Half-Life News

A new mod adding raytracing to Half-Life looks nice, not just shiny

These days, you can't shake a stick without bouncing brown beams around the room. Raytracing has been a hot high-end graphics trend for a few years, with new games boasting support for the complex lighting simulators and old games being retrofitted with shine. This year, a new Half-Life mod will add raytracing support to Valve's seminal shooter, and even as someone usually perfectly happy with old games looking old, I think it doesn't look half-bad. See for yourself in the new video, below.

modder has taken up the real-time path traced torch of putting ray tracing into the original Half-Life, planning for a release in 2022—that is, this year. Russian modder sultim_t dropped a teaser of how Half-Life with ray tracing looks in action on YouTube, and says they'll release both the full build and source code when it's ready...
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Valve are updating Half-Life and more for Steam Deck

Valve are working to upgrade a number of their more popular games for the Steam Deck, optimising controls and interfaces to play better on their upcoming portable powerhouse, the Steam Deck. The Half-Life series, Dota 2, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, either already have or will receive upgrades designed to make them "better experiences".

Half-Life: Delta is a singleplayer mod for Half-Life 1 that creator Yuri, aka XF-Alien, has been working on for a dozen years. It's been released on ModDB though yet to appear on Steam workshop, while Yuri just seems glad it's done: "it's not so bad, cuz this mod has been in development hell for twelve (was started in August 2009) years. And now it's finally done."..
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A former Half-Life designer is showing off prototypes and rejected bloodbaths

It's always grand to get a peek behind the gamedev curtain at things that might have been. Former Half-Life level designer Brett Johnson has been digging through his old work, and his memories, to share some early Half-Life prototypes and some ideas that never came to be. Would Half-Life have been a classic if it had gotten the name "Belly Of The Beast"? I dunno, doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well, does it?