The best PC game of all time gets reborn with new ray tracing mod

Half-Life, Valve's masterpiece that's regarded as the best PC game of all time, is getting reborn with a new raytracing mod.

Skilled modders are completely overhauling Half-Life's in-game visuals with a new raytracing mod, similar to the recent RT updates to old-school shooter Quake 2. The result is a radical change in overall interior and exterior lighting and shadow effects--some of which are as different as light and day.

• Read more: Half-Life 2 RTX Remix with NVIDIA's new groundbreaking Neural Shaders running on the RTX 5090

The RT mod is a re-engineered version of the Vulkan Ray Tracing mod developed for the Xash3D FWGS engine, which is in turn a forked version of the the Xash3D engine originally made for universal compatibility with GoldSource games.

"Half-Life: Ray Traced integrates the real-time path tracing into the original Half-Life (1998). With the hardware accelerated ray tracing, it is possible to calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates," mod author sultim_t says.

The Half-Life raytracing mod is due out sometime in 2022 and will be available here when it's ready.