This engineer’s dispenser is showing the same type of glitching that I’ve seen before.

This is a new one: There should be water in the bottom of this sewer. Instead, all we see is wireframe polygons where the water is supposed to be; obviously, those polygons are missing their “water” texture map.

The Windows desktop itself continued to glitch after I closed Team Fortress, so I had to reboot my machine. After that, TF2 ran fine.

Previous TF2 rendering glitches.

The polygons in this sniper are all facing in odd directions. Notice the two long, thin polygons going down and to the left.

This sniper’s head and rifle butt seem fine, but the rest of him is being stretched to infinity. What’s with the hook floating over his head?

I was running ATITool while playing last night, and saw the following temperatures in the log:

2008-03-07 22:50:34 I Temperature: GPU: 83.3°C GPU environment: 63.0°C
2008-03-07 22:50:44 I Temperature: GPU: 83.4°C GPU environment: 63.0°C
2008-03-07 22:50:54 I Temperature: GPU: 83.4°C GPU environment: 63.0°C

This seems pretty hot. Is it too hot for the graphics card?

Another factor is making me think that temperature is the culprit: when I switched out of the game to save my screen capture, the card temperature would drop. This is expected, since the game’s graphics aren’t rendered when the game is minimized:

2008-03-07 22:52:39 I Temperature: GPU: 82.8°C GPU environment: 62.0°C
2008-03-07 22:52:49 I Temperature: GPU: 69.3°C GPU environment: 62.0°C
2008-03-07 22:52:59 I Temperature: GPU: 67.0°C GPU environment: 62.0°C

When I switched back to the game, with the card now much cooler, the graphics returned to normal. It looks like I need to start shopping for a cooling solution.

I also saw this, which is probably a bug in the game. Unlike the glitches above, this is the only time I’ve seen this:
This soldier moved around the map and fired his weapons, but there was no animation: his arms and legs didn’t move. It was like fighting alongside a floating mannequin. Only his eyes were still animated, adding to the creepiness factor.

I’m not sure if this is a bug or a hardware issue, but I’m suspecting the latter, as I’m the only one I know of (so far) that is seeing this. My first step is to monitor the temperature of the video card with ATITool while playing. (I’m not overclocking the card, just monitoring the temperature.) The next time it glitches, I want to know if the card is overheating.

Also funny is what happens to Steam after quitting a session of TF2 that’s been glitching. As you can see, Steam’s glitching too!

Hopefully I’ll turn something up on this. In the meantime, I’ll post more screen captures as I manage to get them.

Update: Followup post here.

The last time I logged into Steam was on Wed Dec 5 to play Team Fortress 2, so it appears that the fuck-up happened sometime after then.

I’m very annoyed at this — just as I was almost getting to actually like Steam, it goes and pulls something like this. Wonderful.

Update Dec 9: Steam tech support says that my account was possibly hijacked or stolen. I’m not sure how that could have happened (I’m not a complete idiot when it comes to security), but I’ll go along with it for now. They said that they would email me new login information. It’s been a day since their initial answer, and that email hasn’t arrived yet.

Update Dec 11: I had to re-open the support ticket to get a response. At least this time they actually emailed my new login info. So, I’m up and running again with Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, etc.

The latest patch introduced the “Infantry Only” option. This loads a map without vehicles. This can be fun if everyone on the server squads up. However, it’s really only appropriate for smaller city maps. Large maps like Wake Island are just too big to traverse on foot, as I discovered last night.

Many servers are running Infantry Only these days. Almost every server running Karkand (at least servers with players logged in) is in Infantry Only mode. In fact, last night I decided I wanted to play with vehicles for a while, but I simply couldn’t find a server that had players logged in, and was not infantry only. This was quite a bummer.

Since the introduction of Battlefield 2142, it seems that most players have abandoned Battlefield 2. This is probably a good thing overall, since the people left playing Battlefield 2 regularly tend to be better and more polite players. There also tends to be less rude namecalling, teamkilling, and other shenanigans since most of the asshole kids are, presumably, playing 2142.

However, this smaller cadre of players seem to prefer Infantry Only. And, the smaller number of players overall leads to a lot of empty servers. (You’d think that with the smaller number of players, the account servers would run faster. Nope, they take FOREVER.)

With Team Fortress 2 and Quakewars on the horizon, I suspect that our little clan will move on from Battlefield 2 pretty soon.

Should the people who make and sell “violent video” games be held accountable if someone commits a crime because of playing them? That’s something our state lawmakers are considering, to open game makers up to more liability.

Where does the responsibility lie when a dumb, immature kid imitates something they see in a game or on TV? Where does the responsibility lie when a child does not grasp the difference between right and wrong? Where does the responsibility lie for the creation of another criminal?

It doesn’t lie with broadcasters. It doesn’t lie with game publishers. It doesn’t lie with movie producers, comic book artists, or rock musicians.

It lies with the parents.

More coverage on Slashdot.