A Half Life 2 modder, Igor Zdrowowicz, has managed to integrate path tracing into the game - with striking results, even at an early stage in development. His project - codenamed "HL2RTX" - has been in-progress for a handful of months, and the modder has managed to integrate a ray tracing system into Valve's classic shooter (sort of) via NVIDIA's RTX Remix SDK. That package has become open source only very recently, so Zdrowowicz stated that a Portal RTX-derived binary was the tool of choice.

NVIDIA's Lightspeed Studios has already created an impressive RTX conversion of Valve's fan favorite puzzle-platform game Portal (2007), and modders have been poring over the underlying technology and update technique processes. A number of old favorites, running on past iterations of the Source Engine (DirectX 8 and 9), are getting the amateur mod community sprucing up treatment. It is posited that Zdrowowicz will have an easier time with his current conversion project, thanks to an official release of NVIDIA's RTX Remix toolkit (albeit in early access).Zdrowowicz's enthusiasm for digital art lies in the world of "blender, fractals (and) experiments," and his graphical experiments have extended into getting as much visual parity out of an almost 20-year old game. He has not been able to release playable code at the time of writing, so screenshots and gameplay capture footage are the only pieces of evidence that provide proof of concept.


He has documented several complications along the way, including the limitations of old assets: "Unfortunately most of the original HL2 textures look bad when upscaled so I had to just recreate most of them, but Ravenholm is near completion and soon available for download! Still no solution for water and fire not rendering."Zdrowowicz was enthused about his progress, but has to deal with special effects: "Figured out a way to apply normal maps and tweak the materials after capturing relevant textures in game! Some areas look good, some of them kinda dodgy, but I focus my full attention on remaking all materials with this amazing (even though not officially released yet) tool!"

Last month he managed to get water lighting effects working: "For now a bit of fun with refraction!"


Igor Zdrowowicz welcomes community feedback through his HL2RTX Discord: discord.gg/gJTCBjzA