Half-Life was Valve’s first major game release, and it catapulted the company to the top of the gaming industry. Today, Valve runs the Steam gaming platform where you can purchase all its titles, as well as games from almost every other publisher. And you can still play the 1998 version of Half-Life if you so choose. This game just got a makeover that could make that proposition more appealing, but it’s not Valve’s doing. Modder Sultim Tsyrendashiev has completed work on a ray tracing plug-in for Half-Life, bringing the best in modern lighting to the 25-year-old game.
Ray tracing started appearing in games several years ago. The technology allows graphics hardware to simulate the physical properties of light to generate realistic illumination, shadows, and reflections. This is a computationally expensive process, so video cards were not powerful enough to do it until the last several generations, and AMD is still way behind the curve. Meanwhile, Sony and Microsoft added ray tracing support to their current-gen consoles.
Half-Life 1 predates ray tracing by a few decades, but Tsyrendashiev has succeeded in updating the lighting, just as he did for Doom, Quake, and other classic games in previous projects. To peek at Half-Life 1 with ray tracing, you’ll need a copy of the original game, available on Steam for $10.
Tsyrendashiev provides instructions on GitHub to get the mod running, but it doesn’t look difficult. All you need to do is unzip the mod files (about 130MB total) and copy them into the Half-Life folder. The textures, character models, and animations might still look like something out of the late 90s, but the lighting is a night and day difference. You can even see how the new lighting changes the experience by toggling back and forth — just press x to switch.
The mod developer recommends using an Nvidia RTX card because of AMD’s lagging ray tracing performance. Additionally, you may want to avoid custom maps as they could render with unplayably dim lighting. There are also some quirks due to how Half-Life uses a local server to send objects. The renderer also doesn’t support dynamic light maps, so there’s no ray-traced flashlight beam. Even without that, the game looks dramatically better with modern lighting.
Now read:
- The Witcher 3 Next-Gen Update Is Live, but PC Performance Is Terrible
- Intel Hires Former Nvidia Researcher Who Helped Develop Ray Tracing Tech
- Why You Can’t Future-Proof Your Gaming PC
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