It is played in a series of short, sharp, suspenseful exchanges between two teams – terrorists and counter-terrorists – guarding or rescuing hostages, planting or disarming virtual bombs and escorting vulnerable targets through enemy territory. While the graphics and polish have seen continual improvement with Counter-Strike, the gameplay is pretty much the same. Later iterations of the game went through two engines selling millions of units in all, and both the free betas and commercial follow-ups are considered classic tactical shooters. Created by a team of fellow gamers lead by Minh Le (“Gooseman”), Counter-Strike is an everyman’s riff on the in-your-face tactical team shooter, minus the complexities of waypoints or mission planning. Initially born as a popular free multiplayer mod for Half-Life and later co-opted by Sierra, the wildly successful Counter-Strike saw its first retail release as version 1.0. The king of all online tactical shooters. Those interested in giving it a whirl will first need to acquire a copy of the original Half-Life 1 on Steam then follow the instructions provided.ĭigital Foundry's Alex Battaglia took at look at Tsyrendashiev's Quake ray tracing mod at the end of last year and came away highly impressed, calling it 'incredible' and 'less a mod and more a full-on RT remaster for one of PC's finest games'.The P90 SMG packs a good rate of fire, but spreads too much for it to be effective here. With the hardware accelerated ray tracing, it is possible to calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates.'Īs Tsyrendashiev previously promised, the playable release version of Half-Life: Ray Traced has been made available to download via Github. Introducing the project last year, Tsyrendashiev explained, 'Half-Life: Ray Traced integrates the real-time path tracing into the original Half-Life (1998). Half-Life: Ray Traced is the work of modder Sultim Tsyrendashiev - who previously created similar, extremely well-received ray tracing mods for the likes of Series Sam 1, Doom, and Quake - and is based on another previous attempt at Half-Life ray tracing. Half-Life: Ray Traced, a new mod adding hardware accelerated ray tracing to Valve's seminal first-person shooter, is now available to download following its reveal last summer.

Downloading Half-Life