Half-Life: Enriched - 2022 Retrospective news

We're visited by the Ghosts of Developments Past, Developments Present and Developments Future! Let's cuddle up by the fire and hear the tale.

Developments Present

This week the votes for the MODDB's MOD of the Year (MOTY) awards were counted. I was very pleased when Half-Life: Enriched made it into the Top 100 (of nearly 5600 mods voted for) earlier this month. Being on the shortlist was already a great honour for my solo project.

Then this week the Top 10 list for Best Upcoming MOD of 2022 was announced and I was extremely suprised to see that Half-Life Enriched made it to the 8th place! This was an awesome Christmas present to receive and thanks to all of you for making it happen. If developement continues in this steady pace, I might compete for MOTY in 2023! Thanks again for the support!

Developments Past

Half-Life: Enriched has been in development for less than a year but in that time a lot has been done. Already 88 of the 102 maps that Half-Life contains have been enriched which comes down to 86%. I've created a graph to show the progess in a more visual way. As you can see, the development has been very steady overall.

Next to the new chapters, a lot of other content has received updates such as models (about 50% done), textures (over 350 new variants currently), detail textures (77 unqiue variants currently) and lots of code changes. With each update, I tend to take on more content and raise the quality to a higher level, while also improving on older content.

As a way of looking back, I'd like to share my Top 3 of favourite screenshots from this year's releases:

Number 3

This screenshot really shows the improvement in quality that the upscaled textures give the maps. Next to being a lot sharper, the lightmap data also doubles in size, making for much sharper shadows. Especially the area around the yellow pipe feels like it's from a newer engine than Goldsource. This sceenshot doesn't even feature the detail textures yet, so it's even better looking in the current version of the MOD.

Number 2

There are multiple screenshots of outside areas that I'm pretty proud of but I've chosen this one because it was the point where I decided I wanted to remake all the terrain. That decision came at a great cost when it comes to time and effort but also yields great results!

Number 1

I love the aestethics of Questionable Ethics and I'm really pleased what the upscaled textures, the improved lighting and especially the many small props I made, do to this scene. It feels inviting, like a real place I'd like to visit some day.

Developments Future

So, what is to be expected for 2023? I'm currently working on the next chapter 'Interloper' which is quite a lenghty and time consuming chapter. I made the decision to rework all the terrain in Half-Life and 'Interloper' has plenty of it. This means I have to recreate about 95% of the first two maps. Here's a top down shot of the current state of the first map (c16a).

I'm also working on updated models, of which the Crossbow and RPG are nearly done. I might also take on a few more for the next version but I'll leave that to the next article.

Speaking of versions, I'll be reviewing my numbering scheme for future updates. I've labeled my current versions as 'alpha' builds but I've seen that 3rd party websites copying my files do not clearly label them as such. To avoid future confusion, the next versions will probably come in increments of 0.01 so I won't run out of numbers before version 1.0 (which ideally should be the release version).

Thanks for reading and enjoy these final days of the year!