One of the most typical memes on the internet has to do with Half-Life 3, a delivery that does not arrive and it seems that it will never arrive. Gabe Newell himself, the head of Valve and, therefore, Steam, has joked on many occasions with this third installment. Well, now you can enjoy Half-Life with Ray Tracing , thanks to a mod.
We must emphasize that Ray Tracing has as many fans as detractors. This technology really brings interesting things to games, the big problem is the cost. Having the pleasure of using ray tracing is an additional cost that many users cannot or do not want to pay.
Half-Life with Ray Tracing, thanks to a mod
As part of the Ray Tracing promotion, NVIDIA launched Quake RTX , a revision of the mythical game with this technology. Despite the fact that they announced more classic games with the integration of ray tracing, this has not happened. The most “classic” game that has received it in recent years is Minecraft . Yes, there are other games that have received ray tracing, but through unofficial mods.
Now you can enjoy Ray Tracing in Half-Life thanks to a mod developed by Sultim Tsyrendashive . It has a library on GitHub with the mod to implement this technology in the game that Valve created in 1998. We can download the mod at no cost and use it for free.
We should not expect modern graphics, since the base of the game is the same. Yes, lighting effects have been added that give the game another air, they modernize it a lot. From the demos we’ve seen, the game wins quite a bit with this implementation. Something like this happened with Quake RTX, which although it continued with the original graphics, the lighting effects give it a new look.
You have to be aware that to play it you need an NVIDIA RTX graphics card . We went from a game that could be run on a Raspberry Pi, to a game with very advanced needs.
There are many comments from users who have tried it and indicate that it is great. There are also some who have run the game in 4K resolution with an NVIDIA RTX 4090. We have to say that when the game was released, 4K resolution did not exist, just like 1080p, they are added.
Do you want to try the game with these light effects?
To access this mod, you need to download the Ray Tracing Mod on Sultim’s GitHub. This is at no cost to the user, what’s more, you can even optimize the code to improve performance if you want. Although what you do need is to have purchased Half-Life on Steam.
Installing the mod is something really simple:
- We open Steam and access our Library , looking inside the Half-Life game
- We right click on the game and a menu will appear
- We have to go to Manage and from the options we must click on View local files
- We download the mod on our computer
- We proceed to unzip the files hl1-rt.zip and hl1-rt-resources.zip
- We copy it to the local Half-Life folder and tell it to replace all the files that are necessary
- Now, we run the file rt_bin/xash3d.exe
- Finally, we press the letter X on our keyboard to change the renderer
Tell us what you think of this mod for Half-Life, we want to know your opinion after running the game with Ray Tracing.
