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Impressive Half-Life ray-tracing project playable this year

G-whiz.

Half-Life: Ray Traced is a new attempt to get hardware accelerated ray-tracing working in Valve's first-person shooter classic - and you should be able to play it yourself later this year.

For now, though, you can gaze below at roughly a minute's worth of footage showing the project in action. It's being worked upon by sultim_t, who previously put together a Serious Sam 1 ray-tracing mod, and is based on another previous attempt at Half-Life ray-tracing.

"Half-Life: Ray Traced integrates the real-time path tracing into the original Half-Life," sultim-t wrote. "With the hardware accelerated ray-tracing, it is possible to calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates."

Cover image for YouTube videoHalf-Life: RAY TRACED - Teaser

"Source code and the playable build of Half-Life: Ray Traced will be released on Github," sultim-t continued. "[As for] when the mod will be ready... these things, they take time."