And the time has finally come for all Half-Life fans. No no no, Valve has not announced Half-Life 3… yet. However, Crowbar Collective has released the complete version of Black Mesa in a beta form.
What this means is that PC gamers can get the entire Half-Life experience in Black Mesa. Black Mesa Complete Beta features all the levels from the first Half-Life games, including older and new levels for Xen.
As we reported in a previous article, Black Mesa was a bit more demanding than what we were anticipating. Crowbar Collective was aware of these performance issues and has been working on them since then. According to the team, the latest beta version of Black Mesa improves performance across the game, and targets specific areas to increase the frame rate on all machines.
Going into slightly more details, the latest beta version of Black Mesa also changes grenade aim point to be center screen for easier aiming. It also brings tons of small changes and fixes to the “Gonarch’s Lair” chapter, a number of bug fixes and more.
In order to gain access to the beta version of Black Mesa, you’ll have to follow this guide:
- Select “Black Mesa” in your library
- Right click and go to properties
- Select the “BETAS” tab at the top right
- Click the drop down and select “public-beta”
Lastly, you can find the complete changelog for Black Mesa Complete Beta here.
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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From “due winter 2005” to “finished December 2019.” Credit where credit’s due though: they saw it through to completion.
So this is still in Early Access state regardless? It’s not fully done?
It’s fully done. Just a beta, so you might encounter the occasional minor bug.
That’s what beta normally stands for. Not early access, not alpha. A beta release is feature complete.
it is still early access….
the real question is, yeeha simulator 2019 when?
same
Is this a mod for Half life 2? or is it a standalone game?
From Wikipedia:
Black Mesa began as the combination of two independent volunteer projects, each aiming to completely recreate Half-Life using Source. The Leakfree modification was announced in September 2004. The Half-Life: Source Overhaul Project was announced one month later.
After realizing their similar goals, project leaders for both teams
decided to combine their efforts; they formed a new 13-person team under
the name Black Mesa: Source
The “Source” in the project’s title was later dropped when Valve asked
the team to remove it in order to “stem confusion over whether or not
[it was] an endorsed or official product”, which at the time it was not.
Originally based on the version of Source released with Counter-Strike: Source in 2004, the project switched to a more recent version released with Valve’s The Orange Box in 2007. This new version included more advanced particle effects, hardware-accelerated facial animation, and support for multi-core processor rendering, amongst other improvements. The first standalone game came out in September 2012.
The team then stated that they had moved Black Mesa to
Valve’s new 2013 version of Source, with faster load times and Mac OS X
and Linux support, as well as modifying it to be its own hybrid engine.
The Black Mesa branch of the engine is a modified version of the Team Fortress 2 branch, as well as having features from games like Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. On October 27, 2016, the first Black Mesa Linux client was released to the public.
Guy asks a binary question and you copy paste a wall of text. How so very useful.
After reading through all that, I can confirm it’s stand-alone.
“It’s stand alone now.”
See, was that so hard?
I’ve been waiting for this since 2005. But i’ll wait some more till it’s out from the early access
Perfect timing! I just installed the Half-Life series 2 days ago as I
grabbed a couple of 4TB SSDs during the Black Friday sales.
And now that its done time to get it
It took them a decade but they finally done it kudos to them!
so nearly 15 years and they finally have it ready for beta in early access? lol good fvking grief.
At least they’re finishing it. Nearly every fan project doesn’t even reach early access.
Nice!
Just yesterday I spent ~5 hours installing hte original GOTY CD version of Half-Life with custom compilation of mods(Overhaul, AI_HD, Widescreen, etc). And, I have EAX surround enabled using SB X-Fi Titanium card…just when I was ready to start a playthrough this arrives!
EDIT: Fired up the beta…WOW! Looks absolutely amazing, and performs great! Max settings 4K@120+fps(avg.)!
Last time I launched Black Mesa was almost 2 years ago, and since then just looking at the tram ride intro, the amound of detail they’ve put in there is impressive! And the dynmic lights and shadows with HDR is pure eye-candy…
Have they made significant changes to the first part..I.e the black Mesa section?
I played black Mesa upto the Xen section last year(when no Xen was available), and it did look phenomenal.
Any significant change graphics wise with the completed Xen vs what was available last year?
The HDR + Dynmic lights and shadows, and observed more graphical details in terms of objects, and some map minor redesign without altering the base structure. Not sure how it was last year, but definitely much better from the last time I played it around 1.5+ yrs ago, the intro (Black Mesa map)has some great details added…
Thank you.
Looks like the right time to jump into the full experience.
Are the Xen levels interesting or are they just as vague and boring as in the original game?
I can’t play Half-Life anymore. I did so many times I just can’t anymore. Enjoy, guys.