Half-Life Episode Two mod

Plot:
Half-Life Episode Two begins exactly where Half-Life ended, after accepting the job agreement with Gman, Gordon Freeman is sent back to the Black Mesa Research Facility, why? It's up to you to find out. Explore never seen before areas of Black mesa in seven chapters that will immerse you into a spooky and dark environment while you search for clues to reveal one of the darkest secrets of the facility and the reason why you were sent back in.

The Project:
Half-Life Episode Two is an Half-Life 1 modification currently under development, the project focuses on creating a singleplayer adventure with improved and modernized gameplay elements, lots of exploration and action, with a eery and moody atmosphere as well as a deep and interesting plot while partially staying true to the original Half-Life gameplay.

With a reworked and improved game platform Half-Life Episode Two will feature lots of graphical improvements, extended gameplay elements, a new sound platform, professional standard level design, very high quality models and overall compelling presentation.

The game will not, as of currently, support multiplay.

The Trinity rendering engine, or Raven as I used to call it before it had an official name, is now free for download with source code available, released under LGPL license you are allowed to do as you please with the code as long as credit to the original developer is kept, source code for Half-Life Episode Two however will remain indoors as of now. Download for the Trinity rendering engine available at: Half-Life Zone

The Engine:
This game makes full use of the Trinity rendering engine, which supports a wide array of new features handy for both game development and graphics enhancement, the engine brings features like:

• New BSP renderer, capable to support limitless texture resolutions, TGA decals, 3D skyboxes, detail textures, enhanced lightmap based lighting, transparent surface lightmaps and so on;
• New model renderer, capable to also support limitless texture resolutions, model decaling, SSE/SSE2 support, etc;
• Real-Time dynamic world and model lighting;
• Real-Time shadowmapping support.
• Shader water, that uses both reflection, refraction, and customizable fog color;
• Particle engine capable to perfectly simulate effects like rain, snow, fog particles, smoke, explosions, falling leaves and even fireworks, particles can interact realistically with water;
• And effects like motion blur, client based pixel fog, realistic mirrors that will reflect all geometry within its range, extended map entity support for bigger map results, etc.
• The engine is also fully capable to handle non shader processing for older video cards that do not support shader profiles.

To run this mod at its full quality and support with optimal performance, your system must meet the following recommended requirements:

• OpenGL 2.0 capable video card, Nvidia Geforce 6000 series or better with 256 Mb of dedicated video memory;
• Intel Pentium 4, 2.6 Ghz or better;
• 512 MB system ram.

The game is perfectly playable in all common graphics card types (Nvidia and ATI video cards). Intel graphics chips are also supported but are known not to perform perfectly. Nvidia 5 FX series are compatible but only capable to run non shader processing. Other video card vendors (S3, Matrox) were not tested and therefore are not guaranteed to work.

This modification uses Amnesia Sound Engine, an open source sound platform, based on FMOD Ex library, available under LGPL license here.

Ever since Valve Erc forum at Chatbear went down, the Half-Life 1 community lost a potential modding resource, newcomers relied on that forum to get help, and now that it's down, few Half-Life 1 communities are left that support newcomer modders, if any at all. That is why Awkook, Doommarine23, and I (Hunk-Guerrius) have decided to create Half-Life Zone a new community created especially for the HL1 modding newcomers, experienced modders are allowed as well, we hold programs, tutorials and of course, a forum, for now we only support Half-Life 1, but hopefully we will expand to other GoldSource based game such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. Come visit us, if you ever need help we will be here for you.