Half-Life 1 Celebrates 25th Anniversary with Free Director's Cut!

Immediately Valve launched the Half-Life 1: Director’s Minimize to have a good time the sport’s Twenty fifth anniversary. From November 19 to twenty, 2023, Half-Life shall be free to maintain on Steam — with it’s new so-called “Half-Life: The Twenty fifth Anniversary Replace” — so choose it up whilst you can! Learn under what’s new….

Go behind-the-scenes with the unique Half-Life 1 improvement crew on this new documentary:

Half-Life: Twenty fifth Anniversary Documentary

THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY UPDATE
FOR HALF-LIFE INCLUDES:

HALF-LIFE UPLINK

Initially launched as a CD unique for magazines and {hardware} producers, this mini-campaign was constructed by the Half-Life crew proper after the sport went gold. As this was many individuals’s first expertise with Half-Life, we thought it was lastly time to bundle it with the principle sport—no sound card buy crucial.

4 NEW MULTIPLAYER MAPS

Constructed by Valve stage designers, these new maps push the bounds of what’s doable within the Half-Life engine.

CONTAMINATION

Two-foot-thick metal doorways block off entry to this contaminated waste facility, which has questionable scientific objectives at finest. Strap on a gluon gun and roast all intruders.

POOL PARTY

Take pleasure in a soothing keep at this deserted Xen outpost constructed round a cluster of soothing therapeutic swimming pools free-floating in house. How do you breathe right here? It doesn’t matter!

DISPOSAL

Processing Space 3, a large radioactive waste plant gone quiet. Tons of room for you and your colleagues to do experiments with a Tau Cannon or some hand grenades.

ROCKET FRENZY

The creaking weight of this decaying orbital satellite tv for pc launch facility by some means feels acquainted… If we may change on the oxygen traces, energy, and gasoline, we would simply be capable of gentle this candle.

UPDATED GRAPHICS SETTINGS

Play the sport the best way it regarded in 1998, however on a contemporary monitor.

Widescreen area of view!
Choice to disable texture smoothing on the GL renderer!
Lighting fixes together with the long-lost GL Overbright help!
Software program rendering on Linux! Crisp colours, animated water, and unfiltered textures!

CONTROLLER AND STEAM NETWORKING SUPPORT

A correct gamepad config out of the field!
Added help for Steam Networking! Invite your pals or be a part of video games immediately with no fuss.

STEAM DECK SUPPORT!

We lastly put our sport via our personal “Verified” checks, and… we failed tremendous arduous. So we mounted it! After re-testing the sport, Half-Life will get to formally put on the inexperienced checkmark.

Now you may play Half-Life on the most effective handheld gaming pc on the earth in superb 800p with improved controls and UI.

UI SCALING SUPPORT FOR HIGHER RESOLUTIONS

The whole UI has been reworked to scale at bigger display screen sizes. We constructed most of these things for 640×480 CRTs and apparently a few of you’ve upgraded since then.

RESTORED CONTENT

We introduced again the basic Valve brand video with its iconic music and reskinned the menu to match the 1998 construct.

ORIGINAL MAIN MENU ARTWORK

VALVE LOGO INTRO VIDEO

IVAN THE SPACE BIKER AND PROTO-BARNEY

In spite of everything this time we lastly shipped the unique heroes from the alpha builds of Half-Life, out there as multiplayer skins!

AS WELL AS THESE RARELY-SEEN EXTRAS!

In 1999, Valve launched a CD referred to as Half-Life: Additional Information at retail shops, and we’re lastly together with a lot of that content material.

THREE MULTIPLAYER MAPS

DOUBLE CROSS

RUST MILL

XEN DM

TWO MP PLAYER MODELS

The Half-Life: Additional Information CD additionally included some multiplayer skins made by the unique crew; we’ve introduced again this unimaginable skeleton (now with tintable eyes!) and fan-favorite Too A lot Espresso Man.

DOZENS OF SPRAYS

Whereas enjoying a bunch of multiplayer matches we saved wanting extra sprays… So we grabbed a number of megabytes of them from the Additional Information launch!

BUG FIXES AND CHANGE NOTES

New Content material:

Now Verified on the Steam Deck (and our native Linux runtime has been set because the default).
Half-Life: Uplink — the unique standalone Half-Life demo — has been added to the sport, and is accessible via the “New Recreation” menu.
Added 4 all-new Half-Life Deathmatch maps: contamination, pool_party, disposal, and rocket_frenzy
Added three outdated Half-Life Deathmatch maps previously out there solely on the “Half-Life: Additional Information” CD: doublecross, rust_mill, xen_dm.
Added Ivan the House Biker, Prototype Barney, Skeleton, and Too A lot Espresso Man as participant fashions to Half-Life Deathmatch.
Added dozens of recent sprays previously out there solely on the “Half-Life: Additional Information” CD.
Added help for Steam Networking, permitting simple multiplayer through Steam’s Be a part of Recreation and Invite options.
Added help for Steam Buddies Wealthy Presence, permitting your pals to observe your journey via Black Mesa.

Nostalgia:

Introduced again the unique Valve Intro video. Could be skipped with the “-novid” launch command.
Up to date fundamental menu to a design impressed by the sport’s unique 1998 fundamental menu.
Modified the default fashions to the unique (non “HD”) fashions.

Gameplay Modifications:

Improved physics for throwing grenades.
Improved randomness for preliminary spawn factors in multiplayer.
Improved satchel cost controls: major fireplace now all the time throws a brand new satchel, and secondary fireplace all the time detonates.
Mounted push-able entity motion being based mostly on framerate.
Mounted gamers with excessive framerates freezing in place on dying in multiplayer.
Mounted some circumstances the place the participant may get caught in place on stage transitions.
Mounted some circumstances the place characters would interrupt essential dialogue with their “greetings” dialogue.
Mounted weapon view-bob angles.
Mounted crimson barrels at first of Floor Stress not launching as supposed.
Mounted Snarks attacking FL_WORLDBRUSH entities (equivalent to func_walls).
Mounted gamers typically failing to deploy a snark whereas crouching and looking out down.
Mounted sure convars (“pausable” and “sv_maxspeed”) being set to incorrect values when coming into a singleplayer sport after a multiplayer sport.
Mounted singleplayer auto-aim setting being modified when coming into a multiplayer sport that disallows auto-aim.
Mounted the flashlight HUD exhibiting empty after loading a savegame.
Mounted rockets in CONTENTS_SKY not all the time detonating.
Mounted incorrect bullet influence sounds for NPCs.
Mounted gauss gun making a loud static noise if it was charged throughout stage transitions.
Mounted a crash in mods that show keybinds of their UI.
Mounted singleplayer weapons not auto-switching away when exhausted (grenades / snarks / satchels / and many others)
Mounted interpolation artifacts when animated fashions are moved by different entities.
Mounted some buffer overflow exploits.

UI Modifications:

Major-menu background and buttons have been reskinned, and now scale based mostly upon display screen decision with out stretching, supporting background picture layouts as much as 3840×1600.
In-Recreation HUD now makes use of double or triple sized sprites when enjoying at increased resolutions.
UI dialogs and in-game fonts now scale to enhance readability at excessive display screen resolutions.
In-Recreation HUD HEV swimsuit show has been shifted to the left of the display screen, and now not adjustments place at bigger display screen resolutions.
Added an “Allow texture filtering” setting.
Added an “Enable widescreen Discipline of View” setting to appropriate non-anamorphic FOVs, for widescreen and ultrawide shows.
Re-organized all of the Settings screens to enhance legibility, and help controller navigation.
Up to date the Pause menu to concentrate on the present gameplay mode.
The default server identify and multiplayer participant identify are actually based mostly on the participant’s Steam Persona.
The Steam platform menu has been eliminated, now that each one its options are in Steam itself.
Mounted utility icon rendering incorrectly when utilizing the software program renderer.
Mounted participant and spray photos not updating their coloring on the settings display screen.
Eliminated the now very pointless “Low video high quality. Helps with slower video playing cards.” setting.

Enter Modifications:

Improved help for keyboard and controller navigation all over the place.
Added “Decrease Enter Latency” possibility: Synchronizes the CPU and GPU to cut back the time between enter and show output.
Mounted points that induced jerky mouse / joystick enter.
(We principally rewrote all of it – in case you’ve bought a customized Steam Enter controller configuration, you must rebuild it from our newly revealed Official Configuration).

Multiplayer Balancing:

Elevated the 357 injury from 40 ? 50.
Hive Hand reload time has been diminished from 0.5s ? 0.3s per shot, and it is going to be chosen at increased precedence than the pistol on pickup.
MP5 now all the time begins it with full ammo when picked up.
Gamers now not drop empty weapons, and any which can be dropped are reloaded by what’s within the dying participant’s backpack.
Improved client-side prediction to cut back “ghost photographs”. Like Counter-Strike, contemplate hitboxes and never simply bounding bins for hits on the consumer.
Mounted community predicted crowbar swing injury being incorrect.

Rendering:

Added supported for UI Sprites and Texture information bigger than 256×256.
Added help for UI Font particular render modes: “blur” and “additive”.
Added setting to show off texture filtering when utilizing the OpenGL renderer.
Default decision is now based mostly on the decision of the desktop, as a substitute of a 640×480 window.
Default gamma has been decreased from 2.5 ? 2.2, now that we aren’t all enjoying on CRTs.
Software program renderer will now appropriately filter out incompatible resolutions, until there may be only one decision out there on the show.
Restored OpenGL overbright help.
Mounted fullscreen software program renderer crashing on methods that don’t help 16-bit shade.
Mounted software program renderer being stretched when utilizing widescreen resolutions.
Mounted skyboxes and sky shade incorrectly carrying over when transitioning maps in multiplayer.
Mounted the sport showing too darkish after modifying video settings.
Mounted MSAA in windowed mode.
Mounted mipmap rendering on studio fashions.
Mounted gluon gun sprite rendering in multiplayer.
Mounted gluon gun sinusoidal noise being incorrect.
Varied optimizations to help the newly elevated engine limits.
OpenGL optimizations for the Steam Deck.

Engine Enhancements for Mod Makers:

Elevated most restrict of dynamic sound channels from 8 ? 32.
Elevated most restrict of sentences within the sentences.txt file from 1536 ? 2048.
Elevated most variety of entities (MAX_EDICTS) from 900 ? 1200.
Elevated MAX_PACKET_ENTITIES elevated from 256 ? 1024.
Elevated MAX_GLTEXTURES from 4800 ? 10000.
Elevated software program renderer geometry limits: max spans 3000 ? 6000, max surfaces 2000 ? 4000, and max edges 7200 ? 14400.
Cycler and func_button entities can now be the entity goal for scripted_sentence entities, and are allowed to talk in multiplayer.
Integrated func_vehicle entity help from Counter-Strike, for mod-makers to make use of. Full SDK replace will come later, however stage designers can use it now.

Native Linux Construct:

Added help for the software program renderer.
Improved font rendering.
Many stability and conduct fixes.

Different:

Localization information up to date.
Miscellaneous safety fixes.

Notes:

The earlier model of the sport has been archived to a publicly seen Beta department named “steam_legacy”, with the outline “Pre-Twenty fifth Anniversary Construct.” If a mod or function is behaving in an surprising approach, you might must run this archived construct till the difficulty is resolved within the default construct.
We now contemplate this anniversary model of Half Life to be the definitive model, and the one we’ll proceed to help going ahead. Subsequently, we’ll be lowering the visibility of Half Life: Supply on the Steam Retailer. We all know Half-Life: Supply’s property are nonetheless being utilized by the Supply engine neighborhood, so it’ll stay out there, however we’ll be encouraging new Half-Life gamers to play this model as a substitute.