-- [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ] We're getting users that have game freezing during the load phase of the game. A number of them have reported having the same problem in TF2. I myself have had this problem in the past as well. Both times I had this problem the only way I could fix it was to reinstall steam and re-download everything. Simply re-downloading the cache files didn't fix it, and at the time I wasn't aware of the blob file delete trick to try. Also clearing source sdk base and re-running to get fresh files didn't fix it. Supposedly one of the recent TF2 updates recently improved the situation for a couple of people, so I'm wondering if there was a load time bug found and fixed in TF2 that still effects other mods? The first time it happened to me it was at the end of the load bar, and steam would eat 100% cpu until I killed the process. The second time it happened to me was at about the 50% mark.
What could steam possibly be doing when loading a 3rd party mod? Now that we've released of course we're getting similar reports by some users. Some are only getting it in FF, some are also seeing it in TF2. One thing seems sure to me though, and that is that the problem is unlikely to be in our mod, and seems more likely to be an engine or steam level thing. This is quite a problem as there is really nothing we can do to debug what is going on when this happens during the load phase. In most cases these problems coincided with steam updates. The team made it a habit to run sdk base after steam updates to 'refresh' the engine dlls and such, presumably from the gcf files. This didn't always work though, and I was under the impression that running games from the steam menu should in effect refresh these files as part of the process. Valve, is there any means by which we can debug these sorts of issues? Is there any known load time problems and/or any that have been fixed since the last sdk base update? Any information about this is appreciated. Jeremy -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
