Half-Life 2 audio now preloading
Valve chucks 900MB of encrypted audio down our pipes.
Half-Life 2's preload to Steam account holders continued apace this week as Valve allowed users to download "the majority of the audio of Half-Life 2 in encrypted form," according to an update on the developer's website.
The second splurge of data - preceded by around 1040MB of texture and art content last week - comes in at around 900MB and, as with the original preload, will not cost you anything to download. The idea is that the moment the game is made available, those with preloaded copies on their hard disks will be able to start playing immediately once payment is made.
If you have Steam running but haven't seen anything come down the pipe this morning, and want to continue preloading Half-Life 2, it seems that restarting the application kicks it into life, after which point you can monitor the download's progress by going to the "Play Games" menu, right-clicking on Half-Life 2 and viewing "Pre-load status".