Half-Life 2 Forum

For anyone trying to get this running on a MacBook, this may help. MBPro owners should substitute suitable DX/resolution values:

Whew, looks like I posted to quick, as it looks like the garbage is related to the interaction between forcing DX7 onto the GMA950 chipset...

Anyway, just in case anyone else wanted to get things running on a MacBook, here's what to do:

1. Install Steam and install HL2 through it.

2. Set launch properties for HL2 to:

-console -heapsize 512000 -dxlevel 70 -width 1280 -height 800 -novid +cl_drawmonitors 0 +r_shadowrendertotexture 0

(Depending on your amount of ram, you may want to cut down heap size to 256000. I'm running on 2GB RAM.)

3. In-game, you can set the following options for a good prettiness/framerate balance:

Models @ Medium
Textures @ Medium
Shaders @ Low

Now, here's what is missing, some related to having to revert to DirectX 7:

• No AA/AF support, even when forced. Huge bummer, makes the game look surprisingly old when looking at things up close. The chipset, I believe, should be able to support it.

• Game lacks the opening G-Man intro (shows as garbage) AND the transparent video screens (just plain missing). Additionally, certain particle effects show up as garbage similar to what is seen in the opening G-Man video.

• Font draws in the console and other areas look lousy.

• Marching ants on certain texture seams, though easily related to lack of AA/AF.

• Video configuration doesn't keep between launches - workaround is to set this in autoexec.cfg file if you choose.

• Object fade-in is sometimes buggy, popping-in instead. Draw distance for this is also very low - can be remedied in autoexec.cfg if you choose.

• Random gameplay stutter unrelated to the famed "Hl2 Stuttering Bug", but I expected some of this. =)

• Mouse snaps to center randomly, most reproducibly after setting options while in-game.

• Many lighting issues on in-game objects. Notably, many white-colored pipes show up BRIGHT WHITE even when they should be in the shadows. Also easily noticeable when the pet headcrab jumps up on the boxes in the lab - the boxes all change their reflectivity randomly.

• The ammo counter is poorly drawn - ammo counts are cut off.

• The kickback animations for the SMG and a few other weapons are glitchy.

• No thumbnails for saved games

Overall though, it's incredibly playable. Working on CS:S at the moment...

Hope this helps anyone trying to get it up on their lil' MacBooks!

~ Justin D'Onofrio
~ Freeverse Software

Using this post, and other comments that recommended directx8 instead of 7, I've managed to get HL2 to run - however, it doesn't run for very long.
Crashes occur after playing in game for a time - the sound can fail, or the game can hard lock, or it can simply stop running altogether. This happens after less than an hour of time, sometimes within minutes of entering the game.
I would love to help try to sort this out - as it's the only thing that ccurrently keeps me playusing windows for any reason.
As for the post, I apologize if there are spelling or other errors that make it less readable but for some reason, this part of the site doesn't play well with firefox.
System: first-gen intel imac, intel core duo, 1GB Ram, 250GB drive, ATI x1600 Graphics.

any ideas to fix the lack of transparent video screens?
i've been able to deal with the rest without too much frustration but the COMPLETE lack of those videos is bothersome.
especially because they showed up perfectly on the demo version.

[running an OS X (10.4.8), 2.16 GHz Intel core duo w/ 1GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM MacBookPro]

edit: oh and justin, excellent post, thanks. made hl2 run about as perfect as it's going to and still look nice and pretty (other than the stuff you mentioned of course).... and are your loads taking a long time? maybe they do with everybody, i don't know, they just seem to break the pace sometime.

This will be fixed in our next major release. Most likely 6.1. (in fact, in my testing, it is already fixed in our current nightly builds) I have no ETA on a release right now, I wish I did.