Problems with Boxes tinted Orange

Koreish

Alright I bought Valve's Orange Box all those years ago because it was an epic deal and I loves me some epic deals. The problem has been that it's never worked very well for me. Every installment of the HL franchise crashes about an hour after start up and TF2 is always full of lag.

At first I thought it was just my laptop that I had originally installed it on as it was considered old at the Box's release. But then I built a computer and things never got better. I'm fairly certain there isn't a hardware problem, but I'm not for sure.

I used to blame my Wi-Fi connection for the lag but I've played SC2 and many other games online and haven't experienced near the amount of lag that I do in TF2.

Is there some sort of set up I should do to properly run the Orange Box? I would really like to play TF2 with you all again and I have never finished HL:EP2 so I would kinda like to finish that too.

Thrax

I would delete the entire damn thing and redownload from scratch, honestly.

shwaip

You can also try right-clicking the games in steam and telling it to verify the game cache - maybe some of the files got corrupted at some point.

Canti

Thrax wrote:

I would delete the entire damn thing and redownload from scratch, honestly.

This a million times.

shwaip

Canti wrote:

This a million times.

Once should suffice.

Canti

I reinstall it every time I play just to keep it fresh.

cola

You should turn off steam cloud syncing before you re-install though, otherwise the problems may persist.

Koreish

cola wrote:

You should turn off steam cloud syncing before you re-install though, otherwise the problems may persist.

As I have uninstalled and reinstalled a couple times without doing this, this may be the problem.

cola

Yea, for TF2 you have to disable in game syncing and out of game syncing. The syncing in steam is under your Settings, then the Sync/cloud section and unchecked the box. I followed these instructions to fix my TF2 earlier, they might help:

"I figured it out. What needs to be done is you need to have steam cloud disable in the in-game settings, exit the game, delete the contents of config.cfg, save it, then start tf2 again so it can re-write the default settings.

After that, exit the game and make a copy of the new config.cfg file and put it somewhere else (desktop is fine). Next what you want to do is start up tf2 again, enable steam cloud within the in-game settings (it will put the old settings in effect), and now your going to alt-tab out of the game, replace the current config.cfg file with the copy you put on your desktop, bring the game back up, open the developer console and type "exec config", exit the game, and it saves the default settings to your cloud.

Hope that helps anyone out there having this issue. "

Koreish

Hmm on a whim I decided to check my FPS and it was running anywhere from 90FPS to 300FPS that seems really high and not very consistent.

Thrax

The Source engine is not FPS limited, and a delta like that doesn't mean anything.

pigflipper

Koreish wrote:

Hmm on a whim I decided to check my FPS and it was running anywhere from 90FPS to 300FPS that seems really high and not very consistent.

Very common as you move around maps and see/load different texture and animation combinations.