Half Life Source Port

[Marcelo Chaplin]

FreeHLis a Half-Life source port much like Xash3D and Xash3D-FWGS. As GoldSrc isn't open source, like Xash3D it's forked from Quakeworld (specifically FTEQW) with Half-Life features reverse engineered, though unlike Xash3D it does not use source code from the Half-Life SDK which may make it a more attractive option for those wanting to incorporate it into their own open source projects that are incompatible with the Half-Life SDK licence (Xash3D has also been accused of using leaked source code however the developers deny this - I haven't seen any evidence for this, as far as I can tell they're only using public SDK source code).

While it's Half-Life 1/GoldSrc support isn't complete yet, it looks like the developers have already started work on very preliminary support for Half-Life 2, with the intent of also supporting other Source Engine games in the future. As of now many Source features aren't supported - it's even still using the Half-Life 1 HUD and the Half-Life/Quake-style console, making it look quite similar to early pre-release screenshots of Half-Life 2.

This will be the first Source Engine source port and will open up a lot of possibilities in the future for Source Engine modding as well as porting Source games to officially unsupported platforms. I'm excited to see what will come out of this.

I'm aware that source port is technically not the correct term for reverse engineering projects, as the Doom64 EX team once made clear. However ever since the Super Mario 64 decompilation project a lot of people seem to be calling ports that are based on reverse engineering - as opposed to officially released source code - source ports, therefore I'm using it here as a colloquial term.

And there's something with the way the port looks that makes it eye candy. My only complaint would be the lack of support for the Steam version, but it has already been said that there's no plans for that, so I'm gonna have to resort to the CD version.

The PlayStation 2 version was announced to be developed by Gearbox Software on November 17, 2000.[1] It was released in November 2001. The character and weapons models are much more detailed in this version. The levels were also updated and extended based on the work from the Dreamcast port. The game also features an exclusive multiplayer cooperative mode called Half-Life: Decay, and a two player multiplayer deathmatch mode.

The Mac OS X and Linux ports were developed and released by Valve on Steam without any prior announcements on January 25, 2013.[2] Both versions support cross-platform, allowing the players to play with PC users online. The SDK was also ported over to allow modders to create and compile mods for these platforms.[3]

Half-Life: Source is a direct port of Half-Life to the Source engine. It was released along with Half-Life 2 on November 16, 2004. It uses the special effects and physics engine features of the new engine. According to Doug Lombardi, it began as an experiment to see what modders would experience if they attempted to bring their Half-Life mods forward to Source. The multiplayer portion was released in another package called Half-Life Deathmatch: Source in 2005. Both games were later ported to Mac OS X and Linux and released in 2013.[4][5]

Unrelated to the Mac OS X version that was ultimately released by Valve in 2013, the Macintosh (Mac OS) port of Half-Life was announced to be in development by Logicware on April 23, 1999.[6] According to Rebecca Heineman, a programmer on the project, the work on the game was nearly done, and it was three weeks away from the gold master when it was cancelled on October 19, 1999.[7]

Heineman claims that someone at Apple overestimated the number of units of the game would sell and told Gabe Newell that they can sell half a million units. Newell funded and hired Logicware to work on the project. Sierra found out that the figures they were getting were nowhere near the projected sales, meaning the game would not sell enough to support the ongoing development it would need to keep it in sync with the updates to the PC version. This led to the cancellation of the project.[8] Several years later, a second attempt almost brought this Mac port fruition, but this plan was once again came to an end, this time due to a rejection by Newell.[9]

The game was designed with cross-platform capability in mind, which allowed Mac users to play with PC users online. It was cut after Sierra's decision, possible to avoid a situation of a patch breaking the compatibility between the platforms sometime in the future. It is unknown if the game was intended to have mod support. This could be done by a possible source code release to allow modders to recompile and port over their mods.

A Dreamcast port was initially planned to be developed by PyroTechnix, a division of Sierra at the time. Starting in January 1999, only one software engineer had a very short opportunity to begin work on the project, having access to the game's source code for three days, before the company received word that Sierra was closing them down, quickly cancelling this iteration of the port.[9]

On February 14, 2000, the Dreamcast version was announced to be in developed by Gearbox Software and Captivation . It was stated that Captivation would be handling the technology work while Gearbox would create all of the new content. It was cancelled only a few weeks away from its projected release date, due to changing market conditions on June 15, 2001.[10][11] The port was to feature an exclusive mission pack called Half-Life: Blue Shift, which was later released for PC as a standalone expansion pack, along with the new models created for the port.

After releasing their PlayStation 2 port, Gearbox began considering bringing Half-Life to the Nintendo GameCube as well. In early 2002, they hired Russell Bornschlegel, who previously worked on the cancelled Dreamcast port at Captivation as the lead engineer, to perform the engine research. However, only a bare feasibility analysis was completed as the company decided not to go forward as they believed the port ultimately wouldn't be profitable.[9]

The rumors of Black Mesa's death have been greatly exaggerated. It has, however, been over three years since Gordon Freeman went for an all-too-brief jog in his shiny new hazard suit. No, gaming's favorite man of zero words and 1000 crowbar swings per minute hasn't suddenly affixed a chainsaw to his gun or moved his adventures to an unnamed wartorn Middle Eastern setting, but a lot's changed.

Once upon a time, this was Valve's firstborn with a fresh coat of paint. Now, though, the Black Mesa team's pouring its own blood, sweat, and tears into one of gaming's most sacred holy grails - for better or worse. Only time will tell. But how much time? One more year? Two? Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (aka, a billion)? And what state is the remake in now? I spoke with project lead Carlos Montero about all of that and more.

RPS: What stage of development are you on at this point? Are you still designing content, or is it mostly polish now? And, if the latter, is it tempting to over-polish - to tweak every last thing relentlessly because you've already put so much work into the project, and anything less than perfection could be viewed as a failure?

Carlos Montero: There's been a lot of speculation that we have been doing nothing but polish for the last year or longer. This is simply not true. There were and are still parts of the game that we are actively developing, because the game isn't done yet. It is true that over the last year we have put a ton of polish into the game, but this has largely been because some members of the team are less needed on the forefront of development and have taken to polishing old things and trying to achieve quality and consistency across the board.

There is also work that some may casually classify as "polish" that is really more about making sure we are hitting the quality bar we want. If we are examining level flow, pacing, weapon progression, puzzle challenges, player intuition, where people get lost, or stuck, or confused, is that polish? Perhaps it is, but often I think many people are specifically thinking we are sitting around remaking the same assets over and over a little better each time, or trying to find and fix every bug so our game can be "perfect". This couldn't be farther from the truth.

This hasn't been about polish for polish's sake; it's been about learning all there is to know about how to make great games, and using it to make a great game. There aren't any shortcuts there. We just had to learn by doing, by making mistakes, by screwing things up and starting them over again. Sometimes along the way we have learned things that fundamentally changed our way of thinking, and sometimes we have gone back and fundamentally changed parts of the game to reflect that.

So no, I don't think it is tempting to over-polish at all. We are all eager to get the game out. We are dying to get this game out and show everyone what we've been working on, but we aren't so eager that we would sacrifice our values and what we believe will make this game great. We aren't going to put out something that isn't good enough for us.

Carlos Montero: First off - Black Mesa is a not a port. It is literally illegal for us to port anything. Black Mesa is mostly made from scratch, excepting a few assets from the SDK. Pretty much every sound effect, every texture, every voice-over - all of it. We didn't have the luxury of porting a single thing from HL1. Not AI, not level design, none of it. So let's talk about some of Black Mesa's big bullet-point features:

These features are just the tip of the iceberg, really. We've put a lot of love into making this game an amazing experience. When it comes to systems, levels, and weapons, we've touched everything, because we made it all from scratch. We tried to keep what we felt was evocative of the original Half-life, but when recreating these things we have inherently re-designed them. The combat, the puzzles, the mechanics and pacing of every level have been re-designed. The weapon strengths, animations, balance aspects - all re-designed. The systems, aside from being completely coded from scratch, have all been re-designed to some degree. There is nothing we haven't touched, honestly.

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