New Black Mesa Xen Engine hotfix update released, improves dynamic shadows, lighting and performance


The team behind the amazing Half Life Black Mesa, a fan remake of the first Half-Life game in the Source Engine, has released a new hotfix update for it. According to the release notes, this hotfix improves most dynamic shadows flickering, most dynamic lights flickering on lower quality levels Nvidia GPUs,  features settings optimization for new deferred lighting and shadows, and improves the overall quality and performance.

In addition, it sports CSM quality and performance improvements, fixes CSM not working on some AMD cards, decals flickering in some maps, full screen blur when using dynamic light godrays, increases flashlight intensity and range and adds texture scrolling for dynamic light cookie textures.

The team has also announced that the Xen levels will be released after the next major engine update for Black Mesa Xen.

“We will probably do one more “Engine” release just before we drop Xen, in order to make sure that everything is running smoothly on everyone’s machines. We want the Xen release to be as close to a simple content release as possible”

Steam will download this patch the next time you launch its client, and you can find its complete changelog below.

Black Mesa Xen Engine April 2018 Patch Release Notes

  • Fixed screen freezes / crashes on Radeon RX 3XX 4XX 5xx cards!
  • Fixed most dynamic shadows flickering and improved the overall quality and performance
  • Fixed most dynamic lights flickering on lower quality levels Nvidia GPUs (and some AMD GPUs)
  • CSM quality and perf improvements
  • Fixed CSM not working on some AMD cards
  • Fixed decals flickering in some maps
  • Fixed full screen blur when using dynamic light godrays
  • Fixed zombie headshots with the crossbow. Now when you headshot a zombie using the crossbow, they will no longer spawn a live headcrab.
  • Fixed assault points for Houndeyes
  • Added texture scrolling for dynamic light cookie textures
  • Fixed tilemap animation bug in light cookie textures.
  • Fixed rim lighting not working with old light entities
  • Fixed Phong/skin shader specular not working on static props
  • Flashlight intensity and range increased
  • Settings optimization for new deferred lighting and shadows