I'm so excited to play this 20 year old game once again

I love these summary videos of tech/game news. Your passion shines through.

By the way, hl2 rtx does not use any ai textures. It is a feature, but orbifold is using hand made textures. And the rest of the games listed are all community projects with only technical support from the remix devs.

I really like that they didn't just slap on some RTX lighting and say done, they are redoing animations, sprites and models along with it. Quite excited to see how it's gonna end up.

You said it. This is not how valve would do the game today. This is like a alternative timeline of graphic evolution. I love this.

The thing about the "overhauled" 4k textures on many props is that they seem to all be static now. The older low res textures on props often had animation where appropriate, like brinking lights on the rack electronics seen at 5:20 I get that it's nice to see a big upgrade in resolution - but losing any degree of animation just makes the whole thing look more and more like a static simulation rather than a dynamic world, no matter how high res the textures are or how good the lighting is.

Half life 2 lighting still looks spectacular and has a better presentation than many games today. In 2004-2005 the source engine had already incorporated "Radiosity Normal Mapping" which is the encoding of light maps in a novel basis which allows them to express directionality of incoming radiance, not just the total cosine weighted incident radiance, which is where most light mapping techniques stop. The specular lighting was done through a set of manually placed HDR cubemaps. But the most significant component of Half-Life 2 character and model lighting is the inclusion of a directional ambient term from directional irradiance samples precomputed throughout the environments and stored in an irradiance volume (yes, like we see on Blender's EEVEE), the directional irradiance samples or ambient cube sample points are stored in a 3D spatial data structure, when any model that moves in the environment, only the nearest sample point to the model’s centroid is selected from the irradiance volume, this can result in hard transitions in the directional ambient component of illumination as the character or object moves throughout the environment, but they choose to time-average the ambient and local lighting information to limit the effect of lighting discontinuities. Further read at: www.realtimerendering.com/advances/s2006/Chapter7-Shading_in_Valve's_Source_Engine.pdf

*4:20* OK, I wasn't sold until the corrugated iron wall. Even the cobblestone road wasn't enough. But when I saw that corrugated iron wall, I thought "Damn. That's a corrugated iron wall right there. I'm sold."

Excited to see this project getting more coverage! We love you Philip 🧡

3:22 I really hope those materials aren't final. The brick texture looks so bland compared to the original. And the tile floor looks more like a microscopic image of reptile scales or something. Still, I'd say it's looking pretty solid so far. The parallax occlusion mapping definitely adds some much-needed depth to the otherwise simple, blocky geometry.

I actually just joined the team developing this, Orbifold Studios💪 I’m gonna be using my 3D skills to help remake assets. Super excited, HL2 is my all time favorite and getting to work on it is peak awesome! Love your content btw man, always have!

Thank you for the video Phillip! Looking forward to another year of great content

The 3D details are the height map, the metal panel texture, the rocky ground texture. I have made similar textures from zero, no ai tools whatever. I know the random slightly rotated placement of each rock and how to do it. If you carry those height map details too far, as you mentioned in some blind spots or edges it becomes weird which most games dont event care and do anyway, which i suppose will happen to hl2 rtx as well, they wont care. If you played trepang2 what you will notice is that in underground rocky+human constructed places the rocky surfaces geometry is very straight and simple. All the details, rockiness and stuff are the height map details which gets very crazy when you take a careful look but the actual surface is just straight and very primitive. I suppose they didnt do displacements for optimization. In areas they did displacements they did it very wrong and fcked up, in terms of placing it. You could literaly in some surfaces see the empty no face behind of the displacement surface.

imagine half life 2 vr with rtx

They still need to adjust some of the textures and materials, the headcrabs looks like they are made out of clay, the grass looks like it's been freshly mowed, and the image suffers from overbright in a bunch of places. I hope this will stay more true to the game's art style than Portal with RTX did, and run a bit better.

4:17 Wow. Unbelievable that this is the same texture. I never realised that the original texture was meant to represent multiple iron plates. Now being in 3d, it totally changes the way it looks and feels. I love it.

if I remember correctly, HL2 was one of the first games to utilize normal mapping which still looks impressive today, but I just love seeing that it's getting the overhaul it deserves today.

One thing that's interesting after my recent hl2 replay was... the reflections. Every water surface got perfect reflecitons and it;s not cube maps since the items and objects are also perfectly reflected. These are best reflections ever

Now that you mentioned the revamped sounds that makes a lot more sense when I was wondering if the MP7 sounds different in the trailer

Nice video philip, thanks for exploring this HL2 RTX showcase in detail. I wouldn't have seen it without you.

3:18 This is the only thing I'm worried about tbh. That dilapidated brick wall isn't supposed to be a stone with brick imprints. Same with the tile flooring. The AI doesn't really know what its trying to make and ends up making some skyrim cave wall looking texture. Though I believe the team will get those issues sorted by release. Its still looking great

Id love to see Philip do deep analysis on hl2 rtx when it comes out, These old hl2 videos hit hard not gonna lie

imagine this being your first introduction to the half-life games. im trying to say that they should make a black mesa with rtx

The sounds and music in your videos are the best, so immersive!

i remember playing around with an addon parallax shader in gmod back in the day. The Combine Elites looked so gorgeous, also had phong pre orangebox.

This is amazing. Our childhood reimagined

HL2 is also just great storytelling, it had a great atmosphere. Playing the game made me really feel a part of the story instead of being just another shooter .

Just wanted to chime in to say the music you chose for the vid fits really well and I really enjoyed the video :))!

do you have plans to cover The Talos Principle 2? your video on the original was so well written that it actually convinced me to buy the game. would love to see you share your thoughts on the sequel

great and interesting video and perfect video length! They comparison shots help me understand the topic more

This will be Half-Life 2 graphics in 2013.

Super excited about the new assets. Hope they take note of your thoughts since I thought that was tiles too

perfect timing, I was planning on replaying the series some time

I liked the portal one already but this has way more different environments and interesting things to look at, do you think you'll make a video on it in detail when it comes out? At least it seems like you had fun making this one :)

some of the aspects of the game look better but the overhaul of the graphics doesn't scale up uniformly so it creates visually unbalanced areas and it doesn't follow the original art direction. Basically it's a different looking game with some parts looking better, creating a visual dissonance. The game where this was most obvious was the recent awful overhaul of Quake 2 under the mantle of RTX, where hi-res textures were wrapped around low-poly models and the lighting started to cast detailed shadows, resulting in a fun tech-demo with blasphemious, oxymoronic artstyle. I'm glad people are still playing with HL2, I finished the game about 18 times and it's remarkable. Don't forget though that a good-looking game has to scale up details proportionately though - that's the key to a cohesive remake. Thx for coming to my tedtalk.

Yes! I knew phillip would make at least one video on this! I've been patiently awaiting it

The background song you use in someone of the videos gives me chills every time I hear it.

So many 2kliks uploads. This has always been my favorite channel in your network, so I’m very excited by this development in empire 2024

Hey, a helping hand on the initial VTMB (and Freedom Fighters 2001 (AND Silent Hill 2)) project here, had a huge deal with debugging VTMB with REMIX in it's early days and it's nice to see how nVidia kept updating and fixing REMIX to support the games better since no two games are the same. the thing it seems to be missing from source games are the 3D skyboxes since they're a secondary render target obviously, so it gets omited from the bigger picture, but otherwise i think with omniverse, the people working on the project could integrate the 3D skybox into the level itself without no fuss with today's processing power. posing help to the (maybe official) project is a good feeling man. maybe i might get back into it and ask if the team behind it needs the help hand tuning the visuals for them to ensure proper VTMB feel. i'd be the happiest man alive if we could get a remaster in any form... so a real big shame we never got a source code or reverse engineering (or an actual sequel instead of vampire fallout 4), or anything from Troika to help maintain this piece of history the way it deserves to be

I'll be interested to see how feasible it is to back-port some of these textures and models from PBR form to use in plain old Source maps. This does undoubtedly look better than static lightmaps in a lot of places, but I don't understand some of the changes like the wood floor texture, looks completely different. I think the $parallax existed even in HL2, but it might have been added with Lost Coast or ep1. There's also a parallax mapping gmod addon now, but that works completely differently and is based on an implementation for a source mod iirc. Either way it looks impressive in this HL2 RTX, hopefully they do something to make it line up right with perpendicular adjacent surfaces as you pointed out.

One thing some forget is, often the shadows and lighting was made to look a certain way but when you use other techniques in order to generate lighting and shadows things stop looking like how they were intended, sometimes it breaks sections of games, not to mention all the side effects of these techniques.

I'm so hyped to see Garry's Mod with the RTX support from what they mentioned in the blog... Imagine playing your favourite maps revamped with raytracing in VR!

This with the Unrecord style color grading would be mind blowing

I'm not into the plastic textures, not my thing, I love the art style of HL-2, but I do love the RTX lighting, and VTMB getting the RTX treatment would be awsome, that game has a very particular atmosphere that needs to be maintained, the dark contrast backstreets and all that RTX could really bring that aspect out more, It already looks amazing with 8 times 4K (16K) super-scaling and MSAA, and 32K super-sampling makes VTMB look like it has 2020 graphics, this combined with RTX would be crazy, I'd love to see what that looks like.

ok I love this this is not only a texture upgrade its a faithful one . I am so tired to texture upgrades that randomly change colors of things or completely change the look except for that one tile texture.

Environment artist here. About Parallax Occlusion Mapping(POM) breaking down on the edges of things; It is driven by a heightmap, which is a greyscale texture, and modern engine shaders can mask out that heightmap by blending in a neutral value (i.e., zero height) on specific areas of an asset, so you can set the edges to have zero POM and thus looking correct(You can still retain a feeling of volume since you're usually also applying a normal map). However in my experience masking POM is often deemed too expensive to implement just for that slight increase of control of the final look (Which annoys me greatly as an artist; There's tons of polishing techniques that are often overlooked because it's deemed "not worth it")

I will finally be able to play Half-Life 2 with less than 30 FPS thanks to the RTX option! I can't wait to stutter through Ravenholm!

It is exciting how good these old games can be made to look. Might get my nephew to try out my favourites if they look this shiny.

This looks fantastic. I'm excited for the tools to be released and breathe some new life into some of my favourites

I don't remember where i heard it maybe the narration mode it was said but the devs were originally even against adding bump maps so that's why they didn't have parallax at the time. I think the antlion texture artist convinced them to add bump maps.

I trust the fans more than i trust Nvidia employees

3:45 Yeah, that is bathroom tiles, not rock. I really hope they release a version with just update models and better lighting for those who's machines can not do pathtracing. Like, somehow using the higher quality pathtracing to improve the baked in lighting and making the realtime shadows higher quality.

I would love to see this kind of project with ray tracing in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

gonna step in when that drops and apply it to the vr mode

The only ones who really do something here are Remade Assets, the rest is just lighting, which most often makes things worse, for example why in a barn with zombies an ordinary wooden floor suddenly becomes shiny like tiles

I am so excited to get an rtx 4070s end of January .. For all this sort of thing, with folks putting serious work into rtx remix, we are going to get some really cool overhauls of old games 😀 . Also cant wait to play portal rtx

It's nice to see that they're doing to Half-Life 2 as Black Mesa did to Half-Life 1, I'm quite excited to see the release of this project! So is there an expected release date for specifically the Half-Life 2 RTX remix?

Hey Philip just wanna say I appreciate your content. Seems like you always bring interesting things to my attention and the somewhat inconsistent uploads make it a pleasant surprise every time!

This video makes my night night better, if you’re sick, get better.

This reminds me of a game called " industria " which was inspired by half life and had some cool RT features as well , i'd recommend playing as it's decent and costs like 20 bucks

5:35 I literally jolted when I saw Freedom Fighters on the list.

Bioshock RTX is gonna be insane i cannot wait for RTX Remix

Always love your videos about graphics.

5:18 the details make me 🌊🌊🌊

This looks reaaly stunning for a remaster from the ground up i played half-life 1 and 2 back when they first came out and was a wonderful game to play and if i ever have a new pc to play this all maxed out with ray tracing all in 4k this will be one of them without a shadow of a doubt a proper first person remaster. For me just seeing it looking like this to how i remember it once looked back at the day to seeing it to this would be a joy of delight to play and see all the new upgrade.

Some of the materials could still use some work, some surfaces got that flat and shiny look you get when you put old games into RTX tho some look really good.

The 3D depth in the textures is insane! 🤯

I'm so excited! and I just can't hide! this game has been my jam ever since I got it in the orange box on the 360, I'm so absolutely PUMPED for hl2rtx to finally arrive, can't wait to fall in love with the game for.. uh.. the thirteenth time?

This will look amazing with cinematic mods alyx models :)

Looks incredible, especially impressed with assets, great work by the team. Tho I wonder if it's gonna be even more challenging to run then Portal RTX since it takes placed in a closed down, sterile/simplistic facility, but HL2 takes you through all kinds of places.. My 2060 barely ran Portal RTX, so I don't think I'll have a lot of luck running this.. :(

Can’t wait to see the combines

Bro casually introduced Half Life Tuesday and thought we wouldn't notice?? LMAO 5:06

I'm super gonna replay the game when they release this!

Remix is such a cool tool, I can’t wait to see what other games get this treatment. Fingers crossed for a fallout 3 remix

You forgot the "you'll need a 4080 to run it at 30 fps"

The flaw with these "remixes" is that just with musical remixes it just completely shatters the original authors intention, this can be seen in one of the zombie scenes, in the original you can make up the zombie comming though the door, and in the other it's just pitch black. Just recompiling the maps with a higher quality light-map would be the only thing that is needed to make the game look better.

Man this will be the day now playing half life with ray tracing and having you're machine struggling to run 60fps AHH those where the days 🤣

This makes me wonder how it would look if HL2 was ported to Source 2 and updated to use these models and textures giving most of the graphical quality just without real time RTX but with waaaay better performance.

Never plaid half life 1 or 2 but this looks great gonna deffo play it like this as its been on my backlog for ages

There’s an official discord for rtx remix with a section on remix projects that includes some of the listed games (vampire, need for speed, etc) I imagine that could be why it was mentioned

Might be set to release for Half Life 2's 20th anniversary

RTX Remix runtime has been out for a while now, they named very specific games because the community has been modding those a lot already. You can use it right now.

I love Source games getting RTX treatment :) I wanted VTMB remake or sequel for years

I would love if they went forward with Freedom Fighters somewhere down the line as it's IO interactives most under appreciated title .

I really can't wait to mess about with the Remix tools.

Great video, that tech looks really promising ! I like the song at the end of the video (with the piano), did you make it ? Could you share the name please ? Thanks :)

I remember Half-Life 2 blowing my mind graphically when it came out. Then we got the Lost Coast installment with HDRR and I couldn't imagine more realistic lighting 😂

I hope this works with the VR mod they put out

I would love to experience Half Life 2 the way I saw the game for the first time back in the day. This would be a great way to do so. To be fair, I would love all of the older games to be remastered like this. The games have so much soul already, that the light will bring it out even more.

Can't wait for the HL2 RTX remix! It would be so incredible to get all HL1 expansions/titles to experience again with modern graphics, as we remembered it looked like as we were younger!

Woah that looks amazing!!

Those 3D materials will break due to those corners, i think it's gonna be minor stuff but if you look for it the walls will seem like floating

cant wait to watch hl2 raytracing walkthrough

never played HL2 before. gonna play this with all the bells and whistles turned up to the max

i cant wait til someone makes the vr mod work with this

Back when it came out, I remember one guy at university just having this game sit on his desk during lectures. Back when games came in boxes.

4:00 look up height map or displacement map or bump map. They all kinda mean the same thing and i think this is how this is done

i'm thinking how will people look in the game? Will it be a model or the same?

I can't wait for this. I was hoping they would at least tell us the ETA.

I REALLY want to see a Return to Castle Wolfenstein RTX