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The Half-Life remake Black Mesa from Crowbar Collective is about to get a patch to fix up lots of issues, and there's a public Beta available. This will be the first update the game has seen in quite a long time, so it's nice to see they're ensuring it's going to keep working smoothly.

Crowbar are calling it a rolling beta, as they will presumably keep adding to it. You can try it out on Steam via the Properties -> Betas -> select "public-beta" in the dropdown menu.

Info about the Beta:

We’ve pushed a patch to public beta. In this beta we are looking to confirm that:

  1. Nothing that was working before has broken.
  2. Save files are intact for all players.
  3. The Interloper A controller crash is fixed.
  4. Graphics options are set, and stay set in the options menu.
 

We’ve also:

  • Fixed Moss shaders and direction control for both vertex lit shader and skin shader (for props with/without phong).
  • Fixed halflambert/warp/specwarp related problems across all the shaders.
  • Unlocked the even higher graphics setting in options menu.
  • Fixed video settings not staying set.
  • SpotLight cookies should now work on any orientation. Cookie sprite sheet no longer needs to be square.
  • Local lights shadow sampling optimized. They now look better & should be faster on the highest settings.
  • Deferred lighting and NewPostProcess stability and support improved.
  • Lots of misc graphics fixes.
  • Updated translation files with community fixes.
  • Added missing Italian translators Riccardo Rapuano and Andrea Franceschi.

See more on the Steam page.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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9 comments

dpanter Mar 15
Would love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
whizse Mar 15
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Not sure what version I would choose if I wanted to replay Half-Life. The original disc release? The 25th anniversary update? Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, fat chance!
dibz Mar 15
Nice to see. I hope some of this applies to the Linux version too, which I had a lot of trouble with -- in particular too many particle effects would cause the game to come to an absolute crawl on a GTX 1070, but it was fine if you ran the windows version via Proton instead. The last world in the game was also very buggy, and I even ran into a game-breaking bug I had to enable no-clip to escape.

All in all, I still greatly enjoyed Black Mesa, and still highly recommend it!
This is probably my 5th attempt at a play through over the years. There was some flashlight bug on AMD Graphics Cards & MESA in one of the last levels where you are going through these scientist tents or whatever.

It was pitch black.

Hopefully that is fixed on my next play-through.

The story is amazing, I would put it up there with Bioshock 1 in my top favorites of all time.
hardpenguin Mar 21
Quoting: dpanterWould love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
I believe it is. I played through the entire campaign and a tiny bit of multiplayer, no issues encountered that I can remember.
hardpenguin Mar 21
Quoting: whizseNot sure what version I would choose if I wanted to replay Half-Life. The original disc release? The 25th anniversary update? Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, fat chance!
GlaDoS song aside, Black Mesa hands down. Worthy remake.


Last edited by hardpenguin on 21 March 2024 at 11:20 am UTC
dpanter Mar 21
Quoting: hardpenguin
Quoting: dpanterWould love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
I believe it is. I played through the entire campaign and a tiny bit of multiplayer, no issues encountered that I can remember.

It absolutely was not, prior to this patch. The Linux native version in particular has been cursed for years.
whizse Mar 21
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  • Supporter
Quoting: hardpenguinGlaDoS song aside, Black Mesa hands down. Worthy remake.
I'm so glad someone finally got the joke

(No, I have nothing against Black Mesa, I'm sure it's a fine game!)
hardpenguin Mar 22
Quoting: dpanter
Quoting: hardpenguin
Quoting: dpanterWould love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
I believe it is. I played through the entire campaign and a tiny bit of multiplayer, no issues encountered that I can remember.

It absolutely was not, prior to this patch. The Linux native version in particular has been cursed for years.
Then consider me extremely lucky!
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