One of the most influential titles in gaming history, Half-Life can now be experienced with the full glory of ray tracing technology thanks to the dedication of one modder in the gaming community. While Half-Life has since seen its own massively popular fanmade remake in the Source engine, Black Mesa, many fans of the legendary franchise retain their preference for the original game and the unique experience it provides.
First revealed to be a project in development at the start of 2022, this ray tracing mod for Half-Life has been developed by popular modder Sultim Tsyrendashiev, the creator of several other mods which provide ray tracing support for games such as Serious Sam, Doom, and Quake. The popularity of their past works had led to great anticipation within the Half-Life community after the modder announced their next project, even if the fanbase would have to wait a year after its announcement to experience it for themselves. Although the fanmade Black Mesa offers an excellent method of reliving the Black Mesa incident with updated graphics, Valve's official port of Half-Life to the Source engine was unfortunately never as successful, with Half-Life: Source infamously being riddled with glitches that shatter immersion and hinder progress.
While the mod in question has been designed for the original Half-Life game utilizing the classic GoldSrc engine, it offers vastly improved lighting and visual quality when compared to the original. This is evidenced by the trailer that was uploaded on the modder's official YouTube channel, which shows off several parts of the game in impressive ray traced fidelity. The mod is downloadable now via Sultim Tsyrendashiev's page on GitHub, although fans should be aware that the list of known issues claims that it has not been tested on AMD graphics cards.
Initially born as a Quake mod itself, Half-Life and its several cousin titles from Valve have provided the foundation for countless community mods and add-ons over the past few decades. Games such as Team Fortress Classic were also modifications of Half-Life's GoldSrc engine, leading to the hugely-popular Team Fortress 2 which recently had a major update announced for it.
Although ray tracing generally offers an impressive buff to visuals in games, the technology demands a fairly powerful graphics card from gamers, and such hardware doesn't come cheap. Despite relatively few gamers having access to ray tracing technology and fewer still choosing to use it, Valve's renowned puzzle game Portal, a game also set in the Half-Life universe, coincidentally received ray tracing support near the end of 2022 courtesy of Nvidia.
Half-Life is available on PC, PS2, MacOS, and Linux.
Source: Sultim Tsyrendashiev/Github
