Welcome back to a new media update of Half-Life: Enriched! Before we get started, we have to congratulate the game itself because on November 19th, 2023 Half-Life turns 25!
Valve is not known for making a big spectacle of their past achievements but they seemed to have some idea for this very special milestone. If you haven't seen it already, go over to the special Half-Life website. There has been a new update to the game itself, fixing up old bugs and adding some additional new content, such as multiplayer DM maps and new (or rather old) models!
What does this mean for Enriched?
Valve really wanted to give you the oldschool Half-Life experience with this new update. And they delivered because the new patch breaks nearly all MODs, including Enriched. If you are old enough to remember the retail patches, you'll probably remember those breaking MODs on several occassions as well. Luckely, Steam gives us the options of picking branches, so if you like to play MODs, you'll have to go into Half-Life properties and select the steam_legacy build.
The new engine updates are welcome but they're not going to affect Enriched at this point. Firstly because I support the old WON SDK as well, so all content is limited to that build. Secondly, the limits that have held me back so far, have not been updated. The changelog on the new HL update seems to suggest that they're going to update the game more often in the future, so maybe it'll benefit Enriched eventually. We'll see.
New media
In the meantime, I've been adding more content to Enriched, such as these Barney and Gina player models.
You'll be able to play them in the upcoming co-operative conversion of the Xen chapters. Most of that work has been done by now but there are still more changes necessary in the code and the maps to fully support co-op as I want it to function. So a new release isn't around the corner just yet.
There is some more exciting stuff coming in the near future, but I'll keep that under wraps for now! In the meantime, be sure to check out this video series by one of Valve's level designer's, Dario Casali. Very interesting if you are into HL's developement history and goldsrc mapping in general.
Thanks for reading!
*Casali*, not CaSSali :D
Fixed!
I'm very happy to see the project continue to thrive!
Great update
Very nice seeing my question answered in the form of an article! I hope this mod gets completed one day. We'll have to wait and see.
Did the sunday quick fix update, fix this mod? Or does it still have the same issue? Apparently the sunday fix made it so that some mods won't crash on startup anymore.
I'm hoping this mod will come to fruition one day.
The new updates do seem to fix most issues with MODs. There are still some minor things I need to adress but it seems Valve is pushing updates every other day now so I'm going to wait a bit for things to become fixed and stable before attempting to update Enriched.