Blue Shift Unlocked Game DLLs and Patched Maps file

These are the pre-patched maps and libraries that are normally supplied by the Blue Shift: Unlocked installer.

For most users, all that is necessary is to drop these libraries and maps into a copy of your bshift directory.

WON/Steam Blue Shift continued to use a different header type (Dreamcast) on it's maps, as it was ported to PC. Originally, this meant that the game used an entirely separate engine install alongside regular Half-Life. This continued to be the case when Steam was introduced. For players who wanted to consolidate Blue Shift into the regular game engine, this meant modifying Blue Shift's game code to work, which is how the Blue Shift: Unlocked project came to be.

Some time around the Steampipe update, the Steam version of the GoldSrc engine received an update to properly handle the Blue Shift game libraries and maps without any need of modification. So for Steam users, Blue Shift: Unlocked had become largely unnecessary. However, for users on older versions of UncleMisha's Xash3D there may still be a need for these maps with vanilla headers.

NOTE 1: Xash3D-FWGS supports vanilla WON & Steam Blue Shift. If you are building your own Blue Shift libraries from the FWGS hlsdk-portable code branch, you do not need this archive.

NOTE 2: The WON version of Blue Shift only received one retail patch and in this update the map ba_yard5.bsp was modified to fix a few trigger issues that prevented player progression. When using the WON version of the game for Blue Shift: Unlocked, it is expected that the game files have been already patched to 1.1. The archive on this page includes the correct, already patched ba_yard5.bsp.

NOTE 3: Much of what Blue Shift: Unlocked did was extract game resources into a new directory and supply missing UI elements for the Steam version that are not present in the WON version. For WON, a script runs to extract game data from Blue Shift's .pak files. For Steam, this data is extracted from Blue Shift's old game cache file (.gcf), a container type that was in use up until some time around early 2009.

Today, Blue Shift, as well as the rest of the Platinum Pack, is distributed by Steam without any containerization. In other words, the old .gcf files are no longer available. If one wants to experiment with Blue Shift: Unlocked using more recent Steam releases of Blue Shift's game files, the Blue Shift: Unlocked installer will need to be unpacked and the utilities run manually.