11 ms·
Also I highly recommend Black Mesa, which is the remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine. The Xen levels went from what they were to possibly some of my favorite levels
by XorNot 2y ago
Also I highly recommend Black Mesa, which is the remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine. The Xen levels went from what they were to possibly some of my favorite levels in the game, and the music scoring is top-notch. It feels great to play.
- va1a 2y agoMaybe even in a game period. Beautifully done remake.
- jsheard 2y agoBlack Mesa is also 75% off right now, incidentally. Seems like everything Half Life is either free or on deep discount for the anniversary.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago[flagged]
- jsheard 2y agoAnd when you buy an album on CD you just license it for personal use, you can't play it on the radio or in a commercial space. "Buying" a copy of some intellectual property always had strings attached even in the age of physical media.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoSteam can delete a game from your account, they can't delete a cd that I physically have with me. Why does this even need to be spelled out...
- taeric 2y agoDo they have a record of doing this? Paranoia here is largely warranted. But people had fewer rights than they realized before. And finding a way to play older media is often a rather expensive endeavor. Edit to add: I also find picking on Valve awkward here. Microsoft? Sony? I would be far more inline. Even Nintendo. Valve seems to be much more on favor of empowering users, though.
- Uvix 2y agoMicrosoft, Sony, and Nintendo all have physical releases for most of their games that they can't take from my cold dead hands. Valve has singlehandedly killed that market for PC games.
- taeric 2y agoNintendo has some where you can't rent anymore, because the save data is on cartridge. They all have limitations on regions. Again, Steam /could/ do this. Has it? The others have done the things.
- opan 2y ago3DS saved to the cart and had region-locking. Neither applies to Switch. You can get a JP copy of Splatoon 3, play it on your NA Switch, swap to the NA version of the game, and not lose anything.
- taeric 2y agoAh, that is good to hear. May pick up a switch game for the kids while in Japan, then.
- newdee 2y ago> Why does this even need to be spelled out... Indeed. Why did you bother?
- ethbr1 2y agoThis should be so trivially apparent to anyone on HN using Steam that pointing it out is like noting the sky is blue.
- ruggeri 2y agoNot contradicting your point, but adding tangential interesting information. Blu-Ray UHD discs can no longer be played on modern computers as Intel has removed the trusted execution environment needed to decrypt them. Blu-Ray UHD players do a handshake that verifies the use of Intel SGX. One might have always been skeptical of these discs, especially as AMD had never implemented those TEE instructions. But I believe the interesting takeaway is that even physical media is becoming something you can’t count on using without the continued permission/assistance of some outside party. Without regulation I would expect that all new media will eventually require players to be always-online.
- Halian 2y agoWhy hasn’t the requisite software been updated to perform a non-SGX handshake? That seems like a yawning oversight. o_O
- wkat4242 2y agoTrue but a lot of games require an online launcher to even start, even if they are also distributed on physical media I buy most of my games on GOG for that reason. At least you can download a DRM-free copy that can never be taken away.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoTo add to bdjsiqoocwk pointing out the self-evident, in many jurisdictions you have both the right, and the tools to make backups of media for personal use. What exactly is legally permissible and actually possible with non-physical stuff is much more complicated.
- throw10920 2y agoTangential, irrelevant, "flamebait...generic tangents...internet tropes." "reminder" that the guidelines explicitly say to avoid. Nobody mentioned ownership or licensing or anything tangentially related until you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago[flagged]
- dekhn 2y agoIn my decade+ of using steam, this has never been an issue.
- Timon3 2y agoAnd regarding another fan project - turns out the Prologue for Project Borealis has been released on November 11th! They're trying to make HL3 according to the Epistle 3 post from a couple of years ago. https://projectborealis.com/prologue-release/ https://projectborealis.com/prologue-release/ Looks great, and feels pretty close to HL2 mechanics! Definitely has to be optimized more, but a very promising start (albeit short, ~10-15 minutes).
- mepian 2y agoI worked on this in the first year, on the gameplay code. Glad it’s finally bearing some fruit.
- chii 2y agoGood stuff. I have seen a lot of "complaints" from various people that they shouldn't have chosen UE, as it will have made the game much slower to develop since everything needed to be done from scratch. But the graphics looked much nicer in UE and not to mention the tooling is nicer than what one could use with mods. Surely, the upfront cost of porting aspects of HL2 over to UE is not investment lost.
- KronisLV 2y agoHasn't Unreal Engine 5 gotten a bunch of criticism about a lot of the games made with it having high system requirements, and often playing like a stuttery mess? Though it's hard to tell where the technical decisions end and developers not caring much about optimization (or expecting people to use upscaling even for 1080p) starts. Recently, it was revealed that even the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 benchmarks used upscaling and the problems with visually stunning but horribly performing games like The Forever Winter were also pretty obvious. I did very much appreciate what Black Mesa did, though. Maybe Project Borealis will also be a success story in due time.
- talldayo 2y agoIt's complicated. There is Unreal 5 tech that is extremely slow in and of itself (Lumen and Nanite come to mind), but most of the stutter comes from UE5's notorious shader compilation pipeline. Instead of pre-compiling shaders on first launch, UE5 will automatically compile and cache shaders while the user is playing which obviously hits the CPU and causes slowdown in unfamiliar areas. However, it should be noted that this isn't an issue for consoles (where precompiled shaders come with the game) or Steam Deck (where shaders are compiled via Fossilize before the game is even launched). It's most notable on DirectX programs during the first run, which hits benchmarks quite badly but also becomes less stuttery as more shaders are cached.
- throwaway314155 2y agoI had a lot of issues getting black mesa to run on linux natively or via proton. Frequently crashes. Not uncommon per protondb. Food for thought of you're on a linux setup.
- account42 2y agoBlack Mesa is all right but please just play the original if you want to play Half-Life.