Nvidia announces a community-made RTX remaster of Half-Life 2

first came to outletAnd now we come to the other great classic of the source engine: Half life 2 Get a modified version of ray tracing Thanks to the efforts of the community mod team supported by Nvidia.

Embarrassing title Half-Life 2 RTX: The RTX Remix Project, the modified version is currently under development with no specific release date. Nvidia announced it today as part of its previous Gamescom presentations. The remaster will use RTX Remix, Nvidia’s suite of tools to bring ray tracing to classic PC games. RTX Remix was previously announced with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for example; It seeks to give community modders and hobbyists the ability to perform ray tracing conversions for older games, but it’s still only available to a handful of people.

The people, in this case, are a group of modders from multiple community projects who have banded together under the name Orbifold Studios. The team includes modders who have worked on virtual reality Half life 2 project Project 17Asset Rework Project Half-life 2 origins remasteredComprehensive conversation style level up: redux, And another VR model is simply called Half-Life 2 VRamong others.

They’re adding modern Nvidia features like full ray tracing and DLSS, reconstructing game assets with more geometry detail and physical rendering (PBR) properties, etc – similar to what was already done with RTX Introduction Portal.

The short teaser video showing the model’s debut only shows one area of ​​the game, but it’s a highlight: Dr. Kleiner’s laboratory, which is one of the first areas the player visits in the game and arguably the point where the game begins. High alert. It’s an instantly recognizable room for anyone who remembers to dive into it Half life 2 In 2004, or anytime after that, I think.

I often have a concern about these types of community reworks because when I’ve seen other examples – such as popular asset upgrade mods for The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimFor example – I often feel like it hurts the original artist’s vision too much. This conversion looks very correct from the examples we’ve seen. The material etc. is generally correct, although you lose some of the finer details. For example, I think it reveals a bit of Dr. Kleiner’s character that his desk is so messy and sloppy that his keyboard is partially placed on top of his notebook in the original game, but this remastered version shows the notebook on a slightly better side. It’s small, but I think it’s important. However, none of this should be a deal breaker for what we were promised in terms of improved fidelity.

As mentioned, there is no release timeline for this mod, and if you know of mod projects like this, you know they can do it a period. But if you want to help move it forward, there is an open call for contributors to the project website.

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