Half Life FX Created 17 years ago2007-02-18 00:10:48 UTC by Soup Miner

A new beta, and SP demo, was released of this a few days ago. Half Life FX brings a shitload of new, amazing effects to the Goldsource engine. It kinda does to visuals what Spirit did for entities. Although right now it's quite a resource hog, you can do some pretty awesome crap. Check it out: http://chainstudios.hlfx.ru/index.php?do=hlfxs&lan

Me no read Russianic

http://hlfx.ru/gallery/gfx_shadow005.jpg

that's the only one i thought looked really good..

Srry, there's a button for english in the top left corner.

Hunter, download HLFX Single. The regular HLFX isn't very impressive, the recent HLFX SP demo is what you want.

To tell you the truth, none of that stuff looks that good. It's all kinda cheesy, especially when used in contrast to all the old HL stuff. I can see a lot of people using this as a cheap compensation for good mapping, which is perhaps how it'd look the worst. :

And that picture of the light fixtures is just a bunch of sprites. I can't figure out what they were trying to do there.

That would be a screenshot of the bumpmapping.
Just download it and give it a try, there are some very nice effects, most of which can't be captured by a screenshot.
Edit: http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/1151/hsdemo0000iw4.png
^That's not a texture trick, it's dynamic light shining through the texture. The shadows that it casts are also projected onto models, so it looks even better when you are running through it or when an npc is.

Looks alright.

I hate when mods like this do the cheesy shadows. Its like, they are too sharp to look realistic.

I like the bump mapping effects, though. Not that it didn't already exist, though. Flash light looks just like the one from HL2.

If the reflections from HLFX are in the single one, then it would be pretty kick ass. Same with the HDR looking lighting, from the screenshot looking at the map. Im kinda sure thats already possible with regular HL, though.

All in all, looks alright. Too bad its just eye candy, and isn't a decent mod.

Yeah, that's the problem. You can't really inject this stuff into the HL1 mapping as it's far too plain to house these effects.

Apart from that, not bad. I'm downloading the demo now.

I played it, and it's kinda weird but not too good. It's REALLY laggy for one thing (this is with a 256 MB GeForce 7600, Athlon 64 3700+, and 1.5 GB RAM), and it doesn't seem like you should have to sacrifice so much playability for a couple neat visual effects. With all the lag, I had a really hard time crouch jumping (I always crouch jump), and even aiming at enemies was a pain.

The graphics were fairly good, but they really clashed with the old textures, and that detracted from them a lot. If I'd seen these graphical effects used in Poke646: Vendetta, they would have been out great, but here it just looks cheesy.

The flashlight was probably the worst thing about the graphics. I don't understand they did this, but for some reason they decided the regular flashlight wasn't good enough, and they replaced it with this worse looking 2D effect that just lit up certain areas of the screen, instead of actually lighting the geometry.

So, it might be good if you can make a fun mod based on it, but only if they can reduce the lag a lot. Until then, stick with Source if you want good visuals. It's just not worth it right now.

HLFX has been around for a long time now. In fact, I remember, back in the early days when it was considered an absolute pain because it messed with your HL files as it didn't actually present itself as a mod: rather, it replaced your HL install.

Seems neat, and like Spirit, It's something I'd like to explore in detail someday.

Really, Ant? I just thought there wsa the fairly old beta and the recent SP demo.

Well, all these effects are common in today's games. Back in 2000 It would have been surprising to see things like this with the HL1 engine. The fact is, since it's modified, it's no longer the same engine, so I don't know what fuzz is about... The interesting thing about the old engine is pushing it to its limits, accomplishing things that were possible in 1998 but nobody had thought about.
All of those effects can be done in Source with a very good performance. A game engine has limits on what it can draw even if your computer exceeds the requirements. That's why the same huge map in HL1 will give you worse framerates than the Source version, even in the exact same computer.
Take a look at this "diagram" I madeAs you can see, there's a certain relation between what you can do, what your computer can do and what a particular game engine will let you do, all in the same system.

Anyway, I do like the screenshots. They make me want to play the Black Mesa mod for Source!!

Edit: if you try to make your imagination overflow the engine limits, the engine will overflow your computer!

Good diagramm

Makes sense, Kaspergy.

WC: Yah, HLFX has been around. Dunno if this is by the same team, but it's the same name.

HL2 runs faster than this hack lol

Of course it does. That's what we're talking about, it's a fairly pointless mod.

Well I thought it was pretty cool anyway

I picture this as being a mod for the coders so that they can pat themselves on the back for doing something cool with an outdated engine. Unless the source is released, this doesn't seem very useful.