Black Mesa, the seriously impressive recreation of the original Half-Life can finally be completed! Crowbar Collective have put up the big complete Beta. A great way to prepare for the Half-Life: Alyx release next year.
To get in, all you have to do is own Black Mesa on Steam and opt into the "public-beta" branch. Full release notes can be found here. So we're finally closing in on Black Mesa leaving Early Access!
If you just want to jump into the newer Xen levels, you can unlock all chapters quite easily. Go to Options, Keyboard, Advanced, Enable Developer Console. Bring up the console and type "sv_unlockedchapters 19".
A few quick shots of it on Linux:
In the Linux version, if you find it crashes on start try removing the "glshaders.cfg" file found with the game files usually in the "bms" folder. This will clear the Black Mesa cache, which can cause issues as it seems to stick between versions. That fully fixed it for me.
Still needs a lot of optimisations though, even my Intel i7 and NVIDIA 2080Ti went down into single digits a few times while it loaded some bits in and then suddenly super smooth again. This is what a Beta is for though. Xen is certainly visually impressive, Crowbar Collective have done an absolutely fantastic job on updating it.
You can pick up Black Mesa on Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Comandante Ñoñardo Dec 7, 2019
C'mon, Valve! You can pay it.
Amazing that it finally comes to an end.
And it was worth the wait.
Haven't played Xen but the stuff they release some years ago was top notch.
slaapliedje Dec 7, 2019
Quoting: pbDo you still need to crouch-jump on the Xen islands like in HL1?Yes, but not exactly. You jump, press forward and jump again in mid-air, and Gordon dashes. The game prompts to use Ctrl and Space, but I'm not sure if Ctrl does anything.
Quoting: ageresYou jump, press forward and jump again in mid-air, and Gordon dashes.
Wow, that's... unexpected.
Well I guess I'll see for myself, as I've been waiting for the game to be complete before I start playing, even though I've bought it years ago.
Alas, this is Beta and hopefully they will get these issues sorted out!
Quoting: t3gI heard that the native version has FPS issues and you get better performance by installing the Windows version with Proton and D9VK.
Last time I tried native with Xen update it didn't work at all. I did try briefly d9vk and that seems to run really well. I've been waiting for the entire project to be complete before I started my play through.
Quoting: lejimsterQuoting: t3gI heard that the native version has FPS issues and you get better performance by installing the Windows version with Proton and D9VK.
Last time I tried native with Xen update it didn't work at all. I did try briefly d9vk and that seems to run really well. I've been waiting for the entire project to be complete before I started my play through.
I was basing it off of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V58bfGoOWTo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRkTzrPnvXs
Last edited by t3g on 8 December 2019 at 10:31 pm UTC
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me