The team behind Black Mesa has announced that the Xen chapters will be delayed until December. And while this will disappoint some Half-Life fans, the team released the first two screenshots from that section.
As the team stated:
“We know that this is not what anyone would want to hear, but after taking a long and hard look at what we want to achieve, we have decided that this is for the best. We do not want to compromise on Xen’s quality in any way. That said, we consider December to be a do-or-die deadline.”
The team has also implemented a new deferred rendering system that supports fully dynamic lights.
“These new “next-gen” lights cast real-time light, shadows and god rays. These won’t replace all the lights in the game, but we can use them in many special cases where we want the lights to be particularly gorgeous. These lights are much better optimized than other Source implementations of dynamic lights, and are more robust.”
The team has also added a color correction filter in order to better unify the game’s visual style and to add full screen effects during the more intense sections.
So yeah, great news overall (apart from the delay of Xen). Still, we strongly believe that the team should simply take its time and release it when it’s done (after all, the first initial release of Black Mesa was great, despite its numerous delays).
Black Mesa started as a free standalone Source mod but is currently available for sale on Steam at 19,99€.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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half life is a masterpiece when pc gaming was good…..
so true but people hated steam back then
Steam wasn’t around for Half Life, that was Half Life 2.
yes i am talking about that
of course we hated Steam, you saw freaking internet back in 2004? You downloaded 1GB for ages. It was painful.
And Steam itself was f*cking horrible back then, too.
It’s still pretty good now that PC gaming is great.
no…bad port,no exclusive like half life,piracy and bad community(look the case gta v)
Your original, damning with faint praise and typically trollish, comment and therefore my reply was solely in reference to Half-Life. Now you’re pretending like it was on the subject of something else while seizing on the opportunity to YET AGAIN troll PC gaming with another of your semi-literate scattergun blasts of verbal diarrhea. gg
I’ve been playing PC games for the past 30 years and this is the first time we have all genres well covered in the platform. PC gaming is the best it has ever been!
We have all genres well covered? Singleplayer FPS has been dead for over a decade. All console trash after 2007.
Still a Masterpiece… For EVER!!!!
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/335579e2ffbbca61004d91fe4348b821da9652c7ce669b020907e4b07e85d393.jpg
what is this?
Another pic, and it looks amazing and by the way if you ask it’s Half-Life: Source + HD Textures.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/706f23331826f654d5a828fa3d80d75c00ef4662eec0d2ca4553d9bc370e94e8.jpg
it does
Didnt you get blocked? What is this your 3rd acount”?
Looks amazing, can’t wait to do another playthrough once it’s finally fully complete.
Looking forward to this, the remake was very good.
Perhaps every single game dev’ ought to seek your personal approval before committing to projects given that you’re evidently the self-proclaimed authority on deciding such matters.
Either that, or wake up to the fact that the world doesn’t revolve around you!
“before committing to projects”
But they missed zen and surface tension. They didnt commit enough. Its been years since black mesa is out and still not finished.
Surface Tension was one of their guys leaving half-way through & them not replacing him. It was a dumb call to make, but I guess they saw the independent bloke’s progress on his own Surface Tension Uncut Mod & they figured they could rely on him, instead.
…… Probably.
As for Xen; yeah, but like they themselves said from the start, Xen is different to the rest of the game, so they’re approaching it separately.
Also, I’d point out that Black Mesa “part 1” also took years to come out (2005-2012) & then once Valve decided to put it on Steam (2013), they also had to take some time off to augment the quality of “part 1” before going back to augmenting + completing Xen (Black Mesa went Steam Early Access in 2015).
Yeah, they’ve got a bit of a f*cked up priority system, I agree, but considering how slowly development was moving when it was an unpaid Mod, it’s honestly a minor miracle that Xen is coming out this soon, considering everything else they’ve also patched in since Black Mesa was first released as a free mod.
Incredibly impressed with Black Mesa, bought it a while back. Probably the best FPS since Half Life 2 and more fun the HL2 as well. This is goods new all around.
Finally!!
Its never too late when it comes to Half Life 🙂 Better late than never lol. We dont get anything HL related anymore.. so this is pretty sweet.
Also this “mod” is one of my favourite games of all time! I cant really complain ;p
They forgot to do surface tension. We got and unfinished project.
yup and later they released surface tension on moddb as a mod for black mesa……wtf?
Independent bloke finished Surface Tension, separately from the Black Mesa team, so they had to integrate his work directly into their own.
The amount of effort they’re putting into Xen is really starting to get rather disturbing……
In a good way, of course.
“the most fun levels – Xen.”
What.
Depends on how well they’re done. Half-Life OG definitely had its moments, absolutely, but those were most certainly not it as far as I’m concerned.
F.E.A.R. in 2005…….
‘Nuff said ;P
“Next-gen”?? Looks like traditional stencil shadows like Doom 3, Riddick, The Darkness, FEAR etc.