Where it stands
Lost Coast lives in its own lostcoast folder inside the Half-Life 2 install, and comes from the same pointer as Half-Life 2. It reads in the order its own gameinfo.txt lists: its archive over Half-Life 2’s five, then its loose files over Half-Life 2’s, a little over 32,000 files in 12 to 20 ms. That order matches the search paths the game itself prints when it runs.
Your copy is fingerprinted as two parts, lostcoast and hl2, and hl2 is the very same part Half-Life 2 has. Steam installs Lost Coast’s files through Half-Life 2’s own app, and every file in both parts matched Steam’s checksums for them.
Known issues
gameinfo.txtnames voice archives that Steam doesn’t install. They’re noted on the mount and skipped.- One sound in Half-Life 2’s English voice archive fails its own checksum. Garry’s Mod’s copy of the same archive does too, so it’s read as Steam ships it.
- Half-Life 2 and Lost Coast both ship 31 of the same files, and Half-Life 2’s copy is the one on disk. That its copy always wins rests on this one install so far.
Next up
- Hooking Source’s converters up to Lost Coast, with a shader table from Half-Life 2’s own shaders.
- Garry’s Mod mounting Lost Coast’s content from this mount, as part of Half-Life 2’s.