Best way to play Half-Life: vanilla or Xash3D?

[Individualised]

It's become increasingly obvious to me that the vanilla version of Half-Life and other GoldSrc games on Steam is simply not really up to modern standards. While it runs in full HD (unlike vanilla Quake 2), there is so much jank and issues that I didn't even experience on my WON copy. The main issue is mouselook and strafe turning is jagged and give me motion sickness, but there's other little bugs throughout the game that overall downgrade the gameplay experience, with scripted events not working properly, fonts being wrong, voicelines getting cut off, graphical issues. It's honestly a shame that Valve haven't really bothered to maintain it.

 

I'm wondering if Xash3D might be more suitable? As far as I can tell it's the "definitive" source port, but there's not many people playing Half Life source ports to begin with. I also imagine that it might come with it's own issues, being based on the Quake source code with the new GoldSrc features reverse engineered, so I don't know if it's fully compatible yet. Or would this be worse than what I'm already experiencing in Vanilla? Are there any other notable source ports for Half-Life other than Xash3D?

 

EDIT: Just realised like 10 minutes after I posted this that I posted this in the Source Ports section... for Doom. I meant to post this in Everything Else. I am so sorry. I feel so stupid. Please move this post.

Edited March 27, 2023 by Individualised

[DosFreak]

The original version of Half-Life still works and there are also unofficial patches for it

https://v5.steamlessproject.nl/index.php?page=hl1112

https://www.moddb.com/games/half-life/downloads/half-life-won-resolution-fov-mp3-patch

 

You'll likely still experience issues with Xash but likely less than the steam tainted ver of HL (which is nowhere near "vanilla")

Edited March 27, 2023 by DosFreak

[PKr]

6 hours ago, Individualised said:

there is so much jank and issues that I didn't even experience on my WON copy

Thought I was imagining things... Haven't played Half-Life in years, and at this point the Steam version of the game feels so strange to play. It's something about physics that doesn't seem right. Glad you mentioned that.

 

Also, HL:Source is even more broken.

[Individualised]

10 hours ago, DosFreak said:

The original version of Half-Life still works and there are also unofficial patches for it

https://v5.steamlessproject.nl/index.php?page=hl1112

https://www.moddb.com/games/half-life/downloads/half-life-won-resolution-fov-mp3-patch

 

You'll likely still experience issues with Xash but likely less than the steam tainted ver of HL (which is nowhere near "vanilla")

I probably should mention that I'm on Ubuntu so just playing the WON version is not a very viable option for me compared to a native version (it would probably run on Proton but patching it might still be difficult)

[DosFreak]

According to the Wine compat list it's good, likely the same for Proton unless Valve broke something.

If Wine/Proton can't install an installshield installer and patch program then something is seriously wrong but you can always either manually unpack or more likely install in a VM and copy the files over.

If you have an issue with rendering then for some reason people do use dgvoodoo2 with Wine/Proton so that's an option.

With that said I've never used dgvoodoo2 with Half-Life but it should work as long as you use D3D.

Pcem is also an option but is nowhere near necessary.

Edited March 27, 2023 by DosFreak

[Nate42]

Not exactly what you are asking because it's not vaguely vanilla (its not even the same game if you want to get technical) but the fan remake Black Mesa is totally worth checking out, and its a great way to introduce new people to the half life universe. It is a complete remake/reimagining of the original Half Life story in a highly modified Half Life 2 engine. It ranges from "pretty faithful" to "different in ways that make it nearly unrecognizable" depending on the level. Xen in particular is completely re-done. 

 

If you want an authentic original experience its not even close, but if you just want to revisit the game for another playthrough, highly recommended. 

Edited March 27, 2023 by Nate42

[Individualised]

3 minutes ago, Nate42 said:

Not exactly what you are asking because it's not vaguely vanilla (its not even the same game if you want to get technical) but the fan remake Black Mesa is totally worth checking out, and its a great way to introduce new people to the half life universe. It is a complete remake/reimagining of the original Half Life story in a highly modified Half Life 2 engine. It ranges from "pretty faithful" to "different in ways that make it nearly unrecognizable" depending on the level. Xen in particular is completely re-done. 

 

If you want an authentic original experience its not even close, but if you just want to revisit the game for another playthrough, highly recommended. 

I do think Black Mesa looks really cool, but I'd rather complete Half-Life another time on this machine before trying it out since it's been a while since I've last beat the game (I last beat it on PS2 if I recall correctly).

[Nate42]

2 minutes ago, Individualised said:

I do think Black Mesa looks really cool, but I'd rather complete Half-Life another time on this machine before trying it out since it's been a while since I've last beat the game (I last beat it on PS2 if I recall correctly).

Yeah that's exactly what I did, played through it both ways. Personally I just accepted the Steam version despite being kinda janky, if you come up with something better let us know!

[Individualised]

As a side note to show how janky the Steam version is, title screen music is completely broken because of a timing issue that would have caused the music on the opening level to not play (the stopsound command would happen after the music for the level already started playing). Instead of properly fixing this issue, they just decided to make it so that the titlescreen music doesn't stop after you're in-game. So unless you start a new game, the title screen music will continue to play after you're in a level until another music cue happens or you stop it yourself. I guess to be fair, PC Half-Life (not even the WON version; I think it might be a leftover from a pre-release version or Quake in all fairness) doesn't have title-screen music so you can't notice this without mods, but still, really janky. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/979

 

(If anyone knows how to make the Steam version execute the console command "cd stop" automatically upon loading a level, please let me know)

Edited March 27, 2023 by Individualised

[MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai]

Out of curiosity @Individualisedwhich version of Xash3D are you talking about?

Because as far as I know there are at least two versions, one is an older discontinued one and one is a newer build Xash3D FWGS.

[Individualised]

Just now, MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai said:

Out of curiosity @Individualisedwhich version of Xash3D are you talking about?

Because as far as I know there are at least two versions, one is an older discontinued one and one is a newer build Xash3D FWGS.

FWGS, I assume it makes the older version obsolete so I didn't feel the need to specify.

[MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai]

Just now, Individualised said:

FWGS, I assume it makes the older version obsolete so I didn't feel the need to specify.

Yeah I tried the new FWGS version, it ran fine from what I remembered but I did ran into trouble launching blue shift for some reason.

[Jules451]

Xash3D is actually a pretty fine choice. I have played almost every possible version of Half-Life out there (original retail version, the Steam version over the years and Xash3D FWGS recently) and, in my experience, Xash3D provides the smoothest experience nowadays. Xash3D has been explicitly built for 100% vanilla Half-Life support so you'll likely not even notice the difference while playing standard Half-Life. The vast majority of mods also work without any modification, and you'll get none of the technical jank that is present in the official version, so no soundtrack cutting off, no menu music still looping once a map has been loaded, no dynamic lighting framerate drops, and so on.

 

The only "problem", but this really affects only a handful of mods (the only ones having this problem that I'm aware of are Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat), is the lack of a VGUI2 implementation (it's the system that draws the interactive in-game menus in some mods), which means that Xash3D simply cannot start those mods. You can always revert back to the official version if you feel like playing CS.

 

So yeah, definitely go for it. It's pretty sad that Xash3D gets relatively little attention and that other source ports don't exist at all, since it really stifles the community's modding potential, but that's just how things are...

 

3 hours ago, MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai said:

Yeah I tried the new FWGS version, it ran fine from what I remembered but I did ran into trouble launching blue shift for some reason.

The only problem I know of is that the Blue Shift maps in the Steam version don't use the standard BSP map format that every other Half-Life mod uses, since they were quickly ported from what was supposed to be the Dreamcast version of Half-Life. This isn't too noticeable an issue with the Steam version, but with Xash3D it means you can't load any map from the console (although you should still be able to start a new game). There's an easy way to patch them though, if need be.

 

Edited March 28, 2023 by Jules451

[Individualised]

3 hours ago, Jules451 said:

Xash3D is actually a pretty fine choice. I have played almost every possible version of Half-Life out there (original retail version, the Steam version over the years and Xash3D FWGS recently) and, in my experience, Xash3D provides the smoothest experience nowadays. Xash3D has been explicitly built for 100% vanilla Half-Life support so you'll likely not even notice the difference while playing standard Half-Life. The vast majority of mods also work without any modification, and you'll get none of the technical jank that is present in the official version, so no soundtrack cutting off, no menu music still looping once a map has been loaded, no dynamic lighting framerate drops, and so on.

 

The only "problem", but this really affects only a handful of mods (the only ones having this problem that I'm aware of are Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat), is the lack of a VGUI2 implementation (it's the system that draws the interactive in-game menus in some mods), which means that Xash3D simply cannot start those mods. You can always revert back to the official version if you feel like playing CS.

 

So yeah, definitely go for it. It's pretty sad that Xash3D gets relatively little attention and that other source ports don't exist at all, since it really stifles the community's modding potential, but that's just how things are...

I'm going to try Xash3D now, thanks for the recommendation! I've been making do with the Steam version with a few mods to make the menu more like the WON version and restore the title music etc, but it honestly just made things more janky. I was gonna try and mod it a bit more in order to fix some of the gameplay stuff but I think I'm just gonna try Xash3D. Is there a way that I can make it so that it launches from my official Steam library listing for Half-Life instead of having to add it as a non Steam library game?

3 hours ago, Jules451 said:

The only problem I know of is that the Blue Shift maps in the Steam version don't use the standard BSP map format that every other Half-Life mod uses, since they were quickly ported from what was supposed to be the Dreamcast version of Half-Life. This isn't too noticeable an issue with the Steam version, but with Xash3D it means you can't load any map from the console (although you should still be able to start a new game). There's an easy way to patch them though, if need be.

 

That might explain another issue I was having, interesting.

 

Man, this stuff is complicated though for one of the most highly regarded games of all time. I would not be opposed to Valve letting Nightdive have a go at fixing up Half-Life :P But I think they'd rather do anything like that themselves in-house.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Individualised

[Jules451]

2 hours ago, Individualised said:

Is there a way that I can make it so that it launches from my official Steam library listing for Half-Life instead of having to add it as a non Steam library game?

Hm, I don't have Steam around to test this out but since all Steam does is simply launching hl.exe from the game folder, you might try installing the Xash3D files in the same folder and renaming the executable to hl.exe, moving the older one somewhere else. Again though, I can't really try this out myself.

 

2 hours ago, Individualised said:

Man, this stuff is complicated though for one of the most highly regarded games of all time. I would not be opposed to Valve letting Nightdive have a go at fixing up Half-Life :P But I think they'd rather do anything like that themselves in-house.

I used to be pretty disappointed at the fact that Valve haven't been updating the original Half-Life very well, but then I saw how other companies treat their older games (usually just shutting down their servers, but who's ever going to forget how Epic Games outright removed the entire Unreal series from every major game store?) and I'm grateful that there is at least a somewhat modern version with working servers for every Valve game.

 

Yeah, I suppose a Nightdive remaster wouldn't be too bad, though like you said Valve is the kind of company that prefers to handle everything on their own. Besides, I'd honestly prefer the community to work on preserving and updating the game. There are already some interesting mods with the aim of modernizing the original game, and the icing on the cake would be a source code release, but sadly there's little reason to hope for that at the moment...

Edited March 28, 2023 by Jules451

[Individualised]

@Jules451 I forgot to update you, but yes, Xash3D works great. The only issue I have is that I don't really know how to get it working with my own Blue Shift files (Xash3D doesn't support the Blue Shift/Dreamcast level format, and online tutorials just suggest downloading a patched version of Blue Shift).

[DosFreak]

It's been awhile and I've only done it for the pre FWGS ver of Xash Build 4529 since that one is compatible with 2000.
Only tested with retail (HL, opfor, blueshift patched to latest official versions, not the steam ver.)

Make sure the bshift directory is in the root of HL directory where xash is.
Download this and replace it with the existing blue shift .exe
http://www.hlfx.ru/xash/bs_patch.zip

Blue Shift should show up as a mod in Xash.

Edited March 31, 2023 by DosFreak

[Jules451]

8 hours ago, Individualised said:

@Jules451 I forgot to update you, but yes, Xash3D works great. The only issue I have is that I don't really know how to get it working with my own Blue Shift files (Xash3D doesn't support the Blue Shift/Dreamcast level format, and online tutorials just suggest downloading a patched version of Blue Shift).

Out of curiosity, does Blue Shift start at all when you click on New Game? In my experience it should, the only problem is that you can't load maps from the console, load a save or change maps. Anyway, the tool you should use (and the one I've used myself) is this one. The old Blue Shift: Unlocked patch should also handle the conversion, though I'm not sure it it still works with the modern Steam version. If you'd like I can share the converted maps myself.

 

Since we've already been talking about Xash3D, you might want to check out the rebuilt game DLLs from this repository, made by the same developers who work on Xash3D FWGS. If you're interested and have any experience compiling programs it shouldn't be too hard to follow the instructions to compile your own DLLs. You don't really need them, but I thought this might be worth mentioning since they're less buggy than the ones Valve provides. I'd share them myself, but I only have the Linux versions...

Edited April 1, 2023 by Jules451

[Individualised]

12 minutes ago, Jules451 said:

I'd share them myself, but I only have the Linux versions...

I run Ubuntu. Feel free to share any files as long as they're not (unreasonably) copyright infringing. I can probably build the SDK stuff.

Edited April 1, 2023 by Individualised

[Jules451]

6 minutes ago, Individualised said:

I run Ubuntu. Feel free to share any files as long as they're not copyright infringing.

That's nice! Here are the files, then. I've included both the 32-bit and 64-bit game libraries for all three official games, together with both 32- and 64-bit versions of the binaries and libraries for Xash3D itself if you need them. It's not the latest version, but I have compiled them about a month ago so they shouldn't be too old, either.

 

As for the Blue Shift patched maps, I don't know if I can upload them here. In any case, the tool that I've linked in my previous post should handle it easily enough if you have Wine.

[Individualised]

18 minutes ago, Jules451 said:

That's nice! Here are the files, then. I've included both the 32-bit and 64-bit game libraries for all three official games, together with both 32- and 64-bit versions of the binaries and libraries for Xash3D itself if you need them. It's not the latest version, but I have compiled them about a month ago so they shouldn't be too old, either.

 

As for the Blue Shift patched maps, I don't know if I can upload them here. In any case, the tool that I've linked in my previous post should handle it easily enough if you have Wine.

I'll try them out! Thanks for your help!

[No-Man Baugh]

For Xash3D FWGS on Win11: Are the binaries on the "Continuous nan-detect Build" tag good to use, or will I have to compile the program myself from scratch?

[DosFreak]

 

If you mean https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs/releases

 

The last build I tested was on 10-15-2022 which worked fine for XP and above. I think somewhere around 1-30-2023 they started requiring Windows 10 minimum so should be good.

 

Edited April 11, 2023 by DosFreak

[Kityn]

My recommendations for the Steam version (offline play):

 

1. Tons of bugfixes from Half-Life Updated, Opposing Force Updated and Blue Shift Updated.

https://github.com/SamVanheer/halflife-updated
https://github.com/SamVanheer/halflife-op4-updated
https://github.com/SamVanheer/halflife-bs-updated

2. MetaAudio to restore EAX-like audio effects.

https://github.com/LAGonauta/MetaAudio

3. Disable the GL_ARB_multitexture OpenGL extension to "fix" gl_overbright and improve performance in some cases.

https://github.com/dtrebilco/glintercept or Nvidia Profile Inspector.

[liPillON]

@Dwars to the rescue