Half-Life News

Half-Life recently hit its 25th anniversary, and after going free on Steam for a limited time, interest in Valve's classic FPS spiked once again. It's undoubtedly iconic. Half-Life's success made Valve one of the biggest names in gaming, helped to shape the entire FPS genre, and in many ways defined the direction of the entire industry. One of the primary reasons for its success, though, is its unique oddness among triple-A games, even making its era-defining sequel look conventional. There is simply nothing else quite like Half-Life.

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• Fixes for joining games through invites and Steam friends list.
  
• Miscellaneous UI fixes for Dedicated Servers.
  
• Fixed an occasional crash when opening the scoreboard.
  
• Fixed camera movement after death in multiplayer.
  
• Fixed crash when creating a server if the server creator's Steam name was entirely non-ASCII characters.
  

• Fixed crash when modifying certain video settings in a multiplayer match.
  
• Fixed server browser issues after modifying video settings.
  
• Fixed local player not showing up in player count on a listen server using Steam Networking.
  
• Fixed rare corrupted lighting rendering bug in some maps.
  

• Fixed lighting rendering issues on some AMD GPUs.
  
• Fixed mods with their own localization files not loading default strings from updated localization files in Half-Life.
  
• Fixed one dying scientist in Half-Life: Uplink saying incorrect dialogue.
  
• Added "Use shaders" checkbox for the video options. Servers can over-ride this setting with sv_allow_shaders.
  
• Fixed weapons with secondary ammo (like the MP5) not being deployable if there is no primary ammo remaining.
  
• Miscellaneous Steam Networking fixes.
  
• The Half-Life dedicated server application (app 90) has been updated with latest server code and updated windows and linux binaries. Updating dedicated servers is recommended.
  

Half-Life recently received a big update to celebrate its 25th birthday, but a significant bug remained. In a famous scripted sequence during which a long, green tentacle busts through a window and drags away a scientist, the scientist and the tentacle would be mis-aligned, making it look like the scientist floated out of the window of his own volition.

Not anymore. After over twenty years, Valve programmer Ben Burbank has fixed the bug - and explained how he did it.

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