Windows HL2 Single Player (No Steam?)

Is there a patch or something (official or not-so) that allows you to play single player HL2 without being online?!

I see no problems with this if I own the game and simply don't want to rack up my phonebill logging into steam to play a single player game

 

Once you've activated the game (which happens the first time you try to run it), you can open Steam without being online and it'll kick into Offline Mode.

 

BUT it will force a connect sometimes to update itself.

by the by, there are, ahem, ways, of playing it without steam.

 

cool, thats what I wanted to hear
Can you play mulitplayer LAN without being online?

 

Sometimes???

To me it seems a lot more than that.

 

Steam is a wholly great idea that was implemented as if Valve thought no one would notice its clear inadiquasies(sp). Its a great concept that was carried out like what you would get by having a two year old build a helicopter that can go under water. The plan and idea is there but the real thing leaves something to be desired.

This is what I've noticed about steams behavior. Your goal is to simply play HL2 in offline mode. There are two ways of doing this. First, assuming steam is acting normally (kinda rare in my case), you should be able to run offline mode. But (there's always going to be a but with steam), you have to do certain things first. Your steam login information must be saved and all "remember this or that" type options enabled. Next, Steam loves to update. So naturally, before you can play in offline or online mode, you must let it update. If a game is not competely updated, it will be greyed out in the games menu should you be lucky enough to get steam to go into offline mode. After everything is updated, you must close steam in the proper manner. Right click on your steam icon and choose Exit and not Exit and Loggout. I'll note the the exit options have dissapeared on some machines and only Exit remains.

Now, you should be ready to go into offline mode. Kill all connections to the internet and consider disabling your network adapter as well, otherwise steam will try very very hard to find an internet connection. Many people choose to reboot as well.

Now, its time to start *gasp* Steam. At this point a number of different things could happen. I'd like to think I've seen em all but steam continues to depress me with new and exciting ways to **** up entirely. Provided all goes well, you should see a window pop up thats say Steam was unable to connect to the internet followed by the option to exit or launch offline mode. Be prepaired to wait a hell of a long time for that window though. Sometimes it'l take a few seconds, sometime a few minutes, or sometimes a few hours....assume the worst and have a good book nearby. I'll get to offline mode itself in a moment. Now assuming all didn't go well (more likely, I think), you may be imediately prompted with a window stating Steam was unable to connect to the internet and will now close. You may get a message saying offline mode is currently unavailable. Sometimes the Exit or Offline Mode window will appear and then inform you offline mode is currently unavailable. It will more than likely tell you your login information is incorrect. On the off-chance you get into off-line mode, Valve seems to have gone through the trouble of making sure that you don't forget you're using Steam. Once you get into your games menu, you will either be on your way to a fun experience with Half-Life 2, or on your way back to online-mode. This is because, despite you allowing steam to update for the last week....strait, it will decide for you that it wasn't quite finished when you thought it was and was merely taking a short break. IE, you game titles are greyed out and you get a window saying that they arent ready for offline mode. Life is good, remember that when you are fighting off the urge to stab your eyeballs.

I should note, that if you do mange to have everything go right, it would be a bad idea to ever let it run in on-line mode again. Steam, once it finds out there is an update for a game/feature, will completely disable that feature until it has the update.

Steam is rather inconsistent in too many ways for me to outline. Expect a new surprise every time you connect. As stated above, once it works correctly in offline mode, it would be a swish move to keep it that way. I'll also mention the seemingly little known Steam Monitor. When updating, its sometimes hard to guage just what the hell Steam is doing. You may be waiting for the CS Source to update while little do you know, Steam is updating three other titles at the same time. The steam monitor is, so far, the best way to monitor steam's behavior. To get at it, simple right click on your steam tray icon and select Steam Monitor. You'll be presented with a list of current bandwith use, whats updateding, a percentage of how much is done, and a nice little bar graph that is next to meaningless. Why is this useful? Well, anyting in the usage list will not be availabe in offline mode.

Now, you may vaguly remember mentioning two ways of playing your game in offline mode. I just outlined how to do it with steam. The other optinos is to get ahold of a cracked version of HL2 and instantly enjoy a steam-free experience. I, and many other, don't consider this illegal. You already bought the game, and thus, a license for the game. You should sure as **** be able to play it be whatever means you decide to use. Just keep a second install handy (you do have all that free space don't you) so you can actually enjoy the game you paid for.

 

Dunno what all the fuss is about tbh. Never had a problem with Steam. As long as the game/steam is fully updated when you exit it, the next time you try and use it with no connection, the offline mode works just fine.

 

Yeah, I've got to quite agree with this. I've got steam blocked by three software firewalls, a hardware based firewall in my router, and by my smooth-wall client. Some how or another steam still is able to connect, and take about 10-20 minutes to do "something" before I'm able to enjoy HL2 goodness, even when it's already updated earlier that day.

I think steam is like a virus… that you pay for.

 

Yes.........
On the other hand, we all don't have T1, or even broadband for that matter

 

Well that must be nice for you to have such a fast connection. I only have a dialup. And, dammit, if I used AOHell and paid by the minute, I would be VERY annoyed at connecting for 20 minutes every time I wanted to play.

LockmanX, thnkyou very much for taking the time and trouble to write all thatout for me, I found it very useful. I wonder where one might start looking for a steam-disabled version.......

 

I can see where you are coming from, but it does state that an internet connection is required to play the game on the box.

 

Nope... when you dont run steam automatically at startup and you are runing steam in offline mode all the time (like at computer which is not connected to internet), it will never ask for update - except for the first time when you try to run the game - it needs to decript the game data.

 

Many (probably most) Steam users are aware of how Steam is suppose to work. Honestly, I think Steam is damned cool, especially if you do have an uninhibited broadband connection (just a few more weeks until my escape from dialup hell).

However, Steam is, in my personal experience, extremely inconsistant. Now, when I bought HL2, I know I'd be screwed for awhile as it updated and validated my .gcf's....which is why I had a copy of the hitchhiker's guide handy. I suppose the way I use Steam causes me problems. Primarily, I only run in online mode at small LANs at a friends place because he has some decent bandwith. Thing is, after these little LANs, Steam puts up a hell of a fight before running in offline mode again. Lately, I've had a problem with Steam not remembering my login information. Or, at least, thats what it says. I could log onto online mode without it ever asking me for a thing, and have the remember-this-or-that options enabled but when comes time to run offline mode, Steam gets amnesia. Once I got around that, none of my titles were ready for offline mode! Funny, they were a week ago. Even after getting online mode and waiting days and days for every single thing to update, still nothing.

And thats just the recent/current problem. Many of steam's features have failed to function properly. Friends, that oh so handly chat client? Would be great if it worked....(I'll spare you the eulagy of this failure of a cool idea). How about the news and update pages? Well, I can only read so much as absolutly none of the scrollbars/arrows have ever worked for me. I've also had this odd problem with Steam send processor usage to 100%, seemingly at random, and while completly idle.

Steam is also woefully lacking of other features. I, and I know I'm not alone, am on dialup. While it is the accepted fate of dialup users to wait a year and a half to accomplish anything what so ever, I feel that Steam should have had features and tools to give users more control over how Steam uses bandwith. About all you can do is disable/enable automatic updates. What if I don't want to even check for updates? What if I don't want the latest news window to pop up. How bout if I choose what updates I want and when to get them.. Can I with Steam? Not a chance in hell. Ever try out that handy little back up feature? I have, and its failed all three times. With three different backups on three different occasions, the .gcfs created manage to be corrupted by the time I want to run a restore. Useful, isn't it?

Steam is also your worst nightmare if you are trying to host a LAN party. Most of us do not have access to a conection with astronomical bandwith like 500MB down. Many lan parties are limited to 1.5 down, or as is common, none at all. Thanks to Steams wonderful model, you cannot redistribute patches locally. That said, I'll propose an example. You want to run a Counter-strike 1.6 and Source tournament at your LAN party. You insist that everyone showing up is up to date and is able to run offline mode. Naturally, not everyone does. So, out of you 14 teams for both 1.6 and Source, only 5 are ready to go because one or more players per team is having Steam issues. And we all know what you have to feed Steam in order to solve a problem:......bandwith. So now you have about 20 people that need to run Steam in online mode for updates, etc. According to the Steam monitor, updateding CS: Source can consume about 500kbs and still take around 45 (at best) minutes to finish updating. 20 people x 500kbs down is roughly about 10Mbs. Steam in all its ineffiecency will probably take an hour for all that to go though. Chances are, you don't have that much bandwith. In the end, you have angry team, angry players, an unhappy staff (they have to deal with the the previously mentioned), and an unhappy group of people blaming Steam for sucking away al the bandwith. More than likely, this will also make an unhappy you.

So, whats the solution? Right now there are only two. Stomach the ******** or drop any game/tourny that involves Steam. The latter means a drop in attendance which no LAN party host wants. In my opinion, there should be at least two more. The first would be for Valve to release individual updates that can be stored locally and are redistributable over a network. This would greatly help dialup users as well, especially since the backup feature doesn't seem to work. Second, if Valve is dead set againsts redistributable patches, how about a local content server? Get files from Valve and validate them. Then, when time comes at a LAN for someone to update, they could jsut connect to the local server for the files. I'm sure Valve would still want individuals to connect and validate but the server could hand off to official content servers for that. Sure, anyone can make a claim against my ideas for the sake of security but I feel that once the security becomes such a detrament to using the problem that users are driven away, change needs to happen.

I suppose alot of what I say makes me come across as anti-steam and/or anti-valve. I support Valve and I think that Steam was definatly a big step toward future method of distributing software. But for any progress to be made, you can't ignore the problems of the the current methods. Steam needs to adapt to multiple situations and offer the user multiple solutions. Otherwise, I can only see an eventual failure of the company. CS's presence in the LAN party community has already seen a huge decline. Many users have been avoiding or abondoning good games like HL2 simply because Steam is that frustrating.

Err... I'm gonna stop now because I'm starting to feel like this is turning into a novel....

 

Not reading all that mess...

Anyways, goto HL2 properties and change it to "Do not automatically update this game". Then get it to start in offline mode and you should be ok. I'm sure how to do that was covered in here somewhere...

 

Sorry....I tend to do that sometimes.

 

Just add -steam to the icon properties..

 

does that actually work?