techspot Half Life gets Ray Tracing via Mod

[UltraMega]

Quote

The long-awaited unofficial ray tracing mod for Half-Life has landed.
 

A little over a year ago, modder Sultim "sultim_t" Tsyrendashiev shared a YouTube teaser for a new project that adds real-time, hardware accelerated path tracing to Valve's seminal first-person shooter. The mod, a reengineered version of an earlier effort, promised enhancements like reflections, global illumination, refractions and soft shadows.
 

sultim_t said a playable build and accompanying source code would be released on GitHub when it is ready. "These things, they take time," the modder cautioned.
 

Fast-forward a little over a year and sultim_t has delivered.

 

Mod: 

Releases · sultim-t/xash-rt

GITHUB.COM

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Fork of the Xash3D FWGS with a real-time path tracing - sultim-t/xash-rt

 

 

 

Article about mod:

Half-Life mod adds real-time ray tracing to Valve's seminal first-person shooter

WWW.TECHSPOT.COM

 

 

This type of stuff is neat, but I'm not sure I'd say it really looks better with RT. Pairing graphics this outdated with RT makes for an interesting tech demo but not a cohesive visual look. 

 

Having recently upgraded my GPU and been able to experience more RT titles first hand, I find myself asking... do games even look better with RT at all right now? Most or all of the RT I've seen has just as many visual issues as other rendering methods, the issues are just different. For example, in 2077 with all the RT setting on, all the lighting is laggy. If you see a reflection on a surface from bounce lighting (different than something like a reflection on glass), it's a good full second or so behind the thing it's actually reflecting and to me that is much more noticeable and distracting than other lighting methods, especially in a game with a lot of neon flashing signs causing reflections. I could rant about other RT issues, but I'd never stop. It will of course get better over time, but that also raises the question of what actually looks good in a game. Is it better for a game to try to look as realistic as possible or is it better to have some stylization? 

[ENTERPRISE]

This game will never die lol with your good ole modders. That being said I would love to see an "Official" remake of Half Life using todays game engines and features...I would be all over that!

[bonami2]

1 hour ago, ENTERPRISE said:

This game will never die lol with your good ole modders. That being said I would love to see an "Official" remake of Half Life using todays game engines and features...I would be all over that!

Did you try Half Life Alyx it pretty awesome for a vr game. But yea am in for a half life 1-2 remake  

[pio]

I wonder what it'd take to get this put into Sven Coop, the coop mod for the HL series.  If its just a map thing, that might be pretty easy to get the above mod, and any future HL2 mod for RT, and plug them into Sven maybe.  Or maybe Sven needs to be completely reworked?  Idk......

Either way, I love me some classic games with revamped graphics regardless.

[theskonester]

I remember playing this game when it first came out on an Emachine with ATI Rage graphics and a Cyrix processor lol. Had to run in OpenGL mode to get any kind of good FPS

 

Seriously though, its one of the best PC games of all time. Glad it keeps getting love.