

You mean how Sierra and Vivendi have this time?

Valve only have control over online distribution. Their work is still being traditionally circulated via external publishing in the shop-floor retail sector.

When you look at it objectively, I suppose you could say they've placed themselves cleverly. If Vivendi had ever tried to force Valve's hand for an early release, they'd most likely only have put up a fight, which wouldn't have been impossible to survive considering they're not short of resources. It's not as though the company has been financially dependant on a typical publishing model for Half-Life 2's development. Gabe Newell himself said that all of Half-Life's revenue was put back into the sequel along with the other sources of income they had...

In that sense, you do have a point. Self-financing yourself and being free from what we're led to believe is often a rather strict rule of thumb, maybe isn't the idyllic utopian development environment we think it is.

However, this was only for the development of the game. Costs have to be met and justified, and no doubt the illusion of working in a creatively vast space may have led to a disconnection between the end goal results and the compromises made in between.

[Len]

Just to get back to the pre-load, great news that things are moving fwd again that's for sure and as if to time things perfectly the last bit of my new 'puter (the missing case) turned up this morning just in time for the wkend.

So I'm looking fwd to building it, getting stressed and then finallly giving the vst et al a whirl.

[Concept]

It'd been even greater if Valve's servers would actually work for me. It's been around 10 hours now and all I get is that they're busy.

Thank goodness this is being done in stages and not all in one go. I'd probably be here for a century or so waiting just to get to the front of the que.

Anyway... Good luck on building that computer. You certainly chose a good time.

[Spatial]

My guess is that now the preload has started then a release date can't be far behind.

Vivendi must have approved the game in some form for them to be releasing textures and things that "won't change". If Vivendi hadn't given some form of thumbs up then how would they know they weren't going to change ?

I'd say Valve are going to announce a date in a day or two - however when that date will be is another matter. I still say they're aiming for middle - end of September. And before anyone says anything thats September 2004

Retailers changing their dates means nothing really. They're just like us and are only guessing at the moment.

[Len]

I'd say Valve are going to announce a date in a day or two...

Burn the heretic for his falsehoods!

If only...(pls let it happen but I can't bring myself to think like that yet after all the other maybe/maybe nots...)...

[Spatial]

I have my optamistic hat on today. Ask me tommorow and I'll probably give a different answer

[NeilMcRae]

the download took 37 minutes from our Network Engineering centre

[Ciaran]

How big is it? (the download)

[NeilMcRae]

Its just over 1Gb

[Spatial]

Interesting that. I could have sworn that Gabe said somewhere the game would be around 2.5GB in total, so its almost half ( tee hee ) the game.

I'm no expert, so would textures and sounds take up that much ?

Also HL Source is looking pretty funky for a 5 year old game with a sparkly new engine wouldn't you agree ?

[Inertia_]

Not that I've tried many times, but I haven't been able to get on a server to download what's been cached so far. Shame Valve didn't incorporate some kind of queueing system like the one Fileplanet uses; at least then I'd know where I stand.

As interesting as this preload concept is and as exciting it can be waiting for it, I do find myself repeatedly taking a step back and saying "ffs, just release the ****ing game!".

[Concept]

I'm having the same problem and was beginning to think my version of Steam was corrupt. I keep being told the servers are too busy.

Edit. At last. It's working.

[Concept]

Well it was, until I got to 16% a few hours ago. Then the sever completely hung.

Now, I can't even get back on to try again.

If ever we needed proof that online content delivery systems can't manage large amounts of high volume data yet, then Steam's current performance is another example. The technology and infrastructure to cope with the demand obviously isn't there right now for everything to work smoothly and efficiently.

[Ish]

Edit. At last. It's working.

Its not for me.

It doens't exactly inspire me with confidence that I''ll be able to get the release via Steam on day of release.

[Concept]

Same problem. Got it back online working again after my last post. Get to 15% and hey presto, the server stops downloading. Which means I'll have to start again...

Jesus. I wish when Valve state something is downloading, you know, it actually does so. My comments in the above post stand it would seem.

Steam doesn't work efficiently under difficult conditions. If this is any sign of things to come, then God knows what downloading full available games is going to be like under this form of system, when it struggles to forward segments.