Unofficial Half-Life ray tracing mod coming this year

[Daniel Sims]

Something to look forward to: Adding ray tracing to classic games has been an excellent way to show off the difference it makes. Last week a modder posted a YouTube trailer that shows the feature employed on the original Half-Life. The modder plans to have it playable this year, though no specific date was mentioned.

Sultim_t says in the description of his trailer for Half-Life: Ray Traced that he will add real-time path tracing to Valve’s seminal 1998 first-person shooter. The ray-traced effects include global illumination, reflections, refractions, and soft shadows.

Path tracing is similar to ray tracing but far more comprehensive and computationally expensive. The ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Resident Evil Village is mixed with traditional rasterization, only handling effects like global illumination or reflections. By comparison, path tracing renders the entire scene with ray tracing.

It takes so much horsepower that only games with relatively basic or aged graphics like Minecraft or Quake II RTX can use it at playable framerates. However, even those games need upscaling methods like DLSS to do it. Sultim_t doesn’t mention any upscaling feature for Half-Life: Ray Traced.

Sulim_t previously developed a ray-tracing mod for Serious Sam, although this mod is based on a previous attempt to add ray tracing to Half-life. Sulim_t plans to release it on GitHub along with the source code when done. In 2019 Nvidia said it planned to bring ray tracing to more classic games but hasn’t revealed any since.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/92934-unofficial-half-life-ray-tracing-mod-coming-year.html

 

[hahahanoobs]

Which is why Nvidia waited until ray tracing could be accelerated by hardware and mitigated some of that perf hit with DLSS, and why AMD struggles with it.

HL2 is a very old game. We won't see many more thereafter using path tracing. This is just a personal project.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Quake 2 RTX (same engine) looked good with the updated visuals on the display screens and some textures, but overall, Quake 2 RTX was a buggy mess with lower framerates than I was used to.

Would Half Life be much better? I think the alien world Xen could benefit - as well as the THEY HUNGER atmosphere, but I think Half Life was perfect as is.

 

[pcnthuziast]

Neat trick, but Black Mesa looks way better, no ray tracing necessary.

 

[Dimitrios]

Neat trick, but Black Mesa looks way better, no ray tracing necessary.

I even played their new project BLUE SHIFT I heard they added more chapters recently. Gonna have to install BLACK MESA again.

 

[scavengerspc]

Absolutely unnecessary. A complete waste of resources and time. A "feature" nobody asked for.

Looking forward to playing it though.

 

[Guyver1wales]

My yearly play through of HL which I've been doing since HL came out has migrated to Black Mesa. I have no need to play the original HL anymore since Black Mesa came out, not even for nostalgia's sake.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Neat trick, but Black Mesa looks way better, no ray tracing necessary.

It really does. You can do a lot with shaders, with a very minor performance hit. F.E.A.R. is another great example, reactive lighting and shadows all with no RT.