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FTE barely qualifies as a pure Quake engine at this point though, it does tons of stuff.
SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

Seems to be using a dnsft.cloud.zyxel.com certificate. Is this a home router?

https://community.zyxel.com/en/discussion/23595/why-i-get-bl...

Seems like you or someone upstream of you uses a Zyxel brand device that has some kind of dns content filtering enabled. You should be able to get around this on a given machine by configuring an alternate dns provider (dns over https, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, google's 8.8.8.8, quad9's 9.9.9.9, etc.) or doing something similar at your own router/dns resolver/dhcp server if it's not the thing doing this.

>The game is not playable from start to finish. You can play deathmatch and other odd modes.
Interesing, there's more here including HL1 (a.k.a "valve")

Funnily enough the looks of this HL2 through this engine makes it flow more with HL1 than I could expect; an interesting reverse Half Life: Source / Black Mesa / demake of sorts.

Half-Life 2 looks incredible in Quake 1, what gives?
Would it work under vanilla quake 1? Ah, no. I can't check it out.

Good job keeping me away with Anubis, btw.

Super interesting! I'm curious what the purpose is, though?

Edit to answer myself: Looks like this is more of an offshoot of the FreeHL projects by the same author, which rewrite GoldSrc game logic to QuakeC to get those games to run on open source engine stacks, where the utility is more obvious. I guess it was just fun to see how hard it'd be to get HL2 content running.

A bit similar to the OpenMW project working on Oblivion and Skyrim content loading on the side, though perhaps that's a more obvious future vector for that project.

De-makes are interesting because they continuously seem to show what may have been possible long ago in ancient engines if teams pushed them even further.

Then again maybe that level of detail even in idtech1 would have required more computing than was available for many years.

Is this the way we can have HL3 also?
What does clean room mean in this context? They built it from the assets with the game as a reference , but didn't look at the engine source code?
If you want to play Half-Life today I highly recommend Xash3D FWGS (yes its a super awkward name)

https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs

Easy to use Mac build here: https://www.macsourceports.com/game/halflife

This is engine for HL1 while OP talks about HL2.

I'll add, if you have a VR headset, modded HL1 runs beautifully on it with full hand controller support for gun aiming and crowbar smashing. I've also heard lots of praises for HL2 VR mod bringing the game to new levels, I have yet to try it myself.

This is what I love about the open source community. Twenty years later and people are still finding ways to make classic games accessible without DRM or platform lock in. Clean room implementations like this preserve gaming history better than any publisher ever will.