Software engineer ‘sultim-t’, the man behind the amazing Serious Sam TFE: Ray Traced, is currently working on a Ray Tracing mod for Half-Life. This mod aims to add a full path tracing renderer to the game.
This full path tracing renderer will calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects. This is basically what most PC gamers wanted to see from NVIDIA after the release of Quake 2 RTX.
In order to showcase a WIP build from this mod, sultim-t released the following gameplay video. This video shows off the game’s upcoming ray-traced effects, and we highly recommend watching it.
If Serious Sam TFE: Ray Traced is any indication of the quality of this mod, then we are in for a treat. Although Serious Sam had some level design issues with its newly implemented real-time ray tracing effects, it was highly enjoyable.
I also hope that sultim-t will try to bring a full path tracing renderer to the first Unreal game. The first Unreal game is a classic FPS, and would definitely benefit from some ray tracing effects.
We’ll be sure to let you know when Half-Life Ray Traced becomes available. Until then, enjoy the following video!
Kudos to our reader “Art Tur” for bringing this to our attention.
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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I’m glad to see Half Life getting this. It’s definitely one of the great classic games from the late 90s. 1998 was a very good year for quality fun games Half Life, Unreal, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate, Grim Fandango and Starcraft.
This game needs a remake or the fabled HL3 not ray tracing, period.
Half Life 1 got a Remake
Remake is called Black Mesa.
I think he actually wants Half Life 3, but said remake instead. Poor choice of words.
But is it a remake of the fabled HL3?
You can tell Q2 is fully path traced as you can literally see the ray speckles on everything. I’m not convinced by this, it looks like just the global lighting is traced, at least from this video.
Its good to see old classics get some new tech added though, would love to see it in System Shock 2 remake with some PBR textures.
It’s the other way around lol, this is actually not entirely traced, which is why it should be called RAY.
Quake was fully traced in every aspect except for some explosions which relied in sprites i think, it was legitimate Path Tracing.
This looks a lot worse than Quake, original Quake path traced manually looked 100% photorealistic, it just looked like someone playing with toy gums, over a stone counter.
Ray Tracing = X effect/Multiple effects being Ray Traced.
Path Tracing = Everything is Ray Tracing.
This Half-Life video still looks almost entirely rasterized, not even remotely comparable with Quake in terms of Path Tracing.
Wow…you’re sure a f*king a**hole, aren’t you?
Who gives a f*k what you think, a*shole. You could have been…oh, I dunno…a bit more polite, instead of being a f*king jerk.
They need to use it on HL remake, not this old trash
Old trash????
Yes, old. There is a remake
DID YOU JUST CALL OG HALF-LIFE TRASH?!!!!
BLASPHEMY! THIS IS MADNESS!!!
Truth is,with the very heavy cost of the currently half baked ray tracing,you can get much more with rasterization. We should also note that ray tracing is not gonna miraculously make a very dated game visually attractive despite it’s very high cost on performance. it is just one of the several factors needed for better graphics .
Suspect we are at least 10-15 years away before the main stream can do any meaningful “full” raytracing and the dev’s will have to do hybrid approaches until then. First when we get FULL raytracing will the dev’s (and we) start to see the real benefits IE more realistic gfx and no need for the devs to spend alot of time to fake and bake lightning that needs to be done with raster…
That will make the dev part much easier… make the scene, place the lights and they will behave as they should – No need to spend time faking a lights behaviour/shadow/ambient occlusion/global illumination etc etc
Personally i hope for some serious breakthrough that will ease the insane need for computational power to get realtime raytracing going even for the masses…
That looks pretty awesome! Good to see actual ray tracing, instead of the fake RTGI!
Ehhh, if it’s anything like the Serious Sam one it’s going to not only run like a*s. It will look like a*s too. As the temporal denoising and TAA is beyond terrible and completely ruins the experience.
t’s a neat tech demo but nothing more or less to serve as yet another showcase why full path traced rendering is a step backwards and pointless. Much like Quake2RTX.
Besides some reflections, not very different from the original since the lighting together with shadows and radiosity are already pre-baked when the maps are compiled.
Does it really makes the game look better? It still looks crappy as it did. Kinda pointless.
Aside from the reflections in the puddle on the floor, I don’t think it looks better. The shadows are darker and it removed a lot of the light colour bounce from a lot of the scenes. And it’s actually too bright in the outdoor areas it seems.