NVIDIA this week announced Half-Life 2: RTX, a community-made remaster of the legendary game featuring all-new assets, textures, and lighting. Pieces of the remaster are likely to make their way to the already existing Half-Life 2: VR Mod.
When it rains, it pours, as they say.
After years of delays, Half-Life and VR fans have been treated over the last 12 months to full VR mods of Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
And now it seems that fans are in for another treat; the Half-Life 2: VR Mod is likely to get a range of graphical upgrades thanks to the newly announced Half-Life 2: RTX remaster.
Though it already featured improved graphics and lighting over the original Half-Life 2, the Half-Life 2: VR Mod largely focused on touching up the game’s existing assets, and enhancing some key 3D models while building out full support for VR.
Half-Life 2: RTX, on the other hand, is a complete graphical overhaul says Nvidia.
The project is described as being in “early development,” with developers consisting of a range of experienced Half-Life 2 modding teams, including folks from the Half-Life 2: VR Mod team. The teams are working under the banner Orbifold Studios and say they’re seeking more talented people to work on the project.
According to Nvidia, the project will see “every asset reconstructed in high fidelity,” textures built with physically-based rendering techniques, and RTX ray-tracing support.
And while the project will likely mean that high quality 3D assets will make it over to the Half-Life 2: VR Mod, unfortunately RTX ray-tracing probably won’t.
A member of the Half-Life 2: VR Mod team called modding the full Half-Life 2: RTX game to support VR “just a pipe dream at the moment.”
“Currently RTX Remix [the platform used to build Half-Life 2: RTX] is not compatible with Half-Life 2: VR Mod, since they both hook into the rendering pipeline and abuse it in different and incompatible ways,” they said.
But, the member says there are plans to “work with other members of this new super-team [that’s working on Half-Life 2: RTX] on back-porting as much of the shiny new HD content as we can to the old source engine, and putting them into our Half-Life 2: VR Mod graphics update.”
There’s no timeline at the moment for when that might happen, but hey, these things, they take time.