Impressive Half-Life 1 ray tracing mod now available to download
Half-Life: Ray Traced, a new mod adding hardware accelerated ray tracing to Valve's seminal first-person shooter, is now available to download following its reveal last summer.
Half-Life: Ray Traced is the work of modder Sultim Tsyrendashiev — who previously created similar, extremely well-received ray tracing mods for the likes of Series Sam 1, Doom, and Quake — and is based on another previous attempt at Half-Life ray tracing.
Introducing the project last year, Tsyrendashiev explained, «Half-Life: Ray Traced integrates the real-time path tracing into the original Half-Life (1998). With the hardware accelerated ray tracing, it is possible to calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates.»
As Tsyrendashiev previously promised, the playable release version of Half-Life: Ray Traced has been made available to download via Github. Those interested in giving it a whirl will first need to acquire a copy of the original Half-Life 1 on Steam then follow the instructions provided.
Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia took at look at Tsyrendashiev's Quake ray tracing mod at the end of last year and came away highly impressed, calling it «incredible» and «less a mod and more a full-on RT remaster for one of PC's finest games».
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