What Even is Half-Life 2: RTX? 

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Half-Life fans are truly dedicated people

I think nvidia should sponsor the project. It's crazy they aren't already.

Gawd why does looking at high res assets feel so good, I would just stare at filing cabinets and cardbord boxes if this was in VR

In case of Portal Prelude RTX, it was remade by the same team that brought Portal Prelude, including the lead, Nicolas "Nyk018" Grevet.

Really wish VALVe would have taken the initiative with this one and give a hand in directing the remaster process and get people compensated for the work. The models presented are mad impressive in their details, but I hope they all adhere to performance requirements and one unified artistic style. Maybe it is, I don't know.

The fact that Half-Life fans are willing to output AAA quality assets with no extrinsic incentive expected is honestly beautiful. Showcasing pure passion and dedication that is rarely seen these days. Hat's off to the developers.

The people doing this should get compensated.

I wonder if these assets would ever work with HL2 VR

Happy marriage!

The way I see it, there was already a community of people working to make higher quality assets for HL2, but now Remix is giving them a focal point for their efforts. If Nvidia didn't help set up Orbifold Studio, there would still have been a community of volunteers that grouped together to make this happen someday anyways. Its not like they are being forced to work with no pay. I'd make the guess its a passion project for them. Still though, some sort of compensation would have been really cool of Nvidia. Personally, I am extremely excited to see what comes of this. I have been dying to see some sort of HL2 remaster or remake for years. To the point I was about to start on my own remaster project just before this got announced. My only real concern is that performance will be an issue like most other RTX games and projects.

IF Nvidia is using the project as free advertising and the contributors aren't getting paid then I'd not get involved. Straight up wage theft, period.

I feel awesome about HL2 RTX, and personally I don't really care all that much if it doesn't align with Valve's original vision or art style, so long as it's beautful and runs alright. I'm excited to experience Half Life 2 in such a way

there should be more games led by Valve but developed by other studios, like what they did with Turtle Rock and now to a different extent with Orbifold. the main company can still focus on pioneering technology while also putting out titles worthy of the brand name. as long as they're not acquired afterward and forced to work on Steam 'til the Sun blows up.

First ridge wallet sponsor I've seen since Trevor Jacob lol.

I'm mostly excited about seeing the models being used in other games like vrchat, gmod and bonelab modding communities are going to go crazy with these extremely high detail models, also replaying half life in rtx will feel like an entirely different game, its going to be a wonderful experience.

if Valve can just increase the game memory for HL2 like they did for TF2, combining with RTX project we can have a beautiful looking HL2 experience with larger levels. It will take years for this idea to turn real but just the thought of it makes me hope to see a community project merging HL2 maps together at some point in the future.

nvidia should recompensate these people at least with stash of newest graphic cards

there was also a mirrors edge RTX that was apparently cancelled

I know it defeats the point, but I wonder if we could disable the RTX, and just get the textures and models

It would be really nice if Valve and Nvidia actually paid these people

There's clearly a lot of very tallanted people working on this new build and it could really be a game changer for mod makers if it turns out well. My only worry is that some parts of the footage I've seen looks a bit off. For example the wooden floors in Ravensholm look a bit too clean considering it's meant to be a ruined town overtaken by a zombie outbreak. I really hope that's just down to this being an early version of the rtx and they can stay true to the classic Half Life 2 artstyle.

I'm looking forward to trying it. I would prefer if it was an official Valve-made remaster with VR support, though.

5:03 Just want to say how much I love this Grigori model. It looks like they’ve taken inspiration from the Half Life Alyx style of humans.

Still wondering if the Remastered Collection is still coming soon

If this is as good as I feel it is gonna be, I think Nvidia should definitely sponsor the work that the team are doing for this. It looks so high quality and well made, it could start a renaissance for the Source modding scene. I'm 100% down for that.

What I'm hoping is that, after this releases, the assets could be used for non-proprietary stuff. Like, the Portal 2: Desolation branch of Source supports modern lighting techniques and PBR assets. Someone might be able to use that to make a build that doesn't depend on runtime RTX stuff.

RTX Remix is supposed to be a tool for communities to remake and breathe new life into older games. There are soooo many games which people wanted remade for years and years on end and when people actually do end up making these on newer engines they get cease and desist letters up the ***. Advertising it by having it be used the way it's intended is now a bad thing? Sure I never mind people getting compensated for their hard work but crying about people not getting paid for work they're knowingly doing without compensation simply motivated by the passion they have for games from their past I just don't understand. Nobody is getting extorted and sure Nvidia is the only one really gaining anything from it for now but I think this tool will help make that dream of remaking older games that the license holders don't care about anymore finally come true for many.

This is pretty much the Metroid Prime Remastered treatment

Congrats on the future wedding

i love the textures . they are insanely detailed and true to original. but a hl2 remaster thats locked to high end nvidia gpus is weird. hope there will be mod using high end textures but doesnt require rtx cards. they are not getting paid for this is pretty bad. they wont be able to give their 100%. will take a really long time to finish. they probably wont dare to do all chapters. got excited about it but i will be waiting the half life 2 update guy for remaster. but i dont know if his textures gonna be as amazing as rtx remix ones.

Look at Black Mesa, it was a fan project that took many, many years to finish.. at some point valve got involved and picked it up as an actual game sponsored by them with a license being given to Crowbar Collective.. Maybe if Nvidia isn't going to do the right thing Valve will?

This will go hard with the upcoming Fakefactory Remastered mod, which keeps a vanilla friendly style, while enhancing and adding stuff

8:07 I'm pretty sure it can *only* run at the DX7 feature level, actually. That's the main limitation of this software and the type of rendering pipeline it is compatible with as far as I've heard.

Basicly Half Life 2 Remastered, just not from Valve.

Does anybody know the background music around 6:00? Been meaning to ask for a while

Yeah, I feel like a compensation would go a long way in motivating the team to go forward. Feels bad to get a this for free lol.

Seeing Father Grigori's model in its new version compared to the original has really impressed me a lot.

I don't get why anyone would essentially work for Nvidia, of all companies, for free. I think that's absolutely bizarre. It's one of the highest valued companies in the world. But its up to the people doing the work. If they want to do it pro bono for some reason, more power to them. I'll be playing it when it comes out regardless though. 🤷‍♂️

Whether or not there's some legal restrictions in what the team can say, I don't know. But there's a video where the Half-life 2: RTX team talks about how Nvidia has been involved in the project and how this is a sort of test case for what is possible with the tool Nvidia developed. Nvidia has someone dedicated to working with the team, but on the tool side. Feedback from the HL2:RTX team is then sent to the remix team to work on fixing bugs and making the tool better. I really wish it was Valve that was funding the project as well as possibly opening up communication for any questions and assets from the team (textures and models in original resolution, questions about art direction). Nvidia profits from this in terms of advertising, but this whole remix project has been funded from them from the beginning and is a huge benefit to the gaming community as a whole (gpu exclusivity aside). Valve gets their game remastered for free and gets free advertising for their game and company. Valve seems to be getting away with offering nothing but permission for a very public and publicized project. They could help their publicity by funding it.

It's amazing how much detail those remade Half-Life 2 assets have, they look pretty much movie quality.

I wonder if someone would lower the polycount wherever possible and have details normal-mapped but retain the lighting (but have options for amount/focus for reflections and culling)

The project looks really good. People from the community doing this kind of work should be paid a gazillion dollars or at least have a confirmed job offering after this...

That headcrab looks freaking amazing

This needs to be out in time for half-life 2 20 year anniversary this year

can you imagine half life two RTX VR? what a sight that would be. it's not even a new game but it would be a contender for GOTY in my book

that thumbnail was catalyst for my mind to imagine massive storydriven game with beautiful scenery, does anybody know games like that ???

No, they can't be paid by nVidia. If they do, they'll need a license from Valve as well. They can't sell the mod either, again they'd need a license from both. This is something called "a labor of love". Some people actually want to make things in their spare time that they themselves and others can enjoy. If this is a foreign concept for you, you have issues. (Obviously, it's good professional experience and looks good on a CV as well)

What I’m praying for is for this mod to be open source because the idea of old hl2 mods and maps with rtx assests gets me curious

Man, I was about to apply, when you said it's totally volunteer based. I guess they'll be using mostly people under 25 and living in developing countries to work on this. Go get 'em youths! I have bills and live in California! :) BTW, the assets I'm seeing look great, so truth be told, age doesn't matter. But, I'll voice my personal opinion I guess, I think anybody as talented as this, able to create these level of fidelity assets, has thousands of hours in on their craft...they deserve to be paid...like at least 25/hr. Somebody needs a better producer. This is five times worse than Fiver. One last thing--Nvidia is sitting very pretty, if I had a say over there with the suits, I'd definitely propose a deck for this team and get them some funding.

if these guys started a gofundme, they'd reach their quota in a day.

Since RTX Remix is dependent on Nvidia cards… they may as well throw in PhysX while they're at it.

Im excited for this project but with rtx, it’s already super heavy when adding it to hl2 without enhanced assets on a 4070, so it’s looking like they need to do crazy optimization on their models, or buy a 4090. It’s gonna be interesting. 😅

Awesome. Hope that a fully functional Hammer editor will be released with it.

Finally something better than FakeFactory Cinematic Mod. 🤣 Hope when this comes out we will be able to play it with MMod.

i think the lack of compensation shows the love from the devs

Tyler, can you maybe report on the DDOS issue that is currently happening with L4D2 official servers? It has been like this since January. It happens, then gets fixed, then happens again, fixed again, happens again, infinite loop.

If Nvidia is using it for advertising, which it is, the team should be compensated.

It's weird but the whole idea of nvidia remix is that its a mod tool so having a semi?-sponsered mod to push it by actively engaging the source community is probably the best way of going abt the project. Would be nice if contributers were compensated in someway but if they did we'd likely not know anyway.

It’d be a missed opportunity if we get no news for both or one of the remasters in HL2’s 20th anniversary.

Would obviously be cool if people were being compensated, but given that the final product is gonna be free, I don't necessarily see the problem with it being run by passionate volunteers. I understand the angle of it benefiting Nvidia's marketing, but that's just kind of a byproduct of this incredible project even being possible. I can see the argument in either direction, frankly.

They could use a payment for their work, a donate page atleast. But i love this project.

Will it be locked behind RTX only GPUs? Or Will newer amd 6800xt+ or newer be able play this ?

everybody asking 'what' is half-life RTX but nobody asking 'when' is half-life RTX 🥲

They shouldn't release this for free, they should charge like $5 and all the money should go to the team that developed this, or at-least start a crowfunding in case Nvidia decides to get cute and give them legal issues. When a rich, greedy corporation doesn't compensate the hard work of developers the community needs to step up and make things right.

Everything looks Stunning In this project! 💥 Seeing most npc model assets looked most of the time off, But this project with the Father Grigori Model Assets made me in total amazement It's So good 🔥

It looks phenomenal, amazing attention to detail on this and it has everything style-wise that Portal RTX was lacking

I think this project looks really cool, but what I don't like is that they've changed some of the textures completely. Some of them might be placeholders, but if you look at the screens at Dr Kleiners lab, you can see that they show completely different information. That's my biggest gripes so far. I might be nitpicky, but hey 🤷

Half life 2 rtx is the reason why i upgraded from a gtx 1080 ti to a rtx 2080 ti. Can we play it already?

I'm extremely excited for it, my only letdown I guess, is that the "at runtime" means it wont be any more than an incredible graphical improvement. It seems like more of a "layered-over" version than "reworked", as in it doesn't seem like we'll be seeing any fancy new animation, in first-person or seeing characters moving more realistically. Will Alyx still wave her multi-tool vaguely at a door, and play a generic typing animation over a now highly-detailed keyboard? Can NPCs and Combine not have improved animation, like the procedural running in HL:A? Will ladders still be jank, without a newer and smoother climbing system maybe? Will environments be unable to have new objects of any kind? (I know little about how RTXR works so this is a genuine question, but I suspect not?) Will the original Source Engine limit optimization or innovation in this project? None of this is to in any way seem ungrateful to or expect even more out of the incredible people of this project, already doing incredible work. It's more that I'm confident that this community *would* absolutely do these things, but it seems as if RTX Remix is a tool with limited scope that will hold the project back from the many other things a full remaster of HL2 deserves, in a way that a full remake, with new code and in a new engine, could have, and that these developers, I believe, would be willing to make. And once HL2RTX is released, without these features, the possibility of a HL2 remaster including them will plummet, since there *just was one* finished. So don't get me wrong, I'll absolutely love HL2 RTX, even if it is only new models and textures, because that's incredible. And with the original's quality, it's 80% of the way to being perfect. But in the end, it might be extremely high-quality assets overlaid onto an un-changeable baseline that is too dated to fully take advantage of them.

What do you mean you don`t know how to feel about it? Look at Black Mesa Source, released as a free mod in 2012 and it`s a masterpiece...

Excited for RTX Remixed versions including this. I enjoyed Portal RTX. However I agree with Gabe on the sentiment creators should be compensated for making mods like this.

Id happily pay for that dlc/ new release / remaster.

This is completely hypothetical - but maybe the dev team for the HL2 RTX mod CAN'T be compensated moneteraly due to some legal specifics of the EULA of nVIDIA software. Modders can create new assets by it, but to monetize the work - might be illegal even by donations to the project (if they don't have one already). We're talking about pre-existing IPs here (HL2, Portal, TES Morrowind etc.) - nVIDIA maybe thought of this possibility to avoid legal trouble and push their software for buisness use to publishers and dev companies by exposure of high quality community projects like these. Which are fueled by fans' passion therefore - comletely FREE promotion for them. But that's just a hypothesis. A game hypothesis.

Congrats for the upcoming wedding on June mate!

Sadly the rumors of a bioshock rtx remake are false. The RTX Remix runtime is currently unable to hook into bioshock by any known means. There is an official discord where most remix development can be tracked.

I remember you saying some time ago that you would only report on mod projects that are playable, and i thought that was a great rule for you. RTX HL2 is something I would pay money to play today in a completed state. What we've seen is all top notch remaster work, but this seems like a project that will never finish, or that will finish years after it's relevant. I've seen this happen too many times to not see it coming by now. In my view, this should have been a lighting-only project (just ray-traced global illumination & shadows without texture an model reworks). Remaking all the original assets at the levels of quality presented is way too much work to be sustainable for unpaid artists.

I was hoping something like this would happen

yeah. i am never interested in rtx remakes, but a normal remaster however, definitely interested.

Can a current HL2 VR Mod save be brought over to the RTX version to your knowledge? Or can the base HL2 VR Mod be upgraded to RTX via replacing files

I feel happy to see anything HL related come up, but only slightly until it's actually playable (I'm always hearing about something that doesn't pan out in the end)

Personally I'm afraid that it'll suffer from the same performance issues as Portal RTX did; those of us without a 40 series GPU have to use the "Ultra Performance" mode and be left with a muddy looking game, which is not very pleasant. If they can add more performance settings, maybe FSR 3 to use frame generation, that would be cool. All I want for it is to be both playable and enjoyable.

I wonder how this will compare to the Half-Life 1 Path Traced project that completed some time ago.

I feel like Nvidia being the behemoth that it is, and the amount of marketing budget it has, paying the developers once the game has shipped for the amount of hours they spent remaking the assets at least should be mandatory, let alone rearranging said assets in the original levels and making sure it keeps the atmosphere of the original game. I wouldnt be surprized they would scoff it off saying they put a lot of resources making the rtx remix software and offering support to the modders when needed, but if nvidia is actively marketing the mod with RTX, a well known brand Identity marker of theirs, like DLSS, GTX(rip) etc. They should at least make a donation for their next project. Either way these modders are extremely talented and if they really needed money i'm sure they could easily land a job at a studio, like the one mick gordon recently helped announce :)

6:24 isnt this misleading??? they act like RTX makes old games have better models and textures^^

I am eagerly looking foward to this project.

Most anticipated release this year for me.

I had no clue Portal RTX was actually poorly optimized. As someone who usually plays older games, I just figured that an RTX game would be chugging on anything that wasn't the strongest gaming computers available today. That information actually gives me hope that I might actually be able to possibly play HL2 RTX! As for the lack of money, I think most HL2 modders know what they're getting into, though I do have to admit that Nvidia exploiting that is pretty scummy. The devs seem dedicated, and it seems like a safe bet to say that it'll probably make it to release without any major controversy. I'm at the very least excited to see how it turns out!

having an access to it is like the power of sun in the palms of my hand and my palms reflects its god rays

"I was under NDA" Meanwhile 2021 NVidia leak...

Half-Life 2 in Source 2, things are starting to get aligned. Now to wait for the next generation to finally see a 3.

Amazing stuff, but I must ask. 6:09 Making textures and world models makes complete sense, but why spend time and resources making a completly new Headcrab model?. If this project is running on Source 2, AND follows HL:A artstyle closely, wouldn't it be better to just use the HL:A character models whenever posible?. I'm only talking about Zombies and Combine soldiers/units of course. Also Dog!, are they gonna make a whole new Dog model?. The HL:A version is already there for use. :o

I think its cool, really just comes down to how well they can nail it for release. With regards to the concerns around compensation, I find it a bit odd considering the wealth of people who so often make mods for games completely free. Now I know, NVIDIA being involved makes it seem like a mooching situation, but as far as I'm concerned, if RTX Remix gets popular as a free to use and setup modding tool, I'll gladly enjoy all the free content. Doesn't stop people from monetizing future works just because NVIDIA is watching the show from afar. It's up to whoever makes it.

This project is so cool even I got a pfp from it (4:25)

Like Black Mesa, it should be something you buy and the devs get some kickback money for their work

My thoughts are: Looks cool, I might try it out, but if I ever play through Half Life 2 again, would I continue to use the RTX version or would I just go back to playing on the original? For example if I have the choice between playing Half Life 1 or Black Mesa, I'd probably pick Black Mesa.... would I do the same for this RTX version? We shall see...

I will have to agree. If Nvidia is advertising their software using this project without giving something in return to the people working on it, it definitely is in scummy territory to say the least. Not to bring the "rich vs poor" tiresome argument, but they're a multi million dollar company, surely even for publicity sake they could hire these people and then advertise properly Nvidia's tech by saying "here, look how great our software is, we paid this team to work on this old game and look at it now, all thanks to our tech". Anyways, another doubt I have is how consistency could play out. It's an old game with old level design and all of a sudden you have these really modern textures with great lighting. Even the roads in HL2 are square, the ground is mostly flat, without much detail in the design department, it was fine in 2004, but now...

what?! i originally assumed that the devs working on this mod were being paid, considering that Nvidia is heavily using their work on their website and socials to show off RTX Remix??

The HL2 RTX team needs to compensated. This stuff looks so good!

Just realize Tyler can make a good Trevor Phillips cosplay