Continuing the theme of writing this blog as I do stuff, I’ve decided to download the most recent drivers for my laptop’s graphics adaptor.
Before I go to far though, I should probably state that most of my surprise at HL2 even working to the extent that it did, was due to most of the games from 2004 requiring, (that is, explicitly checking for) Hardware transform and lighting, which Intel graphics then performed on the CPU. There were notable exceptions, Unreal Tournament 2003/4 being one. And thinking about it more, Half-Life 2 was after all released in late ‘04, and Valve especially doesn’t want to alienate large percentages of customers. So I guess for those two reasons I wasn’t expecting it to run at all.
OK then. I’ll try installing these newer drivers. (14.19.50.4497 for 852/855GM, from Feb ‘06…) . Wow, that was quick, something’s wrong, it won’t let me install them. I’ll try something else. So I try the automatic driver checking applet, and it says I have custom drivers installed from the manufacturer and to look there instead. They don’t have anything. So I have just tried installing the drivers manually using the Device Manager. Am restarting.
So, back to City 17, AKA Half-Life 2 to see if anything’s improved. I’ll start a new game, to see if I get the G-man. Yay, I can see him now. Though, could it just be because of a restart?
Annoyingly the first screen with Breen still has some transparency issues.
In the game there seems to be a metal support behind the texture projection which is showing through somehow. Oddly, when I alt-tab to the desktop and back again I don’t seem to have the issue anymore.
Unfortunately, I still don’t hear the Breencast, no idea what’s causing that, I can hear other sounds. Maybe I’ll look into that as well. The other thing I want to do is see how much performance I get, but that will be later.
2 comments:
strange, i don't have any of these technical issues on my new Acer 7730 laptop.... although it DOES have a geforce 9600M GT in it :P
in all honesty, getting HL2 to run on the intel chipset graphics adapter is not hard, valve like to let their customers actually play their games, unlike some of the other manufacturers of the era.
The problems you're encountering a typical for any game being run on a system that does not have the hardware neccesary to output the graphic "language" the game uses... you should consider yourself lucky you didn't load the game and get a flickering grey screen :D
As far as your sound goes, that is a totally different story, most gamers these days still run onboard audio, so yours will be fine. i have seen cases where a patch to call of duty games will stop almost all sounds, but leave some playing, and an audio driver update will fix this. It's worth a shot in your case. You really want to get those messages playing, as they're HIGHLY important to that games excellent storyline.
good luck!
Yeah, I have to give credit/props for making their game surprising compatible.
It's not critical I get this working, was just a fun experiment, but I wouldn't mind getting back to the audio issue again... sometime.
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