Black Mesa Released

ProbablyJoe writes "The long awaited Source engine remake of the Valve's original Half Life has finally been released. The initial release only includes the story up until Xen, but the developers say they'll be adding the rest of the story, along with an online multiplayer Deathmatch mode, soon. The game is available to download for free, and only requires players to install the Source SDK (included with all Source games, or a free download). The highly anticipated release has also caused a huge amount of traffic for any servers hosting the files, with GameFront, GameUpdates, and Black Mesa's own CDN brought down within minutes of the release. The project has also been approved by Steam's Greenlight program, and will hopefully be available through Steam soon, though no timeframe has been given."

Comments

Another mirror

[maswan]

Over here: http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/misc/BlackMesa/

Mostly used to hosting linux distributions, but this looks like someone might care to download too. Go ahead and eat a few gigabit/s for us. :)

Re:Seems like a perfect application for BitTorrent

[dopaz]

There's a torrent link on the official Black Mesa site, it points to:

http://www.mediafire.com/?khmzyygg4vetko0

I'm downloading it now, Black Mesa team says "Please seed!"

Re:Comparison to HL2 port from Valve?

[canajin56]

Half-Life: Source used all of the same models and maps, but added the physics engine for rag-doll effects, used shaders for improved water effects, had some limited dynamic lighting improvements (I think?), replaced the pre-rendered 16-bit skybox with dynamic effects, and cleaned up the specular/normal maps for better bump mapping and such. That is, it was a port to a new engine, with almost no changes to the content other than the cleaned-up normal maps and the quick switch-out of the skybox. Black Mesa is not a port, but a remake. They redid all of the maps and most of the models that weren't available already as part of HL2, so it takes full advantage of all the new shaders and lighting stuff, and has much higher resolution textures and models.