Half Life 2 hangs on Startup

[Micha.R]

Hello everybody,

today I installed Half Life 2 from my original DVD. Steam installation and Game installation seemed to work without any Problems.
Also Steam is running and updating my games without any errors. When I try to try to run Half Life 2 this unsharp background picture of the game appears. In the lower right corner a small black box with the text “Loading…”, in the upper left corner of my screen I can read “64-bit mode active”. At this point the game hangs.
I tried several times under different user accounts, reistalled the game and steam client but everytime I got the same result.
I tried it with DEP enabled for essential Windows programs and services only and I finally disabled DEP completely (bcdedit /set nx alwaysoff) but it didn’t work.
I also tried to run steam in compatibility mode for win XP SP2 – same problem.
I ran HL2.exe in compatibility mode – game hung again.
I don’t know what else I could try.
Perhaps one of you has a suggestion.

Thanks in advance.

Michael
____________________________________________________________
C2D E8400@3Ghz, Gigabyte EP35-DS3R
3GB DDR2-800 (OCZ)
ATI Radeon HD 3870
2x 320GB HDD SATA2 Raid0
Windows Server 2008 Standard SP1

[JonusC]

It works 100% fine for me – from the HL2 from the Orange Box. I am on 32-bit though… is there a way to force it to run in 32-bit mode? I’m sure there is… also check your log files for errors. Post them here if you can’t see any and i’ll have a look.

[Micha.R]

Hey soniK,

thanks for your reply.
Forcing the game to run in 32bit-mode was a good idea. I found a listing of command line options on the Valve Developer Community. In 32bit-mode the game seems to work but the valve intro video did not play. I got an error message (something like “file could not be extracted”, and the filename) but after a few seconds the game Menu appeared. So I can live without that video.
I activated automatic generation of a logfile for the console messages to find out what is the problem in 64bit mode but the logfile revealed not very much. Perhaps they included the wrong serverbrowser.dll for 64bit-mode with the installation files? Thats the only thing I read out of that log.

64bit-mode Console Logfile:

Game.dll loaded for “Half-Life 2”
maxplayers set to 1
maxplayers set to 1
Heap: 256.00 Mb
Steam config directory: d:/programme/valve/steam/config
Parsed 23 text messages
execing config.cfg
Can’t use cheat cvars in multiplayer, unless the server has sv_cheats set to 1.
Can’t use cheat cvars in multiplayer, unless the server has sv_cheats set to 1.
Unknown command “mat_colorcorrection”
2 CPUs, Frequency: 3.0 Ghz, Features: Generic_x86
execing valve.rc
Platform Error: module version (‘serverbrowser.dll, VGuiModuleServerBrowser001) invalid, not loading
Spawn Server background01
Begin loading faces (loads materials)
End loading faces (loads materials)
execing skill_manifest.cfg
execing skill.cfg
Summary: 1733 resources total 20.56 Mb, 7.66 % of capacity
Game started

and for comparison

32bit-mode Console Logfile:

Game.dll loaded for “Half-Life 2”
maxplayers set to 1
maxplayers set to 1
Heap: 256.00 Mb
Steam config directory: d:/programme/valve/steam/config
Parsed 23 text messages
execing config.cfg
Can’t use cheat cvar cam_command in multiplayer, unless the server has sv_cheats set to 1.
Can’t use cheat cvar cam_command in multiplayer, unless the server has sv_cheats set to 1.
2 CPUs, Frequency: 3.0 Ghz, Features: GenuineIntel SSE SSE2 MMX RDTSC CMOV FCMOV
execing valve.rc
Spawn Server background01
Begin loading faces (loads materials)
End loading faces (loads materials)
execing skill.cfg
Game started
Initializing renderer…
Warning: using WorldTwoTextureBlend on a non-displacement surface (material: nature/red_grass). Support for this will go away soon.
couldn’t exec userconfig.cfg
couldn’t exec userconfig.cfg
Wrote cfg/config.cfg
Wrote cfg/config.cfg

and here’s the Windows Error log:

Beschreibung:
Aufgrund eines Problems kann dieses Programm nicht mehr mit Windows kommunizieren.

Problemsignatur:
Problemereignisname: AppHangB1
Anwendungsname: hl2.exe
Anwendungsversion: 0.0.0.0
Anwendungszeitstempel: 4394f0f1
Absturzsignatur: 5ba7
Absturztyp: 2048
Betriebsystemversion: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.272.7
Gebietsschema-ID: 1031
Zusätzliche Absturzsignatur 1: 86630bb2988d541cb30747c0da483468
Zusätzliche Absturzsignatur 2: 0bd0
Zusätzliche Absturzsignatur 3: 2565ac5b070ee2a06e4fd23ece3b150a
Zusätzliche Absturzsignatur 4: 5ba7
Zusätzliche Absturzsignatur 5: 86630bb2988d541cb30747c0da483468
Zusätzliche Absturzsignatur 6: 0bd0
Zusätzliche Absturzsignatur 7: 2565ac5b070ee2a06e4fd23ece3b150a

I will test a little bit in 32bit-mode and report if it works.
Am I really the first one to try this game in 64bit mode?

Michael

____________________________________________________________
C2D E8400@3Ghz, Gigabyte EP35-DS3R
3GB DDR2-800 (OCZ)
ATI Radeon HD 3870
2x 320GB HDD SATA2 Raid0
Windows Server 2008 Standard SP1

[JonusC]

@Micha.R wrote:

Am I really the first one to try this game in 64bit mode?

Haha no you are not =) but I did a quick google and found others having the same issue, apparently it’s a problem with the Steam client and a beta version of Steam fixes this. But it only happens to a few x64 Vista machines for some reason… most of them were happy with the -32bit switch fixing it though, I guess it’s up to you whether you want to go ahead and get it cranking in 64-bit 😛

Sources:
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=742898
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-games/199661-half-life-2-failed-load-crashing-once-loaded-resolved.html

So I don’t think we can really do anything sorry – looks like you’re going to have to seatle for 32-bit 🙁 Comparing the two log files, I also noticed that in x64 mode it says “Generic x86” under features instead of SSE, SSE2, etcetera. Odd. And also, the 64-bit log doesn’t list a status summary of the memory pool [“Summary: 1733 resources total 20.56 Mb, 7.66 % of capacity”]. Odd.

Well, I hope the 32-bit mode works good for you. 64-bit would be nice, and games are apparently faster in 64-bit [Crysis for example] but Half-Life 2 is a fairly old game where 64-bit supported was added after release…

[Micha.R]

I played a few hours now in 32bit mode and had no problems. 😀
I set all video settings to the best values and it works fine. So I think at the moment there is no need for me to get HL2 running in 64bit-mode. I think I will try that steam beta later so I can run other games in 64bit-mode. Thanks for the links. I always googled for “Server 2008 HL2” didn’t think of Vista x64.

Thanks for your Help again!

Perhaps the “Game Compatibility List” could be updated with the hint to run the game in 32bit mode on x64 machines.

____________________________________________________________
C2D E8400@3Ghz, Gigabyte EP35-DS3R
3GB DDR2-800 (OCZ)
ATI Radeon HD 3870
2x 320GB HDD SATA2 Raid0
Windows Server 2008 Standard SP1

[JonusC]

No worries champ =) yeah i’ve seen a few programs identify Server 2008 as “Windows Vista – Server Edition” before haha but yeah I have two DVD’s – Windows Vista v6.0.6001 and Windows Server v6.0.6001 they are technically the same OS and not many people run server-as-workstations so searching for Vista can help a lot at times [god knows it has for me!]

That’s a good idea to add it to the list, but I think this error is fairly exotic and uncommon… we’ll see what Arris says about it though. Glad you got it working. Now go blast some combine – Freeman style! Haha peace

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