![]() That means the RT version dials bounce lighting up to 11, producing more realistic results, with light bouncing multiple times to propagate the scene. In the original game, there was often a noticeable contrast between characters and their environments due to the differences between the lighting afforded to static and dynamic objects, but now both categories feel equally grounded in the game world.īounce lighting was present in the original game as mentioned earlier, but the numbers of objects included within it, and its overall quality, was limited by the realities of costly offline rendering at the time. There's a similar but more dramatic effect with light issuing from behind spinning fan blades, which now cast a moving shadow into the room and onto themselves. If a scientist wanders in front of the lamp, they now get a matching shadow. RT lighting recreates the original lighting model surprisingly well in some scenes and transforms it in others.įor example, the original game featured office lamps that produced coloured light on its surroundings as you'd expect, and in the RT remake you get nearly identical colouring and directionality, but now the lighting is per-pixel accurate and fully dynamic rather than being a low resolution static texture. 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. 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'.
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