You can now play the original Half-Life with beautiful beams of ray-traced light

It’s time to mud off your trusty crowbar and see it in a brand new gentle, full with colourful reflections. A PC mod of the unique Half-Life from 1998 that provides realtime path-traced ray tracing to the sport is now out there, and it’s completely beautiful. First teased by its creator sultim_t (Sultim Tsyrendashiev) over a yr in the past, the mod pack is now out there to obtain on GitHub to put in and play with the unique Half-Life on Steam.

Whereas a correct remake of Half-Life already exists within the type of Black Mesa, let’s say this falls extra within the “remaster” camp — very like sultim_t’s different tasks, including ray tracing to unique Doom and Quake titles. The ray-traced Half-Life has parts that also look very late-90s, however tremendously elevated with pretty beams of environmental gentle and superior reflections. The stark lab interiors of the Black Mesa Analysis Facility have a brand new stage of grim magnificence because of occasional baths of colourful gentle. Illuminating a darkish room filled with headcrab zombies with swimming pools of vitality left over by the tau cannon is sufficient to absolutely ship a nostalgic nerd like myself.

After all, you’ll need to have a reasonably beefy PC to render this impeccable lighting. Half-Life could also be outdated, however this lighting doesn’t come low-cost on GPU load. Some forumgoers say you could want a 4090 to play at 4K decision. But when your machine, like mine, is lower than the duty, not less than you may be a part of me in reveling in some screenshots from the continued ResetEra thread as different ray tracing connoisseurs reprise their roles as Gordon Freeman.

We’re residing within the age of impeccable sport remakes and remasters, each for classics and mid-aught gems, but it surely’s at all times cool to see a mixing of basic and trendy graphics like this fan challenge.