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:
- Nothing that was working before has broken.
- Save files are intact for all players.
- The Interloper A controller crash is fixed.
- 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.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
10 comments
Would love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
4 Likes, Who?
I bought the game a few months ago and every so often it would crash. Hopefully this will fix it.
2 Likes, Who?
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!
2 Likes, Who?
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!
All in all, I still greatly enjoyed Black Mesa, and still highly recommend it!
4 Likes, Who?
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.
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.
2 Likes, Who?
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.
0 Likes
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
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: hardpenguinQuoting: 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.
2 Likes, Who?
Quoting: dpanterThen consider me extremely lucky!Quoting: hardpenguinQuoting: 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.
1 Likes, Who?
See more from me