alt.hn

2/10/2026 at 11:21:56 AM

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

 https://code.idtech.space/fn/hl2

by klaussilveira

2/10/2026 at 6:31:45 PM

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

by bni

2/11/2026 at 4:12:34 AM

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/

by pezezin

2/11/2026 at 1:44:51 PM

IMHO, if you want to play Half-Life today, you can also just play the original, I've played it recently and still an amazing game, and several aspects I like it more than Half-life 2. Some might not like the graphics for being dated, but after a while you get used to it.

by henriquecm8

2/11/2026 at 6:00:11 AM

Black Mesa is an almost exact copy of Half Life at the start, and where that's true it's incredibly well done. Feels very much like a remaster.

Unfortunately, by the end of the earth levels and certainly on Xen, the levels switch over to original designs. They become massive and sprawling, boring and confusing. They really should have stuck to doing a like for like reimplementation.

I grew up on Half Life, so playing the first half of Black Mesa a few years ago was one of my favorite adult gaming experiences. But I gave up who knows how close to finish line after Xen was insufferable.

by reitzensteinm

2/11/2026 at 7:19:36 AM

The original Xen is rubbish. I’m glad they remade it. Just like they did with “On a rail”.

Black Mesa is a masterpiece.

by blell

2/11/2026 at 7:08:41 AM

There is one Xen episode close to the end that is indeed way too big for its own good and quite boring, I will give you that, but otherwise I found the new Xen levels very well made and fleshed out. Lets be honest, the original Xen was quite lackluster...

by pezezin

2/11/2026 at 7:24:27 AM

Well, even if the levels are well made and I've just got poor taste, Half Life was such a tightly designed package, introducing new weapons, things to play with (like the trains), enemies, environment modifiers at a steady pace.

Replacing a 5 minute level with a 20 minute level, even if it's better, ruins that pacing. There's just not enough content in the game to support it.

I agree Xen was by far the weakest of the original levels, but I don't think it's a coincidence that it was also pretty short. I think they knew it had novelty but no staying power and probably cut it to the bone.

by reitzensteinm

2/12/2026 at 9:25:18 AM

I'm confused after reading this thread; the Xen levels are long in original HF, or in Black Mesa?

> Unfortunately, by the end of the earth levels and certainly on Xen, the levels switch over to original designs

By original designs, do you mean HF1 version, or pre-HF1 designs that didn't get implemented in HF1?

by orleyhuxwell

2/13/2026 at 1:20:09 AM

Black Mesa has a longer Xen and original designs took inspiration from retail Half-Life but weren't exact copies of map layouts etc.

by jamesfinlayson

2/11/2026 at 3:53:50 PM

Do you mean the later levels are bigger and more confusing in black mesa?

Genuine question, as I own both versions and don't know which to play.

by pipes

2/12/2026 at 9:00:47 PM

Steam Deck owners might want to skip this one. Black Mesa randomly crashes on my Deck for some reason despite being listed as playable.

by matheusmoreira

2/11/2026 at 9:53:25 AM

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.

by jmiskovic

2/10/2026 at 8:51:04 PM

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

by nomel

2/10/2026 at 9:44:56 PM

Eh, I don’t really think that this is an “or” situation. I think that this is an “and” situation. The last time that I set up Xash3D FWGS, I had to copy files from the version of Half-Life that I own on Steam into a different folder so that those files could be loaded by Xash 3D FWGS. I haven’t tried Xash 3D FWGS in a while, but it looks like you still have to do that [1]. Also, are you sure that the Steam version of Half-Life is Windows only?

[1]: <https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs/blob/f0342763547d9bcf486...>

by BlitzGeology91

2/10/2026 at 9:52:13 PM

> Also, are you sure that the Steam version of Half-Life is Windows only?

You're right! It looks like Linux has a native build too. Apparently the Windows version, through Proton, runs better though (not that it matters).

by nomel

2/11/2026 at 3:21:56 AM

What's the point of using this xash thing then?

by ghostly_s

2/11/2026 at 5:20:33 AM

For whatever reason, Valve doesn't want to open source the engine so some people have taken it upon themselves to build a reverse-engineered engine (which now runs on Android, in the browser etc).

by jamesfinlayson

2/11/2026 at 4:28:19 AM

It’s open source and runs on all kinds of platforms. Original HL1 runs on old Windows and IIRC DOS. Nowhere else

by pilif

2/11/2026 at 4:44:41 AM

Valve updates HL1 every few years so it runs on contemporary platforms. DOS was ancient history by the time HL came out, you might be getting it mixed up with Quake1

by skhr0680

2/10/2026 at 11:58:46 PM

the windows version is playable on macos through wine. Even modern version, I got it running on a m2 mac mini on Macos 15 sequoia

EDIT: this was for HL1 I’m not sure about HL2

by jedbrooke

2/10/2026 at 9:45:21 PM

Its ported to Linux just like cs 1.6. Not sure how good Mac build is though.

by SXX

2/10/2026 at 10:02:25 PM

Steam version: This product is not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina or above.

by nomel

2/11/2026 at 1:52:46 AM

Yeah Apple's latest round of breaking changes hasn't been addressed (and seemingly won't be).

The Linux and Mac ports happened in 2013 or so (presumably getting one working went a lot of the way to getting the other working, though there is some speculation that Apple poured in some money to help make it happen).

by jamesfinlayson

2/11/2026 at 1:35:28 PM

MacOS 10.15 dropped support for x86-32 binaries.

Later it became clear why: the Apple Silicon transition, and Rosetta 2, which is optimised for running x86-64 binaries on Apple's Arm64.

But the same change is looming on Linux: Ubuntu tried in 2019 but was persuaded not to, Fedora has tried more than once.

WINE 11 can run Win32 binaries on a pure 64-bit host OS without 32-bit libraries. So, you can run some 32-bit Windows games on 64-bit Linux and macOS which cannot run the 32-bit binaries of their own older versions.

Apple merely jumped first. I think it's not to be blamed here. It'll happen everywhere in time.

by lproven

2/13/2026 at 1:21:52 AM

Oh that's right the - the 32-bit thing. Incidentally Valve experimented with 64-bit GoldSource 20+ years ago for servers at least but didn't really pursue it.

by jamesfinlayson

2/10/2026 at 3:30:59 PM

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.

by sho_hn

2/10/2026 at 4:36:51 PM

[dead]

by its_magic

2/10/2026 at 4:42:55 PM

Someone did something interesting to them and shared it with the world. That you feel is a waste of time does not add to the conversation and more broadly acts as a chilling effect on others who might want to share their interests.

When it comes to something like this, mom's advice is golden: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything."

by jjordan

2/10/2026 at 4:45:34 PM

It's a waste of time made necessary ONLY because of copyright law. As I explained.

As is THIS ENTIRE COMMENT THREAD.

And 10,000x other comment threads exactly like it, with you fools arguing back and forth for 300 pages about the subject.

What a complete waste of time and energy. Thanks, copyright law.

by its_magic

2/10/2026 at 6:18:51 PM

Nonsense. People reimplementing stuff to see if they can is unrelated to copyright. See the many implementations of vi.

by sho_hn

2/10/2026 at 4:45:55 PM

I'm also wonder why, but who cares, it's cool and fun. If someone wants to spend their time doing it, great. It's a lot more valuable than the time you spent writing that disparaging comment.

by bottlepalm

2/10/2026 at 4:50:06 PM

Tho I also disagree with you, I just want to point out the many HN guidelines[1] you are violating:

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I don't think downvoting your comment is super useful either but there are elements of how you are interacting that are not related to your argument that you could change to be less likely to be downvoted.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by aeturnum

2/10/2026 at 4:39:48 PM

Why not just install it from Steam?

by __alexs

2/10/2026 at 4:58:27 PM

[flagged]

by Der_Einzige

2/10/2026 at 5:03:26 PM

I'm curious, what value do you actually derive from the website? Why stay?

by wholinator2

2/10/2026 at 7:32:54 PM

[flagged]

by its_magic

2/10/2026 at 9:04:50 PM

Are you invited into polite company in real life or do you restrict your egotistical and paranoid rants to online only?

by Sabinus

2/10/2026 at 9:37:23 PM

Another great question, and another good opportunity to supply you with true facts and deep knowledge of reality. Here we go.

(This is turning into a real educational opportunity, unexpectedly.)

I have never--not once in my entire life--been so mistreated in person as I have been online, here or elsewhere. It simply does not happen, for some reason. At all. Ever.

This is not to say I haven't ever met any of you online abusers in real life; no, statistically speaking, I'm sure you're out there in the crowd somewhere, presumably within earshot when I speak truth. It's just that (for whatever reason) you simply never, ever think to approach me in the same manner as you do here.

(Maybe you can think of one or two good reasons why this is so. I'm sure whatever explanation you reach will be completely self-centered and self-serving, just like your other justifications and rationalizations about everything, which always reach the same conclusion: that I'm wrong, and terrible, and that you're a Good Person, and it's OK for you to just shit all over me.)

Since there is no such thing as downvotes or flags in real life--and since you don't have any actual rebuttal to offer to what I say, in 95% of cases--therefore your only choice (other than listening and, you know, learning) must be to sit quietly and fume in the corner, were you to suffer the indignity of hearing my horrible and unacceptable opinions spoken in the vicinity. So I guess that's what you do.

If you run into me in real life, feel free to speak up and make yourself known next time. Be sure to froth at the mouth as you call me a lunatic and a maniac and so on. Really, the more hatred you launch in my direction, the more success you will surely have. Everyone who hears will be thoroughly impressed at how right you are and how terrible I am.

by its_magic

2/10/2026 at 10:18:55 PM

> It simply does not happen, for some reason. At all. Ever.

Do you speak the same in-person as you do online? Most people probably could not parse any of what you posted, even with context. The most they'll pull from it is the Nazi correlations, and they probably won't extrapolate nice things from there.

I have thick skin, I dislike copyright and keep the company of all sorts of malcontents. If you lashed out against me for refusing to use your copyrighted code in real life, then yeah I would hold you very deeply in contempt. Or assume that you're an undercover agent of some sort trying to peer-pressure me into crime.

by bigyabai

2/10/2026 at 10:47:47 PM

I am a descendant of the man called Sequoyah, if it's not obvious. Writing clearly and expressively is not difficult for me. I do it as easily as breathing. If you can't parse my perfectly clear and understandable language, the problem is with you and not me.

I didn't "lash out" at anyone. I simply asked why waste time on this when you can just use the original source code. It's a valid question, isn't it?

It's also a perfectly cromulent place to express my completely valid opinions about the abomination and complete waste of time and energy that is copyright law, isn't it?

So what is the actual problem here, other than your butthurt feelings, that are in fact a personal problem of your own creation and have nothing to do with me? ... Ah, it seems I answered my own question.

Again and again we come back to the root of the problem: Why are you so determined to find some kind of flaw in me and my opinions? Pull the log out of your own eye first.

Why do you hate me so much that you enjoy censoring and shutting me down at every step, preventing me from expressing my valid thoughts? Isn't that abusive behavior of the sort that one expects from a tyrant, not from a supposedly free society?

Is this the paradise you had in mind to create when you genocided my ancestors and drove the survivors from our land? Well, you did not succeed in deporting or killing me. Nor will you silence me.

If you were truly correct in your own opinions, you could easily outargue me. A look at my post history will show at least one or two examples where I admitted the other guy was right when they clearly were. I guess that's considered an amazing superpower these days, since it never, ever happens anymore. No, you'd rather fight LITERALLY TO THE DEATH in some cases rather than allow for an alternate viewpoint.

And you wonder why people all over the world say your nation is corrupt and full of arrogant criminals. Gee, I wonder how they ever came to that conclusion.

You often call yourself "polite society", but you're not really very polite, are you?

by its_magic

2/10/2026 at 11:17:43 PM

I have no defense for HN; the website is designed poorly, moderated inconsistently, and the YC-affiliated retinue is sketchier than a pencil drawing.

That being said, people who take things personally for no reason is exactly the reason the "flag" button exists. We all know that the Half Life source code is out there on the internet, most of us agree that copyright is stupid, and a good handful of us are probably deliberately violating copyright law. That isn't your excuse to deride people who make things that don't conform to your (literally illegal!) outlook on society.

This is a really cool project that is in no way invalidated by the existence of leaked source code. Your copyright tangent is a non-sequitur and deserves to be flagged.

by bigyabai

2/11/2026 at 6:05:58 AM

I maintain my position that this project is a complete waste of time which exists only due to the abomination that is copyright law. (Without that reason, the author would have easily recognized this project as a waste of time, would he not?)

I continue to assert that it's OK to have such an opinion and to express it freely. I reject your incorrect, selfish, and quite frankly evil belief that I deserve to be censored. Nobody deserves to have their honest opinions be censored, ever, especially in what is allegedly a public discussion forum.

(Except maybe you--since you self-identify as a tyrant. I'm OK with you never being allowed to speak again, if you want to shut me up when I have done nothing wrong.)

There are about ten trillion important projects that need to be done in this world, many of critical, life and death importance. Reimplementing a 20-year old game (due to copyright concerns, of all reasons) is a foolish waste of time no matter how you slice it.

If the guy was collecting Pokemon cards or spent all his time watching sports, or blowing his money on hot rodding, or a thousand other foolish things, I'd post exactly the same advice: Stop wasting your time on useless activities and get serious.

Of course, such a sentiment isn't going to be popular in a forum full of so many young (or not so young) "men" and "women" who spend their entire "lives" inside video games, when they aren't doomscrolling on "their" phone. Lots of escapism and avoidance of reality going on around here. Let's just hate and attack the messenger, that's always a great move.

It's pretty sad we have to keep going back and forth about this. All you had to do is just let me express my opinion and move on. But you just couldn't do that; it was impossible. Now we have a giant "discussion" thread in which you are unsuccessfully attempting to argue with a brick wall, after your censorship attempt failed.

Remember what I said above about the GIANT WASTE OF TIME AND ENERGY that copyright law creates? I wonder how many watts and calories have been burned and lost forever as a result of this thread, in addition to all that has been wasted on this reimplementation of an old game.

Here's some more life wisdom: Just because somebody says something "negative" doesn't mean they're being an asshole. It is permissable to disagree and to express that disagreement. Stop being so thin skinned, perpetually offended at every word that comes out of my mouth. You will not succeed in censoring me. Period.

by its_magic

2/11/2026 at 5:54:31 PM

> Remember what I said above about the GIANT WASTE OF TIME AND ENERGY that copyright law creates?

You are the only one wasting your time in this entire comment chain. Everyone else has moved on.

by bigyabai

2/10/2026 at 6:01:39 PM

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?

by sdwr

2/10/2026 at 6:19:26 PM

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)

by brynnbee

2/10/2026 at 7:19:52 PM

How about the assets?

by alpb

2/10/2026 at 7:54:53 PM

I assume you, the player, have to provide the assets yourself, and the game won't run without them. Since the code does not contain the assets, there is no copyright infringement.

by blell

2/10/2026 at 9:54:25 PM

As long as the assets dont contain code, they're kind of fair game. The rule of thumb is you cannot redistribute them, but if the person owns a legal copy you can point to them on their local system. It is not up to you to figure out if they're pointing to a pirated copy or a legitimate copy mind you.

by giancarlostoro

2/10/2026 at 1:11:30 PM

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

by fp64

2/10/2026 at 3:32:57 PM

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.

by tsunamifury

2/10/2026 at 5:24:00 PM

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.

by plorkyeran

2/13/2026 at 1:23:12 AM

Not sure but I think it might have been getting close to what was possible - I remember reading about Michael Abrash working with John Carmack on all sorts of things to get acceptable framerates.

by jamesfinlayson

2/10/2026 at 8:50:37 PM

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

by squarefoot

2/10/2026 at 12:43:15 PM

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

by user____name

2/10/2026 at 1:05:36 PM

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.

by vkazanov

2/10/2026 at 1:09:53 PM

Yeah, but Half Life 2's Source engine was itself a continuation of Goldsrc which was itself a continuation of the Quake 1 engine. The lineage is there but beyond a certain point it's not really Quake anymore.

GZDoom/UZDoom is a similar grey area, it is built on the original Doom codebase but they've added so many features that it's practically its own distinct engine now. Those forks can even render arbitrary 3D models, which OG idTech couldn't do until Quake.

by jsheard

2/10/2026 at 1:13:20 PM

We'd have to come up with definition of quake :-) FTE has a lot bolted on it but the focus us in Quake, quake mods, lifting some limitations and making mod dev convenient.

But it is the same overall code structure, the same game, etc.

All these oss quake engines, are they quake? Ironwail, quakespasm vkQuake?

by vkazanov

2/10/2026 at 2:27:00 PM

I think the litmus test is weather they are backwards compatible with old maps/campaigns from the original engine/game.

Half-Life 2 sure won't play quake maps nor will it play hl1 maps.

by amlib

2/10/2026 at 4:15:26 PM

> Half-Life 2 sure won't play quake maps nor will it play hl1 maps.

Not without modifications but Half-Life: Source is essentially a tech demo to show that they can be ported easily (if you are OK with dropping some pesky features like randomized wall textures).

by account42

2/10/2026 at 5:02:30 PM

AFAIK hl1 maps needs to be open in hammer, tweaked a bit and then recompiled to function in hl2. You also better have those originals .rmfs rather than a .map or a even worse, a .bsp :)

by amlib

2/10/2026 at 3:13:28 PM

Qames/quake from 9front =). It can run LibreQuake with Malice as a MODs, and that's it. Quake, Quakeworld and everything for vanilla, no modern changes like QuakeSpasm or worse, DarkPlaces. If someone backported HL2 to the original Quake with reduced physics and still run under a Pentium III fast enough, it would be something astonishing.

I see impressive stuff with reimplementations such as Surreal Engine, but they will require far more powerful machines.

If Surreal had a software renderer (not requiring AVX or similar) running under an SSE2 machine, that would yield even more respect, because if your reimplemented engine runs in legacy machines the portability would explode. Just have a look on Scummvm on how many platforms and OSes can it run. Or the Super Mario port for PC, where some fork supports even 3DFX under DOS, and GL 1.2. Thus runnable under TinyGL with no 3D accelerators and even under Plan9/9front with custom tweaks.

by anthk

2/11/2026 at 11:18:04 AM

We are all fish.

by spiritplumber

2/11/2026 at 9:45:00 AM

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.

by singularfutur

2/10/2026 at 12:49:15 PM

SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

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

by CodeCompost

2/10/2026 at 3:23:28 PM

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.

by opello

2/10/2026 at 2:46:25 PM

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::

by linuxguy2

2/10/2026 at 3:06:42 PM

Maybe you are MITM`d?

by notachatbot123

2/10/2026 at 4:26:20 PM

Ah. Looks like it is being blocked by my corporate software.

Thx for the replies.

by CodeCompost

2/10/2026 at 1:50:05 PM

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.

by lloeki

2/10/2026 at 2:08:00 PM

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.

by homebrewer

2/10/2026 at 2:24:44 PM

And Viktor Antonov (rip) art style.

edit: there is also the fact that map compilers for gold source games have advanced far beyond what they could do back in 1999. The lightmaps and light sources alone can be far more intricate nowadays than what you would get from the official valve ones in 1999.

by amlib

2/10/2026 at 3:23:13 PM

The other thing though is that Original Quake Back In The Day ran on a Pentium 75 (needed the maths co-processor) with a dumb framebuffer. All the rasterising of polygons was pure software, as was all the geometry processing. Running GLQuake was a huge improvement but it required an expensive add-in card that piggybacked onto your VGA card, and a whole different binary.

Now you can just kind of pile it into a block of RAM, aim a chunky ASIC at it, and pull the trigger every frame.

In the late 90s a mate of mine did a phenomenal video of a Quake demo (you could record all player movements and camera positions as a "dem file") that he'd rendered out, raytraced in POVRay. I printed it to VHS for him as part of a showreel, and never thought to keep a copy myself.

by ErroneousBosh

2/10/2026 at 7:02:40 PM

While lighting is important, not using halflife.wad and going above the original budget of 500 polys per "scene" is what makes modern works look much better.

Most of the original textures are under 128×96 px and some suffer from awful palletisation artefacts with purple and orange halos. We still cannot use more than 8 bpp but we can use 512×512 textures and do a better job at reducing to 256 colours. I use pngquant for that.

In GoldSrc lightmaps cannot get more intricate though, they're tied to the texture scale so you cannot get a finer lightmap unless you also make larger textures and scale them down, and these two combined will wreck your "AllocBlock" budget in which all your textures and lightmaps must fit.

ericw-tools and its dirtmapping are still welcome improvements over the "traditional" *HLT compilers.

by l-p

2/10/2026 at 10:42:58 PM

> In GoldSrc lightmaps cannot get more intricate though, they're tied to the texture scale so you cannot get a finer lightmap unless you also make larger textures and scale them down, and these two combined will wreck your "AllocBlock" budget in which all your textures and lightmaps must fit.

AFAIK some of the improvements include much better light bouncing techniques, transmission of surface colors like source does, more accurate lights, spotlights that emulate what source spotlights does and faster compilation (computers also got faster and MT support helps a lot). That alone allows level designers to be more ambitious by taking advantage of faster iteration and place even more lights.

I do agree that there are likely dozens if not hundreds of reasons why maps can and usually do look way better today than what could be done in the past. Hell, even level designer proficiency with the tools as time goes is also surely a reason.

by amlib

2/11/2026 at 5:23:10 AM

I think the biggest reason is just better hardware. In 1998 many of the props were just blocky level geometry.

by jamesfinlayson

2/10/2026 at 3:31:26 PM

I used to do a bit of mapping back then (nothing that survived to this day, thankfully); as I recall, practically nobody used official map compilers. As it often happens, the community wrote replacements that were much faster for debug "-O0" builds, and generated lightmaps of a significantly higher quality for the release "-O2" builds.

It was either ZHLT or VLHT, or something like that; looks like more alternatives have been written since then.

https://gamebanana.com/tools/5391

https://github.com/seedee/SDHLT

by homebrewer

2/10/2026 at 3:57:17 PM

The lighting is one of the main area's that really improved a lot.

For standard Q1 mapping ericw tools [0] is great (the page has some nice previews).

This project seems to use Nuclide for building which by default uses vmap compiler [1][2]. Which is really Q3 but I think FTE handles that well internally as the newer format has some more modern features.

> Powerful BSP compiler. Use VMAP to bake levels like you're used to from similar engine technology, with high quality lightmaps, cubemap-based environment mapping and adjustable vertex colors on spline-based meshes.

[0] https://ericwa.github.io/ericw-tools/

[1] https://developer.vera-visions.com/d4/d50/radiant.html#autot...

[2] https://github.com/VeraVisions/vmap

by trashb

2/10/2026 at 4:52:23 PM

There was a similar path with Unreal3. The early games (2006) lighting looks quite harsh by modern standards, one of the highlights of Mirror's Edge (2008) was DICE using third party Illuminate's "beast" lighting, then Epic moved to "lightmass" around 2009 with the public UDK toolset.

by keyringlight

2/11/2026 at 2:05:00 AM

The Z from ZHLT ended up working for Gearbox Software.

by jamesfinlayson

2/10/2026 at 9:03:30 PM

A shame to only now learn of Victor Antonov's passing. His work on HL2 and Dishonored remain some of my favorite examples of video game world building of all time. These places felt real and lived in, in a way few other video games have matched for me.

by giobox

2/11/2026 at 6:34:51 AM

Yeah Cry of Fear really pushed the GoldSource engine to its limits (I think it implemented a custom renderer but the models just push the base engine's limits with regards to maximum polygons and texture sizes).

by jamesfinlayson

2/10/2026 at 5:23:25 PM

Is this the way we can have HL3 also?

by unixhero

2/10/2026 at 2:01:08 PM

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

by hiprob

2/10/2026 at 2:09:29 PM

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-...

by Cthulhu_

2/10/2026 at 3:38:21 PM

Quake 2 was when they added multi-colored lighting - it's really aged well.

by koverstreet

2/11/2026 at 5:24:31 AM

Can I run this on my 486?

by NSUserDefaults

2/10/2026 at 10:56:03 PM

[dead]

by huflungdung

2/10/2026 at 1:42:33 PM

[flagged]

by lucastytthhh

2/10/2026 at 3:11:16 PM

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

Good job keeping me away with Anubis, btw.

by anthk

2/10/2026 at 3:21:23 PM

[flagged]

by pantalaimon

2/10/2026 at 3:33:55 PM

No, just a 9front user with a web browser, Netsurf. I shouldn't need JS to read an article you know.

by anthk