Half life 2 petition.

[nutsak]

Something to do about having to have a net conenction at LANs and for single player... with off the shelf copies.. or something..

http://www.petitiononline.com/HL2/petition.html

[Midnight Son]

Let's not get all steamed up now.... :wink:

[Mark Asher]

How exactly is this going to work? If I buy a copy of Half-Life 2 at Target and take it home, I have to have a live Internet connection going while I'm playing it? Is this just speculation, or has Valve said as much?

[Union Carbide]

I'm too lazy to actually find the link, but the FAQ states essentially that you don't need an internet connection for the storebought copy unless you use Steam. Once you've used Steam, you have to have a live net connection to play, even for single player.

I expect this will get pulled out once they figure out that not everyone has a broadband connection to the net, or some enterprising hackers will "patch" it out.

I remember a similar sort of thing happened when Half Life came out: all decals were persistent until the end of the level. Not just sprays, but all bullet holes, blood splatters, scorch marks, etc. I'm sure on the development machines there was never a problem, but I recall that a friend and I would crash out of multiplayer games at exactly the same time when our identical voodoo 2s barfed on all the bonus textures.

Net idiots playing multiplayer all said that the game was laggy when they were playing on the net or on a LAN, when what was really happening was their systems were choking on all the textures.

Included in the first patch was a limit on the number of decals that would be allowed before old ones would start to be removed.

[xahlt]

Email posted via halflife2.net:


-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Deeming [mailto:chrisdeem@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 4:16 PM
To: gaben@valvesoftware.com
Subject: Will it never cease?


I'm not sure if it will ever cease or not. The constant nagging question
that people are asking - Will Steam be required to have an internet
connection active when starting up a singleplayer game or a LAN game?

It's giving me a headache

Seen the petition yet?

Chris_D

Gabe: No, it won't.

There will be a brief transition (like two weeks) when it is necessary, but
then it will go away. It's a temporary issue.

I'm thinking the 2 week period might be to verify review copies until the release, then changed?

[DrDel]

hmm.. this is interesting.

send him another email and ask him is Sept 30th is still the release date.


(if it is, then we should be hearing a GONE GOLD this week).

[Mike Cathcart]

(if it is, then we should be hearing a GONE GOLD this week).
Vivendi has previously had games go gold the week they ship. If the title is big enough they'll pull out all the stops.