MINERVA - read-only archives

Everytime I load a saved game in the second map of pegasus, it crashes, due to a problem with hl.exe. Strangely, this happens only with the saved games, where I have the RPG.

Have you gone through the troubleshooting stages described ?

I'm wondering if this forum is defunct or largely abandoned at this point, and if asking for help here is a waste of time, but for lack of a better solution I'm here. So I've gone through the checklist of usual suspects, and none of them are the culprit it seems. I've not, however done a complete playthrough of HL2 and EP1 since having installed them. I've played them numerous times, and only played the first couple of chapters prior to trying to play Minerva. I've been launching from the library list in steam.

The problem I'm having is in the first part of the game (carcinogensis). Upon descending the ladder into the underground facility, and taking the stairs down to find a locked door one must go through, and unlocking it via the kind of circuitous route that HL is notorious for, and having found the security station and unlocked the door, during the subsequent combat with the handful of waves of soldiers, I have an error. Invariably at some time during the combat I will get looping sounds and the game will hang. This has happened repeatedly. Just short a dozen times. I got through it once before by lowering my AA and AF settings (In previous playthroughs of HL2 EP1 on this system I noticed that setting my AA and AF at any setting other than the recommended would cause the screen to go completely blank, so my suspicions turned to those culprits...but anyway) But now it seems as if those are not working this time. The configuration is the same (played through over the weekend) And I'm a bit stumped.

System Specs

i7 920 @ 3.2GHz
MSI Eclipse SLI x58 motherboard
3x2gigs DDR3 1333 (Corsair XMS3, not overclocked)
HD Radeon 5850
Asus Xonar DX sound card
WD Caviar Black 500gig system drive
Seagate barracuda 7200.10 500gig data drive
Sony-Optiarc Sata DVD RW
PC Power and Cooling silencer 750
Windows Vista HP x64

I know a lot of those details are unnecessary but I thought I'd spill it all in advance rather than have to go through it again, bleh.

Driver versions that support my video card only go back a couple of generations, so I'm not sure where to go to get a catalyst version that works if this one doesn't.

Event Viewer comments:

Error 8/18/2010 9:11:26 AM Application Hang 1002 (101)

The program hl2.exe version 0.0.0.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Problem Reports and Solutions control panel. Process ID: 2bc Start Time: 01cb3ed68465bc72 Termination Time: 39

Read a few of the threads which are below the stickies. Summary:
- Minerva is currently broken due to a recent HL2 update.
- The author is working on a fix, but since he is working for Valve now, he is busy with other things.
- The official fix is actually a port to the Orange Box engine, so it will take even more time.
- There is an unofficial fix, which involves a copy of old assets that are *not* downloaded through Steam any more. (But if you have an old install of Episode One, you still have these old assets, as they aren't forcefully deleted.) This unofficial fix can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=328

Thanks for the replies, I wasn't certain I'd get any for this. It looks as if I'm going to have to content myself with the one fairly solid playthrough I got. I've reinstalled my OS since May 5th, and I don't have any backups of the games prior to that. I tried the patch, but it caused graphical problems. The game becomes unplayable after a point in the game, when you have to jump out of the elevator to cross the fallen metal structures to get to a walkway (Pegasus), those structures give the graphical error image you see in this video, they can't be walked across, so, I guess I'm stuck waiting for a version that works well. Besides which, the behavior of the stalkers is aberrant (you can see it in this video if you watch).

It's not my patch, it's DaftMink's. ;)

And you're right about the cut-off date. So I take it you installed Episode One prior to the cut-off date? The error models only appear late in the game though, this glass elevator is where I saw them the first time: http://img22.imageshack.us/slideshow/we ... s30000.jpg