Quite nice, as raytracing mods go!
These days, you can’t shake a stick without bouncing brown beams around the room. Raytracing has been a hot high-end graphics trend for a few years, with new games boasting support for the complex lighting simulators and old games being retrofitted with shine. This year, a newHalf-Lifemod will add raytracing support to Valve’s seminal shooter, and even as someone usually perfectly happy with old games looking old, I think it doesn’t look half-bad. See for yourself in the new video, below.
Half-Life: Ray Traced is made by Sultim “sultim_t” Tsyrendashiev, building on work by others. “This project is a reengineered version ofhttps://github.com/w23/xash3d-fwgs, which is ANOTHER port of HL1 to ray tracing,” Tsyrendashiev explains. Complicated chain of development history, but simply: it’s Half-Life with raytracing.
I find most attempts to add raytracing to old games ugly. Too many are too damn shiny, they often don’t look themselves, and many don’t even look good. I have an almost visceral dislike ofNvidia’s Quake 2 RTX tech demo showcase doodad. To me, it’s a perfect demonstration of the horrors of “graphics” and the stumbling march of technological process towards “photorealism” which cares not one jot for aesthetics. This, however, I deem acceptable.
While I’m not mad keen on some of the surface texture, I do like that it’s happy to let a lot of things be old and pixellated still. Yeah, that looks enough like Half-Life to me. I’d still prefer to play Half-Life in its original form but if you adore raytracing and desperately crave my approval, you have it: you may use this mod and I’ll be okay with that.
Last year, Tsyrendashievbopped raytracing into Serious Sam: The First Encounter:
