Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

[bni]

If you want to play Half-Life today I highly recommend Xash3D FWGS (yes its a super awkward name)

https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs

Easy to use Mac build here: https://www.macsourceports.com/game/halflife

[pezezin]

IMHO, if you want to play Half-Life today, go get Black Mesa, an absolutely fantastic fan-made remake with Valve's blessing:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/

[jmiskovic]

This is engine for HL1 while OP talks about HL2.

I'll add, if you have a VR headset, modded HL1 runs beautifully on it with full hand controller support for gun aiming and crowbar smashing. I've also heard lots of praises for HL2 VR mod bringing the game to new levels, I have yet to try it myself.

[nomel]

Or, can still be purchased on Steam for $0.99, during sales. Windows only though.

[sho_hn]

Super interesting! I'm curious what the purpose is, though?

Edit to answer myself: Looks like this is more of an offshoot of the FreeHL projects by the same author, which rewrite GoldSrc game logic to QuakeC to get those games to run on open source engine stacks, where the utility is more obvious. I guess it was just fun to see how hard it'd be to get HL2 content running.

A bit similar to the OpenMW project working on Oblivion and Skyrim content loading on the side, though perhaps that's a more obvious future vector for that project.

[roywiggins]

Speaking of:

https://openmw.org/2024/from-bsp-to-esp-how-s3ctor-abused-qu...

[arifmeticus]

Not related to the engine, but it reminded me of a demake of Half-Life 2 in Quake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhuXHGb_4vU

[sdwr]

What does clean room mean in this context? They built it from the assets with the game as a reference , but didn't look at the engine source code?

[brynnbee]

It means they didn't reference any existing or decompiled code from the original client. None of it is directly infringing on any copyright, though it may be doing so indirectly since there have been plenty of lawsuits for tools that contain no copyrighted information can but can used to facilitate infringement (e.g. a tool that decompiles a game ROM)

[fp64]

>The game is not playable from start to finish. You can play deathmatch and other odd modes.

[shellwizard]

Impressive, given how old Q1 engine is. It brings back memories of Paranoid Doom mod: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/p-r/par...

[tsunamifury]

De-makes are interesting because they continuously seem to show what may have been possible long ago in ancient engines if teams pushed them even further.

Then again maybe that level of detail even in idtech1 would have required more computing than was available for many years.

[plorkyeran]

I do suspect this would not run well on a 75 Mhz Pentium 1. It would be very surprising if Quake 1 was actually the pinnacle of what as possible on the hardware of the time, though. id made exactly one game targeting that generation of hardware, and then their next game had meaningfully higher system requirements despite coming out only a year later. The hardware capabilities were changing so fast that there simply wasn't time to iterate on a specific target.

[user____name]

FTE barely qualifies as a pure Quake engine at this point though, it does tons of stuff.

[vkazanov]

It does a lot, yes, but also is very much a continuation of the original codebase - i've spent quite some time tinkering with internals of it.

[squarefoot]

Interesting, I loved both HL1 and 2. Some games never die, brought to mind the Black Mesa remake of HL1 with the HL2 engine that gave it new life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKutLsub-80

[CodeCompost]

SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

Seems to be using a dnsft.cloud.zyxel.com certificate. Is this a home router?

[opello]

https://community.zyxel.com/en/discussion/23595/why-i-get-bl...

Seems like you or someone upstream of you uses a Zyxel brand device that has some kind of dns content filtering enabled. You should be able to get around this on a given machine by configuring an alternate dns provider (dns over https, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, google's 8.8.8.8, quad9's 9.9.9.9, etc.) or doing something similar at your own router/dns resolver/dhcp server if it's not the thing doing this.

[linuxguy2]

I certainly don't get that cert. I'm seeing a LetsEncrypt cert for idtech.space with various SANs.

  # host code.idtech.space
  code.idtech.space is an alias for idtech.space.
  idtech.space has address 192.99.32.215
  idtech.space has IPv6 address 2607:5300:60:47d7::

[notachatbot123]

Maybe you are MITM`d?

[singularfutur]

This is what I love about the open source community. Twenty years later and people are still finding ways to make classic games accessible without DRM or platform lock in. Clean room implementations like this preserve gaming history better than any publisher ever will.

[lloeki]

Interesing, there's more here including HL1 (a.k.a "valve")

Funnily enough the looks of this HL2 through this engine makes it flow more with HL1 than I could expect; an interesting reverse Half Life: Source / Black Mesa / demake of sorts.

[homebrewer]

Even simple Half-Life 1 mods built on textures and models from Half-Life 2 look much closer to 2 than one would expect. For example this mod, but not only:

https://moddb.com/mods/half-life-dark-future

You won't confuse it with modern Half-Life 2, but the original HL2 engine had far worse graphics than the latest version. Makes you realize how much of the difference between HL2 and HL1 is due to different textures and level design.

[unixhero]

Is this the way we can have HL3 also?

[hiprob]

Half-Life 2 looks incredible in Quake 1, what gives?

[Cthulhu_]

Quake's engine is open source and for example nvidia used it in some more recent tech demos, although this one's for Quake 2: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-v1-2-...

[NSUserDefaults]

Can I run this on my 486?

[anthk]

Would it work under vanilla quake 1? Ah, no. I can't check it out.

Good job keeping me away with Anubis, btw.