Half-Life: Enriched - Alpha version 0.85 news

Been waiting long? Wait no longer, click that link!

It's been 6 weeks since the last update on the project. I know you guys are all used to Valve Time but to me, this new alpha version felt like an eternity to get done. The aim of this new release was to add new content and fix bugs, but also do another large art pass. For those who aren't familiar with development language: an art pass is where you add new visuals and details to existing areas. This is mostly done after gameplay has been tested to work as intended.

I've already done several art passes when I updated all lighting and texturing in earlier builds but some areas still felt empty or bland to me. I've decided to add some more details to exiting scenes, however there are a few issues.

Firstly, in some cases I ran into the engine limits. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to add anything to the map because it simply would not compile or load. There are hard limits to the goldsrc engine and that's just something we all need to deal with.

Secondly, Half-Life has a certain charm. Unlike other (more modern) games, it is not littered with small details. This was necessary because of the hardware limitations of the time. But I still want the design to feel like Half-Life, so I've got to hold back a little on that front.

Third and last: I want to work with the original material as much as possible. I could grab any high resolution art from the internet and toss it in there to make it look great but I really want Enriched to be a showcase of what Half-Life could have looked like within the same engine.

The screenshots above are a good example of adding some more flavour to a scene but not completely alienating what it used to be like. It's good to work by this principle but it gets a little harder when the original did not have anything that is comparable. I'm talking about 3D skyboxes.

In the original Half-Life, a skybox is a six sided cube with a texture resolution of 256x256. For 1998 this was quite acceptable but as time progressed and resolutions and screens got larger, it became apparently how terrribly blurry those textures are on such a scale. The skybox resolution is hard coded, so no amount of upscaling is going to help me here.

However, there is a workaround. Half-Life supports 512x512 texture resolution in models. By cutting a box model into segments you can achieve high resolution skies. In the example below, the top consists of four 512x512 textures, making for a grand total of a 1024x1024 sky texture. All around the resolution of the sky image is even 4096x512!

After that you can start filling that box with landscape models such as terrain, rocks and buildings. Create a little depth illusion and add a sprinkle of Photoshop magic and you'll end up with something like this:

I've tried my best to stick to materials from Half-Life while making this skybox and (apart from the clouds) everything can be traced back to the original WAD content. This really helps selling the idea that this skybox is part of the map and in fact something that fits the feeling of Half-Life, even though it wasn't there in the original.

As you can see above, I've created various new skyboxes for each earthbound chapter that features an outdoor scene. The next step is to do the same for the Xen chapters, which is going to be tricky because the artwork is very distinct and also way too low resolution to work with. I yet have to decide how I'm going to approach that. Making these 3D skyboxes has been a very long and tedious job of going through various editors tweaking and finetuning. I think this is why this release has felt like such a long time. I love the result but it hasn't been the most fun or motivating to work on.

There is even more eyecandy to enjoy in this release with the glowy eyes of the new Hivehand and Snark models.

All maps up to the Xen chapters have received a visual update so be sure to give the MOD another playthrough. I've spend a lot of time on redoing the satellite rocket lauch sequence in 'On A Rail', I hope you like it! Many bugs were fixed in the process, so refer to the full readme if you're curious.

Thanks for reading and sticking around with Half-Life: Enriched. This MOD page has just surpassed 500 active watchers, which is just very cool for such an old game.