Updates to Half-life 2 series

Sometime around the 26th of May 2010, STEAM did some major updates to Half-Life 2 (HL2), HL2 – Episode One, HL2 – Episode Two. Updates include….

Updates to Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Half-Life 2
Added support for Mac
Added Steam Cloud support for save games
Added new achievements
Improved graphical effects

Half-Life 2: Episode One
Added support for Mac
Added Steam Cloud support for save games
Added new achievements
Improved graphical effects

Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Added support for Mac
Added Steam Cloud support for save games

Note: Save games for Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One will go through a transition. The current level you are on will be saved, but not the exact position in the level.

Source & Discussion - Half-life 2 & Episode 1 Updated With Achievements (Steam Play) - Halflife2.net Forums

Note the "Cloud support for saved games" - SteamPlay, Steam Cloud and Achievements

To make sure you never lose your progress, your save games will now be stored in the Steam Cloud automatically each time you exit the game. If want to upload existing save games to the cloud, just launch the game and then exit. The Steam Cloud will store your most recent 100MB of save files - each save game, once compressed, takes around 2MB so that's around 50 save files. We've spent a lot of time racking server boxes crammed with hard-drives, so please take advantage!

Additionally I noticed these added features (don't remember seeing them before) in Advance settings under Video....


Note the red dots; especially Multicore Rendering and Field of view.

The improved graphics look pretty good for such an old game engine.




AA & AF seems to be working just fine.

And now the bad news???

There's a discussion here about the new updates breaking some of the mods for the games. Mostly non-Orange Box versions

Kasperg_JM
I’m creating this thread because I’m concerned with Valve’s latest Source Engine update.
The old HL2 engine has been replaced by the Orange Box one. The different logo (the bald guy with a valve in his head instead of the usual dude with the valve in his eye) was the first clue, but once you load HL2 (or any HL2-based mod), it is evident that the engine has been updated. Better lighting, more contrast, no anti-aliasing problems for Nvidia cards, better sprites for fire etc…
Sounds good, right?
Well, the Orange Box uses a different system for organizing scene files and subtitles thanks to its console version.
What does this mean?

It means that all mods based on non-Orange Box versions of the engine will no longer work properly.

Source - New Update Breaking New and Old Mods?*|*PlanetPhillip

Aside from the mods issue, I would urge those that haven't played the game in a while to check it out. You might be surprised.

Peace

ooh, I didn't notice the changes to the graphics settings (i did think it looked 'nicer' in general though) I got some of the new achievements though

One thing, I loaded an old save to get at some of the story based achievements, and it seems to have overwritten saves past that point after I got down to playing, so, if you really want to keep your old save-games, be careful.

Raye Gunn said:

One thing, I loaded an old save to get at some of the story based achievements, and it seems to have overwritten saves past that point after I got down to playing, so, if you really want to keep your old save-games, be careful.

Yeah that's somewhat mentioned in the update notes....

Note: Save games for Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One will go through a transition. The current level you are on will be saved, but not the exact position in the level.

If that's what you mean?

Not really. Well, it's probably related. but like, I loaded a save game from the beginning of the game, and my PLAN was to kind of skip forward through my saves to get the achievements, but then discovered that all saves past the one I was on currently for the achievement had disappeared. The wording of the update didn't make it clear that would happen.

Hmmm....I don't know what to think about that. Maybe you visit the discussion forum and pose the question there. I didn't notice that when I posted the two screen shots. You can clearly see they are from different levels. However I've not chased the achievements so...

interesting post about updated graphics. i suppose it's using the same source engine as l4d2 now?

i'll have to crank up some steam to download those classics again and have another look-see.

what's happened to episode 3?

mickey megabyte said:

what's happened to episode 3?

Valve forgot about it

mickey megabyte said:

what's happened to episode 3?

right on schedule like HL2 episodes 1 & 2 were

we should see it released sometime in the next 5 years

As I said before....

It would be mighty nice of them to get Half-Life 3 released. But I suppose they're still waiting for the Hex-Core 24 terabyte processors to drop in price. Those cheap Hex 12's won't run the game