The Half-Life: Ray Traced mod has been released

An eagerly anticipated ray tracing mod for Valve‘s classic first-person shooter Half-Life has been released.

A video of Half-Life: Ray Traced, which was made by modder Sultim Tsyrendashiev, is viewable below.

“Half-Life: Ray Traced integrates the real-time path tracing into the original Half-Life (1998),” according to its creator.

“With the hardware accelerated ray tracing, it is possible to calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates.”

To access the mod, players need to download the necessary files from the Half-Life: Ray Traced GitHub page and merge them with a copy of Half-Life 1 on Steam.

The mod’s release has been eagerly anticipated, due in no small part to Tsyrendashiev’s past work on ray traced mods for Serious Sam, Doom and Quake.

Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell said in May 2021 that the company had multiple games in development and was keen to make more single-player experiences following Half-Life Alyx’s release the previous year.

“We definitely have games in development that we’re going to be announcing — it’s fun to ship games,” he told 1 NEWS.

“Alyx was great — to be back doing single-player games, that created a lot of momentum inside of the company to do more of that.”

However, Newell refused to be drawn on the subject of new Half-Life and Portal games when questioned about potential sequels.

Further reading

An hour of footage of Arkane’s cancelled Half-Life game has been released

The Dishonored studio's Half-Life spin-off, 'Ravenholm', never saw the light of day

“I’ve successfully not spoken about those things for a long time and I hope to continue to not talk about them until they are moot questions,” he said. “Then we’ll move on to a new set of questions.

“The nice thing is, by not answering those questions, I avoid the community coming up with new, equally-difficult-to-answer questions.”