Half-Life 2 Forum

Hi there,

I have a problem with Steam and all of its applications.
When I start Steam it takes several minutes to load. When I start any game it takes several minutes, too.
When I play CounterStrike: Source this is not a big problem, because once a map is loaded I can play fluently.

But whenever I play Half Life 2 it is really annoying to wait for such a long time when a new level, or even just a new part of a level is loading. Half Life also runs perfectly once it is loaded.

I'm using the newest generation of the MBP 15" 2,2Ghz 128mb 8600GT

Any suggestions?

Well, it's a known issue that Steam launch and game launch times are quite long under CrossOver Mac. It's something we've investigated, but we have not yet found the cause. To some degree it's due to slow system calls and interprocess communication (IPC) on the Mac. Leopard fixed a certain bug which allowed us to take advantage of a faster IPC mechanism, so this is improved somewhat with that OS.

That said, the delays should not amount to "several minutes", I don't think. My only suggestion is to check the Energy Saver settings on your MBP. If you're playing while plugged in (which I would recommend), make sure your processor is set to run at full speed and your hard drives are set to not spin down.

I have slow loading times too.. here are some specific counts:

Time to Load in Crossover 6.2 on 2.4ghz 2gb Macbook Pro
Steam - 1:55
HL2: Episode 1 - 2:08
Saved game - 2:00
Section load - :55
Respawn from death - :20

So that's 6 minutes each time I go from only Crossover open to playing Halflife 2. That's a long time..

You can speed up HL2 loading quite a lot by passing the "-console" parameter to it(in the usual Steam way). This way it doesn't load the background map, which takes a long time to load and is thrown away anyway when you start a game.

The other times are a bit longer than usual, but not out of the usual bounds. The respawn from death sounds long though, usually it is below 10 seconds.