![]() ![]() That makes the path-traced lighting look incredibly faithful to the original - just with more detail and - more importantly - dynamism. Valve's attention to detail in nailing the consistency of their lighting means that the game still looks reasonable in 2023, but it also means that the game is almost uniquely suited to a path-traced conversion.įor the RT mod, Sultim ensured that lighting of the same style and intensity is emanating from the same light sources of the original game. In general, the light maps show light emanating from the sun, lights and other logical light-producing sources, and even bounce lighting is scientifically considered to produce realistic results. Most lighting was calculated offline and then projected onto the world with textures - normally in a static fashion but occasionally they were toggled on and off or swapped out rapidly to give the appearance of dynamic lighting. Looking back at the original Half-Life, it was designed with the CPU, GPU and RAM limits of the day in mind - so real-time lighting was minimal, limited to the game's rarely-used flashlight. Nearly all the art, textures and models are the same the key difference is primarily in how these objects are lit and shaded. The RT version builds on this by replacing the rendering portion with a Vulkan-driven path tracer. Interestingly, Half-Life RT is a fork of Xash3D rather than GoldSrc, an open-source 3D engine that maintains excellent compatibility with GoldSrc assets. Half-Life: A Full RT/Path-Traced Upgrade For The OG PC Classic Tested! To see how Half-Life Ray Traced compares to the 1998 original, check out the full video breakdown. Getting started is thankfully straightforward - just install Half-Life on Steam, then download the necessary files from Sultim's Github page, following the instructions provided. It's a transformative upgrade that's well worth experiencing, so we played through the RT version to break down what exactly the mod does, how it compares to the original 1998 release and see how well it performs on modern graphics cards. The mod completely remakes the game's lighting using path tracing while maintaining its assets, thereby providing an alternate vision of a modern Half-Life compared to, say, the popular fan remake Black Mesa. Almost 25 years after its original release, a new mod for Half-Life has arrived: a fully ray-traced version of the game, courtesy of modder Sultim Tsyrendashiev - who previously produced ray-traced versions of Serious Sam, Doom and Quake. Long after most people had played through Half-Life's campaign, games and mods powered by the GoldSrc engine continued to entertain and amaze. At the moment, there is no way for "non-technical" people to experience the original-half life.Įven if you think the HD-models look better, they should be disabled by default, out of respect to the original Hal-life.Half-Life is one of the most influential games of all time, thanks not just to its immersive setting, story and visuals, but to its 'modability'. The historic work of many Valve modelers and artists has been swept down the drain. The official documentation now refers to options that don't work. Old players will become frustrated that they can't get the original Half-life back, as the the only way revert the change is a launch command that isn't documented anywhere (and at the moment this doesn't even exist!). New players to Half- life will think the game always looked this way. You are effectively rewriting history, as Steam is pretty much the only place to buy Half-Life. Suddenly "upgrading," the look of a 15 year old game, with no option to revert is a very bad idea. Heck, even the promotional images on it's Steam page use the old models. When I play Half-Life, I expect it to look the way it did 15 years ago. The version of Half-life available on Steam is no longer the real half life. When Valve made Half-life Source, they had the option to use the HD-models, but chose not to, as the originals are better.īut that is not the worst of it. The HD-models clash with the art-style of the game and look very out of place. ![]()
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