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Half-Life remake Black Mesa is getting a remake… in the original Half-Life engine

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

Now another group of modders is taking Black Mesa and… let me just check that I've got this right… remaking it in Half-Life 1's engine?

Yep. This is a thing that is happening. The mod is called Black Mesa Classic, and it's a demake of the Black Mesa remake, bringing the updated version of Half-Life back into the original game's engine. That's… interesting.

The mod project was actually announced back in 2019, so it's been underway for a while, but it just came to my attention with news that a demo of one level, We've Got Hostiles, had been released for people to try. Unfortunately, that demo was removed the same day it was uploaded due to "a last minute issue," but it'll be back up "as soon as it is fixed," according to the modders. Hopefully that won't be long, because I'm genuinely curious to take a look at it.

"This is a GoldSRC project aimed to remake Black Mesa: Source with Half-Life assets on PC," says the mod's page on Moddb.com. "Our main vision for this is to give a new look to the original Half-Life in the original engine, adding more realism and immersion, making Half-Life more enjoyable and giving long life to GoldSRC."

The other goal is to make this version of Black Mesa playable for anyone on any sort of PC. Got an old laptop or ancient rig that doesn't run modern games all that well? You'll still be able to play Black Mesa Classic, provided your creaky PC is at least powerful enough to run the original Half-Life, which isn't a tall order.

We'll keep an eye on Black Mesa Classic as it continues development—the team is currently looking for additional mappers, modelers, animators, and programmers, so the finished mod sounds like it might be quite a long way off. Hopefully not quite as long as it took to bring Black Mesa to life.

 
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Isn't that water from HL2? I don't recall the original engine having refraction.
My thoughts exactly. It didn't. That there is directX9 pixel shading, requing at least a geforce fx for it. (unless they have redid the effect for directX7, or older Open GL versions)

This requires directX 8+ pixel shaders to do. I remember my geforce 3 was the first to have it. Only some games did it in 2022, those being Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, and that was about it at the time.
Half life 1 was out in 1998, and popular in 1999, This was voodoo 2 into Voodoo 3 era. 16 bit colors, multitextured and colored lights. No pixel shaders, hell there wasn't hardware t&l yet until 2000 with the geforce 1/2 cards (and the sad death of voodoo gfx) .

Geforce 3 changed all that and gave vertex and pixel shaders, but they were basic. Look at morrowind water for good example. It didn't get a bump until hl2 and directX9.
Half-life2 was out when geforce 4 and FX were out, and directX9 launched. 2004, tons of games were now using shaders and half-life2, doom3 along with far cry and others pushed this to the next level.
 
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