Half Life Update
By David Gasior

Muffled Weapon Sounds

We have found, based on demos that people have sent us, that our
original variables were not set to account for many of these levels and
weapons.  We did most of our testing with Half-Life: Day One, which does
not have many of the levels and weapons that the retail version does, so
we didn't see (or hear) what people were reporting until we played the
retail and got really far into the game.

These console variable changes have been tested in many of the later
levels, along with most of the really kick-ass weapons.  They should be
fine for making sure that your weapon sounds don't get drowned out by the
other noises around you.  We have tested them on our Vortex 1 and Vortex 2
boards and they seem to work real nicely.

s_distance 18
s_2dvolume 0.88
s_verbwet 0.15
s_min_distance 8
s_refgain 0.34

Low Framerate

Framerate hit when using A3D 2.0 is still a little high for most
people, and we are work at reducing that as much as we can.  One of the
problems with Half-Life and the demos we've gotten seems to be that we can
run a demo once, get a really low number for the framerate, then run it
again and it and watch it double.  Some sort of caching of textures maybe?
I notice that the longer the demo, the better the framerate gets.

Regardless, if you are suffering a framerate hit that is unacceptable to
you, use the geometry console variable to turn off geometry processing
(what sucks up the host time).  This can be done as follows:

s_geometry 0

You will still retain A3D positional audio, but on a Vortex 2 card, your
framerate should be +/- 2 fps of what DirectSound offers.  Hopefully, we
will a new A3D driver release shortly that will start to bring the
framerates back up, even with geom processing.

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