Anyone actually able to pre-load it yet? I keep getting the servers are to busy message.

yup i get to busy aswell.

nevermind after a few minutes it worked and im now pre loading it.

Got it. It took a long time, and went fairly slow, but I got it. Now gimmie HL2! lol

I preloaded it over the weekend. Can't wait!

I'm buying it on CD. To heck with this steam thing.

I pre-ordered it but am trying to get it via Steam just to save a bit of time. Is there any way to instigate the DL yourself or does it just push on its own?

If you open the Play Games tab HL2 appears at the top. Right click on it and select preload.

If it doesn't appear under the "Coming Soon" section, you need to restart Steam. Once you see it, you can double-click it and follow the wizard to start pre-loading it.

Thanks guys. I will give it a shot as soon as I get home.

Whenever someone can confirm the max player limit, please post it. Thanks.

There have been a few posts about it in the steam forums. From what we can gather the maxplayers is 128. I doubt there is a server that can handle that tho. I would say 64 would be the max considering what there is availible for hardware.

128 seems to be the theortical max. 64 slot servers are running for the CSS Beta, with good performance. Considering Joint Ops can run 250 slots, and runs 150 fine on most decent performance boxes, I would expect 128 to be entirely possible.

I was thinking 128 would be the max. Now all I need is for the Day of Defeat mod to be converted and I'll be wasting more youth.

Maps would have to be pretty large to hold that amount of players. And will really suck when a 128 player map only has 10 players on it.

I remember playing 64player Stalingrad on MOHAA before. Was so funny. Spawned next to about 20 other axis and then you got a rocket comes flying at all of you. Its pretty good doing a boiler room brawl though with 64players. Just gets naded so bad. I think with CS could be the kind of same thing but i think they will have bigger maps but even on some of the older maps such as dust you could still have alot of fun with 128 players. Obviously sometimes it would just be to much.

So are people speculating that HL2 will run on our servers just like CS: Source beta does as far as resources ?

The CSS beta is the same dedicated server HL2 will have. You'll note in Steam (Windows Client) that "Source Dedicated Server" is available, as opposed to "CSS Dedicated Server" .. You'll also note that the linux CSS package includes an hl2 folder, much like hlds_l includes a valve folder. SRCDS is the same for HL2 and CSS.

As such, I'd expect similar, but not exactly, the same performance. HL2 "DM" as a "mod" may or may not be more intensive than CSS. Same thing with UT2K4.. Onslaught eats far more resources than Deathmatch or CTF.

yep. that makes sense. thx

You can take the Steam Error message down Ted. I preloaded last night

Dang valve...servers busy....err

Where is the CSS files?

Server or client? Clients that own Condition Zero are the only ones allowed to use the CS:S beta as of now. Correct me if I am wrong.

Server files can be grabbed via STEAM using the HLDSUpdateTool.

Use "Counter Strike Source" in the game variable. And yes, it needs to be in quotes to work. Otherwise you will get an error saying you can't mix HL2 and HL1 files.