f13.net

Team Fortress 2 Second Impressions

After that initial rocky start during which NOTHING WORKED AT ALL, I've gotten a couple of hours into this thing and am ready to share some thoughts.  

Overall: I think it's a worthy successor to the Team Fortress line.  It's fun, fast-paced, and pretty.

Gameplay:  Basically a streamlined version of earlier TF games.  Most classes have fewer weapons (most notably, the grenade loadout that everyone used to get is gone), but everything that's there has a use and is pretty nicely tuned.

Style: Ten out of ten.  Everything from the menus to the maps to the characters EXUDES style.  The maps have tons of background detail and props, the in-game UI is colorful and animated (but not distracting), the characters and weapons are beautifully modeled and animated.

Performance: The maps are a bit slow to load, but the game itself runs like a dream on my machine (GF8800GTX, 2GB RAM, Intel E6600).  Other people were complaining of lagging and stuttering, so YMMV.  I expect this to get better as development continues.

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You know, I can't get excited about TF2. If it had come out you know, within a year or two of HL1 I would be. But really? This long for TF2? Are they serious?

Uh. It's pretty goddamn awesome.

As a side note: The only slow load is when the game starts up, everything else is super fast. But then, when I'm greeted with the PICK THE RED OR BLUE DOOR, it's always 0/0 and I'm the first person in the game by 30 seconds to a minute.

It's awesome, yes.  The only way it could be more awesome is if I didn't suck so much.  I spent two or three hours getting familiar with it on a 24-man server, though, and I'm getting up.  Still can't do shit with the spy but I'm working on it.  It's pretty easy to spot the longtime TF players, and I try to learn as much as I can from them before they frag me, or stab me in the eye, etc.

You should play with me and Justin (Jigglypuff). We play really really late though. 1-6AM PST.

You were apparently unconscious, played with bhodi instead.  Many times, he was the "I" in "TEAM", the rest of us were either retards or, in my case, inexperienced.  I could occasionally do some damage with the scout, though.  I love me some scout.  HERRO I HAZ SHOTGUN!

I've become a massive fan of just using the bat with a scout. I can kill a heavy before he can turn around. 4 wacks to the skull and those fuckers go down.

I want to play.

I hate my life.

Apparently several people have been having the "crash every 2-5 minutes" problem that I have. Anybody here come up with a solution for it? None of the things listed on forums around the internet seem to be anything other than a temporary fix.

Yeah, I haven't had a game hardlock my computer, forcing a manual power-down, in a long time. TF2 did it to me last night. I hope they patch that shit. :x

I actually am glad I waited, and I was able to just go download UT:FC where this game wanted money to do that.

As far as the issue goes it sounds like some kind of RAM issue, and probably one that I would've been just as frustrated about. Assuming that right now there's no recommendations, and I don't have the game, I'd need to lurk up an answer, but I was able to assist three friends with older machines to get UT:FC to work at well below recommended specs so if you wanted help let me know.

HL2 manages to crash the shit out of my PC although it should more than handily run it.  Granted it seems to be about once a play session, not a horrendous frequency you're stating. I have a great deal of fear TF2 would do the same (QW doesn't, but I don't care much for it).  I guess I'll pass until there's some sort of multiplayer demo.

Honestly, the only reason I preordered Hellgate was to get in the beta and see if it'd murder my PC. 

And I know this is going to be on the 360, but I can't imagine playing a shooter at this pace with thumbsticks.  :|

What gets me is that it plays totally flawlessly until it crashes the whole system to hard-reboot status.

No stuttering, no lag, no rubberbanding, no visual artifacts... everything works perfectly and then it freezes, sound gets caught in a loop, and everything's completely busted. When I ctrl-alt-del Task Manager sometimes gives me an error message before what little remains of my operating system dies.

It's not a crash, it's a Crash. I have occasionally gotten to play for upwards of four minutes, however, and what I've seen is a great deal of stylistic fun.

Is the sound loop endemic of every crash? Like every time you crash it's a sound effect? Any idea if this is primarily an issue effecting on-board sound? Is your machine on-board?

Hmm

First rule of tech support.. Always get sys specs.

We also should maybe start a new thread for this?

I dunno and don't know if I should look to buy a pre-order or not, because I'd bet that happens with sound lock-ups.

I still do want TF2, badly... Maybe I'll get a new computer for Christmas.  :-P

I've had the looping-sound hard-crash. My sound card is external (PCI card), a SB Audigy 2, if I recall right.

Had the same kind of primary crash in HL2.  Nothing ever fixed it for long. 

Doubt it has anything to do with the sound card. That just happened to be the sound that was being made when the machine went in OMGWTFCRASH mode. Could disabl ethe onboard or audigy to be safe for a while.

Ever had heat issues with that machine? Might want to try to update motherboard drivers, video drivers, sound card drivers ETC. After doing easy software stuff like that, also check to make sure your PCI / AGP / memory cards are all seated well. Check temps if you have a hardware monitor RIGHT after a crash (in BIOS).

Last time I played HL2 or HL2 mods (probably around 6 months ago?), it was rock solid. Only thing that's changed is that I'm now running windowed in a 16:10 resolution as opposed to fullscreen in 4:3.

I've had the sound looping crash since the First HL over about 8PC's of all different component makes and models. I can usually play for a couple of hours before it happens though. Zombie Master made it happen every 15 minutes or so though. I always just assumed everyone had it.

I'm also getting the looping sound hard crash, it happens in DAoC too but only after several hours.  It never happened on my old computer, I can't remember the last time my computer has crashed so hard that I had to manually reboot it.

Hopefully so many people will complain that the source of the problem will be found, I'm just using the Realtek HD on-board.  A couple weeks ago I almost bought a soundblaster despite my distaste for Creative hoping that it would solve the problems, good to hear that it happens there too, I guess...

If the entire system crashes, it's usually a sign that something has gone really horribly wrong somewhere outside the game.  Like, say, a bad video driver (e.g. a buggy implementation of some shader feature that no game you've played before TF2 has tried to use).  Make sure you've got the latest version of all that crap if you haven't already.

You could also fire up Perfmon and start logging memory usage.  The next time it crashes you can look at your log and find out how much memory it was using before it went down in flames.

Temperature is another good thing to check.

If you're getting the sound loop bug, try using -refresh 60, which really won't have a noticeable affect on anything. If it still happens, throw in -dxlevel 81, which will make things look worse but has a pretty good chance of fixing it. If it still doesn't work, -nosound should fix it... but you get no sound of course. I never had any sound loop problems with HL2 till I tried TF2, but the -refresh 60 fixes things for me.

You also might want to throw in -novid +map none to improve the starting load times.

HL2 still plays perfectly with no problems. The little Lost Coast demo works great as well.
I've updated every driver, I've disabled every feature I can find.

Episode One crashes within minutes.
TF2 crashes within minutes.
I imagine Portal and Episode Two will suffer similar fates.

So I guess I paid fifty bucks for Peggle: Extreme?

I fixed my problems with TF2 by upgrading to the latest NVidia reference drivers, running Windows Update and running the DirectX updater (which had a huge backlog of updates to download).

Got a solid hour in before I quit, no crashing. TF2 =  :heart:.

I would get the looping-sound crash a lot when playing the HL2 mod Zombie Survival a lot. I just lowered my resolution in-game and it seems to happen less frequently.

As for TF2... 2 thumbs up! :)

3 favorite classes are:

Engineer
Scout
Spy

I lol'd the first time an enemy Medic healed me as a Spy.

Specs? I'd probably tru Yoru's fix as well.

From what I've been reading a lot of people are swearing that if you turn down hardware acceleration one notch in control panel->sound that the problem goes away, I'll try it tonight.

I've tried that, too. No dice.

Here's a huge thread from Team Fortress 2 (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=598493) in which different people have had success or failure turning different things on and off and futzing with it. Also some people try everything none of it works. Here's a similar thread, three times as long, from the Episode One forum. (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=500297) Something is seriously wonky with the Source engine. Pulling single strings moves multiple limbs, and tracing which ones are faulty has apparently proved beyond Valve's capacity for quick solution. The problem has been around for months, and they have enough happy customers that nobody's losing sleep.

I'm the sucker.

I paid for a game that doesn't work on a system that doesn't let me return it. Big whoop.

Are you sure that there isn't a customer support authorized return policy for defective/non-working software? I'm sure they'd like to keep their nose clean with the BBB in the new wild world of downloadable software and would be happy to honor a chargeback.

Right, I forgot that Vista doesn't even have hardware acceleration for sound anymore...

It does, just not for DirectSound 3D:

http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html

Hmm, well I certainly can't find any slide bar to lower.

At any rate I don't know if it was the steam update, the TF2 update, the audio driver update, the video driver update or Talonus's refresh 60 idea but I was able to play an entire round or two without crashing, nice.

Got a crash dump?  Could figure out from that at least the general ballpark of why it crashed (i.e. if it crashed in a particular driver you know that's what you need to update).

It crashes because all of a sudden Steam starts eating 90%+ of my memory. Then it goes looking for more memory and it can't find it, but the process that can't find that extra memory doesn't have enough memory to really function, so it never finishes. Then it goes looking for more memory. Forever.

Queue the looping sound.

Every once in a while I get lucky and DirectX notices that it doesn't have enough memory to run and crashes the game with a dialogue box. The rest of the time nobody notices and Steam just sets everything on fire. Now according to all the forums I've read it's not actually Steam that's eating all that memory, it's the game I'm playing... and it's specific to the most recent additions to the Source engine. That Steam and the game interact on such a close relationship convinces my crash dump that Steam is the guilty party.

Apparently some people don't get the Steam problem and instead their crash dumps reveal a random set of other features (a new one every crash!) that notice the memory chomp first and take the blame.

Something is broken about the way that Source interacts with something that I have in common with some other people online. Nobody knows what that commonality is... Valve least of all.

You're not running Vista by any chance are you?  Hellgate told us to install this hotfix (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105) that deals with memory problems, since I made so many other changes at the same time I don't know if installing this is what helped me play a bit longer in TF2 or not.

For all I know I still have the problem and just got lucky last time being able to play for over an half hour without crashing.

No. I'm not running Vista... I'm just fucked.

Can I have your stuff? 

How much memory (physical and virtual) do you have?  I've got 2GB of physical memory and I think TF2 uses all of it (pushing everything else out to the pagefile).  So if you've got 1GB of physical memory and only 1GB of pagefile, I can see it hitting a ceiling pretty easily.

If you've already got 2GB of physical memory and another 2GB of pagefile and TF2 is eating all of it for lunch and wanting more, then yeah, I think you're just fucked.