Valve Celebrates 25 Years of Half-Life With Feature-Packed Steam Update (arstechnica.com) 49
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This Sunday, November 19, makes a full 25 years since the original Half-Life first hit (pre-Steam) store shelves. To celebrate the anniversary, Valve has uploaded a feature-packed "25th anniversary update" to the game on Steam, and made the title free to keep if you pick it up this weekend. Valve's 25th Anniversary Update page details a bevy of new and modernized features added to the classic first-person shooter, including:
- Four new multiplayer maps that "push the limits of what's possible in the Half-Life engine"
- New graphics settings, including support for a widescreen field-of-view on modern monitors and OpenGL Overbright lighting (still no official ray-tracing support, though-leave that to the modders)
- "Proper gamepad config out of the box" (so dust off that Gravis Gamepad Pro)
- Steam networking support for easier multiplayer setup
- "Verified" support for Steam Deck play ("We failed super hard" on the first verification attempt, Valve writes)
- Proper UI scaling for resolutions up to 3840x1600
- Multiplayer balancing updates (because 25 years hasn't been enough to perfect the meta)
- New entity limits that allow mod makers to build more complex mods
- A full software renderer for the Linux version of the game
- Various bug fixes
- "Removed the now very unnecessary 'Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards' setting"
In addition, the new update includes a host of restored and rarely seen content, including:
- Three multiplayer maps from the "Half-Life: Further Data" CD-ROM: Double Cross, Rust Mill, and Xen DM
- Four restored multiplayer models: Ivan the Space Biker, Proto-Barney (from the alpha build), a skeleton, and Too Much Coffee Man (from "Further Data")
- Dozens of "Further Data" sprays to tag in your multiplayer matches
- The original Half-Life: Uplink demo in playable form
- Four new multiplayer maps that "push the limits of what's possible in the Half-Life engine"
- New graphics settings, including support for a widescreen field-of-view on modern monitors and OpenGL Overbright lighting (still no official ray-tracing support, though-leave that to the modders)
- "Proper gamepad config out of the box" (so dust off that Gravis Gamepad Pro)
- Steam networking support for easier multiplayer setup
- "Verified" support for Steam Deck play ("We failed super hard" on the first verification attempt, Valve writes)
- Proper UI scaling for resolutions up to 3840x1600
- Multiplayer balancing updates (because 25 years hasn't been enough to perfect the meta)
- New entity limits that allow mod makers to build more complex mods
- A full software renderer for the Linux version of the game
- Various bug fixes
- "Removed the now very unnecessary 'Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards' setting"
In addition, the new update includes a host of restored and rarely seen content, including:
- Three multiplayer maps from the "Half-Life: Further Data" CD-ROM: Double Cross, Rust Mill, and Xen DM
- Four restored multiplayer models: Ivan the Space Biker, Proto-Barney (from the alpha build), a skeleton, and Too Much Coffee Man (from "Further Data")
- Dozens of "Further Data" sprays to tag in your multiplayer matches
- The original Half-Life: Uplink demo in playable form
This one is a must-play. (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry to bump their slashvertisement, but if you've never played this one, "free" is definitely worth the price.
Re: (Score:3)
Not only Half-Life, but Blue Shift and Opposing Force. Play the trinity.
The graphics are not great by today's standards but still somehow the visuals are awesome. For the day I thought the NPC scripts were pretty good, the level paths are non-linear but intuitive so you don't often get frustrated walking in circles.
I enjoyed it far more than Half-Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two, or Lost Coast.
Re: (Score:2)
but still somehow the visuals are awesome
I noticed this with the whole Half-Life series in general, and I have a theory about it: With Half-Life 1, specifically, it doesn't have appreciably higher texture resolutions or polygon counts than "Quake II" which came out around the same time, but they still seem to have made the graphics stand the test of time better, I think somewhat ironically by using the available software/hardware features less. What I mean by that is, by not making every map and texture and model into something really "flashy" tha
Re: (Score:2)
You paid full price before Valve even existed? That's quite the feat.
Re: This one is a must-play. (Score:3)
The original Half Life didnâ(TM)t have Mr. Valve but a Sierra logo when you started the game. The game was developed by Valve but published by Sierra Studios. Many people had never heard of Valve before the success of Half Life and some people still think that Valve/Steam purchased the IP after the fact. A bit of a Mandela effect I think because of the way Half Life was originally introduced and then the success of Steam later.
Re: (Score:2)
Still said Valve right on the product right from day one regardless of whether or not you remember properly if the Valve intro video was in the first release. The point is, Valve made the game, so buddy couldn't have paid full price for the game before Valve existed.
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Half Life 2 is now as old as Tetris was when Half Life 2 came out. The original 1985 Tetris, which was text based and on ran on some Soviet computer.
Re: (Score:2)
If they don't like the outdated graphics, then they can play Black Mesa: https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
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The problem is not just the visuals. HL gets too frustrating when you get to Xen. It seems they ran out of time to refine that part. BM's take on Xen is not perfect but a massive improvement.
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HL gets too frustrating when you get to Xen. It seems they ran out of time to refine that part. BM's take on Xen is not perfect but a massive improvement.
Black Mesa was *so* close to being perfect, but they fumbled Xen as well. Instead of a jumping game, they made it into a running game. I finished the original HL, but gave up on BM because of Xen.
Re: This one is a must-play. (Score:2)
Not just the graphics. Xen in original half life was crap that bored so many players that they never finished the game, they did way better in black mesa to the point that it was actually fun. They also improved On A Rail, which wasn't as bad as Xen, and the battle just before Xen was made less confusing. Gonarch and Nihilanth were also pretty epic battles, unlike the original.
Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac app? (Score:5, Interesting)
Releasing this game for free is nice and all, but I'm left wondering why they even bothered to release the Mac version at all. It's an unsigned 32-bit (i386) binary, which means:
It really would have been better for them to not release a Mac app at all. At least that would leave people assuming that Valve just didn't think the Mac market was worth bothering with. But this? This tells me that Mac support was a bullet point in some contractor's requirements list, and they couldn't even be bothered to check to see if the executable they were shipping would be usable for anyone. It really feels like a slap in the face.
Oh, and the best part? This app was built targeting macOS version 10.7. It has workarounds up through 10.11. Steam just dropped support for all versions of macOS prior to 10.13 two months ago. There are at most two major OS versions that can run this (10.13.x and 10.14.x), and possibly as few as zero.
For that matter, how did they even manage to *compile* this app? The last major version of Xcode that even provided the 10.7 SDK or earlier was Xcode 12, which won't work on any OS version later than Catalina (2019). This is absolutely baffling.
So why in the world did they bother to release the Mac version of this app at all, given its current state, at this point in time? Approximately no Mac users can realistically run it at all. Who do they think is going to be able to run it?
Re: (Score:1)
Who do they think is going to be able to run it?
People who use better operating systems.
Re:Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac app? (Score:4, Funny)
Who do they think is going to be able to run it?
People who use better operating systems.
Why did they bother with a Windows version, then?
Re: (Score:2)
It's a better platform for business apps and games alike.
It might be a more *popular* platform for business apps and games, but architecturally, it's a train wreck of backwards compatibility headaches that constantly breaks in weird and unexpected ways, like Windows security false positives that render the machine unbootable.
Most games are available for Windows. Not quite so for Macs. No need to guess why this is the case - keep living in your over-priced walled garden.
The Mac is not and has never been a walled garden. I can grab any arbitrary unsigned binary and run it with just a simple right-click, left click on "open", and clicking through a couple of security dialogs. So only one of us is guessing, a
Re: (Score:2)
By some estimates, the Mac has up to 31.3% of desktop sales, and Windows has as little as 53.43%
Important bit you fail to mention: in the *US* market. Globally, things are a bit different. [statcounter.com]
Re: (Score:2)
By some estimates, the Mac has up to 31.3% of desktop sales, and Windows has as little as 53.43%
Important bit you fail to mention: in the *US* market. Globally, things are a bit different. [statcounter.com]
Thanks, was looking a little too quickly. Still, 68 to 20 is only a factor of 3.5.
Re: (Score:2)
it's a train wreck of backwards compatibility headaches that constantly breaks in weird and unexpected ways
Actually that is objectively false. Windows puts a lot of effort into backwards compatibility to the point of it actually being a weakness for the OS itself.
There are more Windows games because there are more Windows users, but not by that much anymore.
Except yeah that much. Your cite for current sales of Macs doesn't change the fact that Mac use barely scrapes in at 20%. That is a pitiful market share made up of users who largely don't play games and don't expect to. Heck Mac has 100% of desktop sales in our house this year, but it makes up 10% of the computer share in our house, and probably 0.5% of
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Windows is now dropping the backwards compatibility, though. It began in Windows 7, a lot of my older Windows software wouldn't work any more there. So they released XP Mode, which was based on their purchase of Connectix to get Virtual PC, which was trash. Some of the software wouldn't run on that, either, like Civ 2. Later on people made patches for Civ 2 to get it to work on Windows 7/amd64; I am running that patched version on Linux via Wine.
Windows is a better platform to game on because the games are
Re: (Score:2)
it's a train wreck of backwards compatibility headaches that constantly breaks in weird and unexpected ways
Actually that is objectively false. Windows puts a lot of effort into backwards compatibility to the point of it actually being a weakness for the OS itself.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. What I meant was that their attempt at maintaining complete backwards compatibility is a big part of what causes the OS to be fragile to the point of near unmaintainability.
There are more Windows games because there are more Windows users, but not by that much anymore.
Except yeah that much. Your cite for current sales of Macs doesn't change the fact that Mac use barely scrapes in at 20%. That is a pitiful market share made up of users who largely don't play games and don't expect to.
You can't play what isn't there. It's exactly like saying "Recent Tesla owners don't use an AM radio, so they don't need one."
So it seems to me that the main reason people buy PCs for gaming is because there are more games for the PC, and the main reason there are more games for the PC is because people are still buying PCs specifically for gaming.
Which makes it an objectively better platform to release a game on.
Except that if I'm remembering the numbers correctly, the total number of Mac users outnumbers the number of gaming PCs by a factor of something like four, and a lot
Re: Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac app (Score:4, Interesting)
There are more Windows games because there are more Windows users, but not by that much anymore. We're not in the days of the Mac at 4% of the market and Windows at 95.8% anymore. By some estimates, the Mac has up to 31.3% of desktop sales, and Windows has as little as 53.43% (source).
Mac users, in my experience, basically only do one of three things: Software development (typically for ios,) Photoshop, or Safari. The non-technical ones basically just do the latter and only bought it because their hipster photographer or film hobbyist friend told them that all of the cool kids use macs and...if their friends all jumped off of a bridge, of course they'd do it too, just like any other lemming.
That said, your source just isn't relevant here. You know what is? This:
https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
TL;DR: 1.1% of steam users run Mac os of any flavor, of those the vast majority do so on a laptop or mac mini that doesn't even have the GPU power to run anything. Linux fares way better in comparison, yet hardly anybody buys computers with Linux preinstalled, and many Windows users don't buy whole computers at all. So what does that tell you about the meaning of sales figures? Or the lack thereof.
Likewise, because Mac usage has been trending down for so long, valve has actually started to drop support for the platform entirely in their newest games.
Hope that helps clear things up.
Re: (Score:2)
That said, your source just isn't relevant here. You know what is? This:
https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
TL;DR: 1.1% of steam users run Mac os of any flavor, of those the vast majority do so on a laptop or mac mini that doesn't even have the GPU power to run anything.
First, that's a worthless stat, because if you've looked at how few games are available for Mac on Steam, you'd understand why almost no Mac users go there. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. And most of the games that are "available" for Mac are things like this, where you have to own something 5+ years old just to run it.
Second, no current Mac "doesn't even have the GPU power to run anything". Sure, they're not desktop machines, but almost nobody buys desktop PCs anymore. Laptops and tablets outnumber de
Re: (Score:2)
First, that's a worthless stat, because if you've looked at how few games are available for Mac on Steam, you'd understand why almost no Mac users go there.
Well let's examine what you've done so far:
1. Ask who Valve thinks is going to run this, a product distributed over steam
2. Concede that: "[windows] might be a more *popular* platform for business apps and games"
3. Use (what actually are not) sales numbers to "prove" there are plenty of mac users to go around for games companies to sell to, completely disregarding that the numbers you provided say nothing at all about what they're being used for
4. Insist that steam's own data, by far the most useful data to
Re: (Score:2)
First, that's a worthless stat, because if you've looked at how few games are available for Mac on Steam, you'd understand why almost no Mac users go there.
Well let's examine what you've done so far: 1. Ask who Valve thinks is going to run this, a product distributed over steam
Ask who Valve thinks is going to run a Mac app that literally cannot work on any Mac built in the last five or six years. That's a perfectly reasonable question.
2. Concede that: "[windows] might be a more *popular* platform for business apps and games"
3. Use (what actually are not) sales numbers to "prove" there are plenty of mac users to go around for games companies to sell to, completely disregarding that the numbers you provided say nothing at all about what they're being used for
4. Insist that steam's own data, by far the most useful data to indicate who their customers are, is a worthless stat
Do you see the error of your ways yet?
The only error I'm aware of making was arguing with someone who enjoys taking sentences grossly out of context.
Steam's data is useless for the purposes of determining the potential market for games, because it's a chicken-and-egg problem. As long as Steam's store contains very few Mac games, you cannot reasonably expect Mac users to go there, and
Re: Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac app (Score:2)
Mac currently has an order of magnitude more games than Steam. Sure, the triple-A titles are only on Windows but weâ(TM)re talking about 300 or so games currently on Steam with that designation (most of them older). The vast majority of casual games are iOS, Android etc. compatible and Mac now natively runs a ton of iOS games and it is literally a compilation away for most developers to scale to a proper desktop game.
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The vast majority of casual games are iOS, Android etc. compatible and Mac now natively runs a ton of iOS games
Did you have a stroke? Literally no one plays casual mobile shit on their laptop/desktop.
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Most people I know do, because again, the developer can scale them with the push of a button. Plants vs Zombies and other Capcom games, a bunch of Nintendo and LEGO games, all work at 4K resolution with controllers on TV or on a MacBook or on an iPhone. And off course, Steam has a significant library of Mac games as well.
Re: Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac app (Score:2)
Ignoring the debate of which OS is better, it is curious that they targeting a version of the OS that isnâ(TM)t on most current Macs.
At the same time, Iâ(TM)d like to see more work done to allow 32-bit Intel apps to work on the ARM based machines.
BTW what the best operating system is comes down to what matters to an individual person. If you are too insecure to accept that other people may have other preferences and priorities, then thatâ(TM)s your failing.
Re: Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac app (Score:2)
Re: Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac ap (Score:2)
The steam hardware survey basically agrees.
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Came here to mention the macOS compatibility issue as well. For a free game, we got what we paid for, I suppose!
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Came here to mention the macOS compatibility issue as well. For a free game, we got what we paid for, I suppose!
Yeah, we got it. For about twelve weeks.
Just two weeks after the announcement of the 25th anniversary, Steam announced that they're dropping support for Mojave (the last version of macOS that can run 32-bit games) on February 15, 2024, just 90 days after they announced the update. I guess the 25th anniversary edition didn't bring in the huge surge of people with ancient non-updated Macs that they were hoping for? ROFL.
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Yeah, saw that. I wrote to Steam to complain, and told them to cancel my account... as I only signed up for Half Life anyway. Hopefully we don't have to wait another 25 years for a 64-bit macOS binary of HL :^)
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But that is where they hid the 25th anniversary announcement for Half Life 3
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Why did they bother releasing a 32-bit Mac app?
Because it's an architecture they have it working on. Probably just trivial changes needed to publish this.
It was probably either this or not launch it on Mac at all, not like they'd port a game engine to a new architecture for a fan service release.
Re: (Score:3)
Plenty of people still have old macs.
All of the Half-Life series is available for mac, so long as the version of macOS you have can still run 32-bit apps.
The September 2018 Mojave release was the last to support 32 bit apps - 5 years back.
Sure, that cuts mac M1 users out of the loop - but heck, the game is 25 years old FFS - if you are that desperate to play it, use a VM and install windows for ARM, or better still, use a PC.
This game will run on a $100 computer, heck, people have got it running on a raspbe
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All of the Half-Life series is available for mac, so long as the version of macOS you have can still run 32-bit apps. The September 2018 Mojave release was the last to support 32 bit apps - 5 years back.
Sure, that cuts mac M1 users out of the loop - but heck, the game is 25 years old FFS - if you are that desperate to play it, use a VM and install windows for ARM, or better still, use a PC.
Not just M1 users. It mostly cuts out the last two years of Intel Macs, too, because new machines can't generally run older OSes (without virtualization).
Re: (Score:2)
And as for "Why bother?"
(pre-Steam) store shelves... (Score:1)
err - no shit?
Re: (pre-Steam) store shelves... (Score:2)
https://nypost.com/2021/05/20/... [nypost.com]
QED
Missed nostalgia-opportunity (Score:1)
"Removed the now very unnecessary 'Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards' setting"
Should've kept it in, just for old times' sake.
64-bit? (Score:2)
Now just the question of when they plan to release 64-bit binaries for Windows and Linux? Last I checked, only the Mac version is 64-bit.
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Now just the question of when they plan to release 64-bit binaries for Windows and Linux? Last I checked, only the Mac version is 64-bit.
Only if they updated it since I looked last night. The Mac version is 32-bit, and won't run on any Mac built in the last five years (unless you virtualize it, and then won't run on any Mac built in the past three years).
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What do you want from 64 bit binaries? It does give a performance advantage on its own, up to 15% in extreme cases IIRC, but I doubt performance is going to be a big issue for many amd64 users who are playing this game.
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Now just the question of when they plan to release 64-bit binaries for Windows and Linux?
What's the point? If the game doesn't benefit from it in any way, then all you're doing is creating a binary that needs both more ram and more disk space while giving you nothing in return.
Wow (Score:2)
That's an awful lot of work to update Half-Life that Valve won't do to update Team Fortress 2.
I want sub categoies dammit (Score:2)